Frida Kahlo nominated by author Jessie Burton
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“We’re talking here about a woman who was Mexican, dark skinned, disabled and queer, who produced art and didn’t allow her disabilities to define her. She defined who she was on her own terms,"
So says Circe Henestrosa, fashion curator, Frida Kahlo scholar and co curator of Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up.
Circe joins Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist in discussion about the Mexican artist known for her self-portraits and her distinctive look - the dresses and flowered hair, the monobrow, the piercing stare.
Born in 1907, Kahlo's life was a collage of strength, beauty and pain. She survived polio and a bus crash that should have killed her, as well as a complex, passionate marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera.
Nominator Jessie Burton celebrates Frida Kahlo as a remarkable life who triumphed over adversity with true grit, glamour and great wit.
Presented by Matthew Parris.
Producer: Nicola Humphries
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2020.
Transcript
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| 0:38.0 | Late in the afternoon of the 17th of September 1925, a trolley car collided with a wooden bus in Mexico City. The crash bounced us forwards and a handrail pierced me the |
| 0:46.7 | way a sword pierces a bull, wrote Our Great Life. Her body covered in blood and almost supernaturally dusted in powdered gold paint, a pot of which another passenger had been carrying. |
| 1:00.0 | This broken body belonged to our great life, Frida Carlo, who with her intensely personal |
| 1:08.2 | work and the unforgettable distinctive look she cultivated went on to become one of the 20th century's most celebrated |
| 1:16.1 | artists. |
| 1:17.1 | Today, Frita is championed by author and essayist Jesse Burton, whose work includes the best-selling novels, the minaturist, the muse, |
| 1:26.9 | and most recently the confession. |
| 1:29.6 | Jesse I believe your first encounter with her was of a rather unconventional kind. |
| 1:34.3 | Tell me about it. |
| 1:35.6 | It was in 2006 I was an actress and a PA to lots of big city firms and I think one of my bosses |
| 1:42.1 | had this bag and down the side of the bag was this |
| 1:46.3 | portrait of Frida Carlo and I didn't really know anything about her but there's this photo of me |
| 1:51.9 | holding up the bag with a mustache on myself, because she had this kind of dark mustache on her upper lip. |
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