Frida Kahlo (Portrait of an Artist)

Brownridge’s gloss on Kahlo’s dazzling vision and life covers the usual points associated with the artist in straightforward language: “Frida liked to paint lots of outfits or versions of herself in the same picture. She did this to show what it was to feel like lots of different people, all rolled into one body.” Combined with Dieckmann’s colorful pictures, full of sweet-faced characters and stylized flowers, the resulting biography has the effect of obscuring what’s essential about the artist: her rich, fierce, insistent originality. Kahlo’s own complicated, seductive, and often troubling paintings, inset in small format as part of the larger illustrations, reveal a fundamental mismatch between her idiosyncratic symbology and this book’s simplified approach, which explains magic realism as “objects from real life but with a big sprinkle of Frida’s special magic!” Ages 5–7. (Sept.)