Finding Frida Kahlo : in Mexico, fifty-five years after the death of Frida Kahlo, in San Miguel de Allende = Encontrando a Frida Kahlo : en México, cincuenta y cinco años después de la muerte de Frida Kahlo, en San Miguel de Allende / Barbara Levine with Stephen Jaycox

Encountering Frida Kahlo -- An interview with Carlos and Leticia Noyola -- An unexpected archive in five cases -- A suitcase -- Scrapbook -- A box -- Self-portraits -- Airmail letters, personal archive of Frida K -- A large wooden chest -- Diary -- A box containing hummingbirds & letter -- An Olinalá chest -- A metal trunk -- Folder of menus -- Notebook of recipes -- Birds.

Finding Frida Kahlo presents, for the first time in print, an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century's most revered artists. Hidden from view for over half a century, this richly illustrated, intimate portrait overflows with fascinating details about Kahlo's romances, friendships, and business affairs during a three-decade period, beginning in the 1920s when she was a teenager and ending just before she died in 1954. It is a rare glimpse into an exuberant and troubled existence: A vivid diary entry records her sexual encounter with a woman named Doroti; a painted box contains eleven stuffed hummingbirds, concealed beneath a letter in which she laments her discovery that her husband, Diego Rivera, had been monstrously dissecting "these beautiful creatures" to extract an aphrodisiac; an altered French medical book describes the pain she was suffering from the amputation of her right leg, written by Kahlo upon pages that illustrate an amputation technique; a letter to a friend expresses her loneliness, and a simple request for coconut candies. Frida Kahlo never wrote an autobiography. Instead, she left behind a much more complex material universe. Finding Frida Kahlo offers scholars and fans alike an opportunity to examine firsthand Kahlo's secret world and draw their own conclusions about how she imagined her place in it.

Bilingual book : English and Spanish.