From Publishers Weekly
"Kid, don't forget me. Write once in a while... That will be enough to know that you still remember this wench!" Khalo writes in this volume of love letters and photographs, making charming use of then contemporary English slang-her preferred mode when addressing Muray, the American glamour photographer and her lover. Reading Khalo's wildly funny tirades against Andre Breton and other French surrealists ("coocooo lunatic son of bitches") is a unique and worthwhile pleasure, but this book's finest offerings are its photographs, though the results are of uneven merit. The many casual snapshots have a patina of unearned nostalgia-an effect that will satisfy many, but leave others feeling as if they're sifting through yellowed photos in an antique store. The standout images are Muray's more formal portraits of his lover. The photographic techniques available to Muray in the late '30s and early '40s created layered colors that have an almost painted effect, and are delicious to look at now. Khalo was both a woman and a myth-complicated, challenging, talented and, perhaps, masochistic (or so the Khalo specialist Grimberg asserts in the book's one essay)-but readers will see these qualities best through Muray's photographs, not Khalo's letters.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
In the fall of 1938 Frida Kahlo traveled to New York for her first solo exhibition. There she met photographer Nickolas Muray whom she had first met in Mexico, and they started a passionate affair. Muray, born in Hungary, was a successful New York fashion and commercial photographer known for his portraits of celebrities such as Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Claude Monet. Having experimented with color from early on, Muray found his most colorful model in Frida Kahlo. Their liaison yielded a series of breathtaking, mostly color photographs, most of them never published. Our book for the first time presents a large selection of this series, with excerpts from the Kahlo/Muray correspondence and an essay by Salomon Grimberg.
