The Annina Nosei Gallery
Paperback · Hardcover
Ships in 2 to 5 working days. Delivery quoted from your address at checkout.
Read the opening free
3,785 words · no email, no account
No. 061 · Art & Design · Visual Art
The Body and the Brush
a biography of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón
What the book is
On a September afternoon in 1925, a wooden bus collided with a streetcar in Mexico City. An eighteen-year-old art student named Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was impaled on a steel handrail. She would spend the next twenty-nine years rebuilding herself, in plaster, in paint, and in public.
Sofía Estrada's biography returns Kahlo to the rooms she actually inhabited: the blue house in Coyoacán, where polio first marked her body; the studios of Diego Rivera, whose marriage to her was at once a love affair and a political instrument; the guest quarters where Leon Trotsky took refuge, and where she took him as a lover. Estrada reads the paintings — fewer than two hundred in a working life — as documents of a woman who refused to look away from her own ruined spine, her miscarriages, her amputated leg.
Kahlo died in 1954, largely unknown outside a small circle. The face that now sells tote bags, tequila, and Halloween costumes is, in a sense, a second life — one she did not live to consent to. Estrada traces that afterlife with the same care she gives the original: the 1980s rediscovery, the academic canonization, the licensing wars, the brand.
What emerges is a portrait of a painter who built a self out of injury, and an industry that has been dismantling and reselling it ever since.
At a glance
- Subject
- Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón
- Shelf
- Art & Design · Visual Art
- Written by
- Sofía Estrada
- Chapters
- 18 across 195 pages
- Narrated by
- Rowan Hale
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- chronic pain · suicide ideation
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The LegendRead free
- 02La Casa Azul2,719 words
- 03Polio2,446 words
- 04The Preparatoria2,475 words
- 05The Bus4,536 words
- 06The Maestro4,198 words
- 07Gringolandia4,008 words
- 08Cristina4,030 words
- 09The Painter Becomes a Painter3,223 words
- 10Trotsky3,781 words
- 11New York and Paris3,650 words
- 12The Two Fridas3,680 words
- 13The Tehuana2,720 words
- 14The Broken Column4,362 words
- 15Lovers2,932 words
- 16The Bed in the Gallery3,308 words
- 17I Joyfully Await the Exit3,468 words
- 18The Tote Bag3,699 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 195 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 195 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-038-6 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale
ISBN 979-8-90623-019-5
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Body and the Brush about?
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Body and the Brush — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,785 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 62,500 words, 18 chapters, 195 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: chronic pain; suicide ideation. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- chronic pain
- suicide ideation
Listed before you buy, not after.
