Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph

A delicately beautiful woman who smoked and drank ``like a mariachi'' and enjoyed her own sexual freedom even as she suffered the infidelities of her adored husband Diego Rivera, Kahlo painted ferociously honest visions of her private world. In this first volume of the Bantam-Barnard Biography series, Drucker graphically recounts the artist's devastating accident and tortured physical life with a fearlessness to match Kahlo's own. No apologies are made for Kahlo's many love affairs with both men and women or for her unabashed support of Communism as a means of allaying endemic poverty. Detailed analyses of Kahlo's autobiographical paintings convey the surreal morbidity of Mexican culture as well as the facts of a brief but abundantly gifted life. From the opening scenes of a young, polio-stricken Frida conjuring up an imaginary friend to the final hallucinatory image of the dead artist, we are irresistibly drawn to this woman whose life has much to teach about passion, courage and self-determination. Ages 14-up. (Oct.)