Word: frida
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...FRIDA by Hayden Herrera; Harper & Row; 507 pages...
...Frida, a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), is a mesmerizing story of radical art, romantic politics, bizarre loves and physical suffering that raises the question, Why hasn't someone told it all before? Part of the answer is that Kahlo was the wife of Diego Rivera, the muralist and cultural provocateur who overshadowed nearly everybody and everything he touched. He would, in fact, have dominated this book about his wife if Biographer and New York Art Critic Hayden Herrera had not put him in his place...
...series of lingering images: a robust hulk on a scaffold, applying bright Marxist idealizations to the walls of public buildings; a blustery reveler brandishing a revolver to ensure attention; a celebrated philanderer openly displaying his conquests; and a monumental infant seated in a bathtub full of floating toys while Frida lathers his plump breasts...
Kahlo was no passive victim of her husband's machismo. She was a tiny, tough-mouthed daughter of a photographer of Hungarian-Jewish descent and a strikingly attractive woman from Oaxaca. Frida herself had a gamy beauty that drew lovers of both sexes. There seem to have been dozens of them, including Sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary who died in Mexico shortly after a Stalinist agent put the point of an ice ax through his head. Frida initiated the affair with Trotsky, not because she found "Piochitas" (little goatee) attractive but because she thought...
...quarter-century he was in constant demand in the world's great opera halls, sharing the stage with such stellar Wagnerian sopranos as Kirsten Flagstad, Frida Leider, Maria Miüller and Helen Traubel. Despite his rigorous schedule, Melchior never canceled a performance, something of a landmark for temperamental opera stars. Once while he was in Götterdämmerung he developed a swollen polyp that choked him; he found that by holding his head to one side he could sing-and sing he did for three hours...