We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Devouring Frida: the art history and popular celebrity of Frida Kahlo" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Beginning in the late 1970s Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status less for her richly surrealist self-portraits than by the popularization of the events of her tumultuous life. Her images were splashed across billboards magazine ads, and postcards; fashion designers copied the so-called Frida look in hairstyles and dress; and Fridamania even extended to T-shirts, jewelry, and nail polish. Margaret A. Lindauer argues that this mass market assimilation of Kahlos identity has consistently detracted from appreciation of her work, leading instead to narrow interpretations based on an entrenched narrative of suffering. While she agrees that Kahlos political and feminist activism, her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Reviera, and the tragic reality of a progressively debilitated body did represent a biography colored by emotional and physical upheaval, she questions an author-equals-the-work critical tradition that assumes a :one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting. In kahlos case, Lindauer says, such assumptions created a devouring mythology, an iconization that separates us from rather than leads us to the real significance of the oeuvre. Accompanied by 26 illustrations and deep analysis of Kahlos central themes, this provocative, semiotic study recontextualizes an important figure in art history at the same time it addresses key questions about the language of interpretation, the nature of veneration, and the truths within self-representation.
