It is, writes Kathryn Hughes at The Telegraph, a diary “of a very particular kind. If you’re looking for a historical chronology or straightforward narrative, prepare for disappointment. The diary was then republished by Abrams in a beautiful hardcover edition that retains Fuentes’ introduction. This means we must peer as closely into Kahlo’s life as we are able if we want to fully enter into what Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe called “her construction of a theater of the self.” But we may not feel much closer to her after reading her wildly-illustrated diary, which she kept for the last ten years of her life, and which was locked away after her death in 1954 and only published forty years later, with an introduction by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. She transfigured herself into a personal language of symbols and surreal motifs. Her “specialty was suffering”-her own-“and she adopted it as an artistic theme as confidently as Mondrian claimed the rectangle or Rubens the corpulent nude.” Kahlo treated her life as worthy a subject as the respectable middle-class still lifes and aristocratic portraits of the old masters.
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