A reissue of the beautifully illustrated and authoritative biography of Frida Kahlo, publishing in time for a major London exhibition

Frida is the story of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary women, the painter Frida Kahlo. Born near Mexico City, she grew up during the turbulent days of the Mexican Revolution and, at eighteen, was the victim of an accident that left her crippled and unable to bear children. To salvage what she could from her unhappy situation, Kahlo had to learn to keep still – so she began to paint.

Kahlo's unique talent was to make her one of the century's most enduring artists. But her remarkable paintings were only one element of a rich and dramatic life. Frida is also the story of her tempestuous marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, her love affairs with numerous, diverse men such as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky, her involvement with the Communist Party, her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture, and of the inspiration behind her unforgettable art.

Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.

Here is the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman -- with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.

Nominated for the Pulizter Prize, "the definitive biography of Arshile Gorky--lucid, persuasive, intimate and refreshingly clear-eyed" (Andrew Solomon, "The New York Times Book Review")
Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky-and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cé zanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948.
A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-"Arshile Gorky" traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."

Matisse: A Portrait by Hayden Herrera is a work of art in itself, a luminous portrait of Matisse the man, his highs and lows, his love of comfort and color, his complex relationship with his wife, his boldness and stubborn belief in himself, and, above all, his passion for his art. At the time he started to paint, Matisse recounted: "I was filled with indifference to everything that people wanted me to do. But the moment I had this box of colors in my hands, I had the feeling that my life was there". Vivid and entertaining, Herrera's brief critical biography brings to life a man who, despite a tumultuous emotional life, sought to create "an art of balance, of purity and serenity". At the same time her attention to Matisse's personal visual language brings the reader astonishingly close to the creative process, to the mind and brush of the artist. With twenty-eight color plates and eighty black-and-white illustrations, Matisse: A Portrait will guide both the general interest reader and the student of art to a vital appreciation of the work of one of the greatest and best-loved artists of this century.