Enjoy this episode from season 2 of Getty's other podcast, Recording Artists. This series features materials from Getty's archives. This season, titled Intimate Addresses, highlights artists' letters.
To hear the rest of the season, subscribe to Recording Artists on your favorite podcast app or on our website here.
In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lover—Julien Levy. In this tender and personal letter, she moves from the logistical challenges of sending art across national borders during wartime, to describing her painful new steel corsets, to asking after her many friends in New York, where Levy lives. Unpacking this letter and exploring Kahlo’s words written in her own hand provides a new understanding of an artist who has become larger than life in the years since her death at age 47.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor highlights Kahlo’s vibrant personality, tracing how her artistic career developed alongside her long-running health struggles and her now-iconic style and persona. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose work often addresses pain and the body, provides her artist’s insight while historian Circe Henestrosa, who co-curated the Kahlo exhibition Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, shares charming anecdotes and important details of Kahlo’s life.
For transcripts, images, and additional resources visit our website.
Trailer—Recording Artists Season 2
Art and Poetry: Recording Everyday Life
Art and Poetry: How to Witness the World
Art and Poetry: Connecting Stories at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: The United Nations and Uyghur China
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Monuments and War Zones
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Who Defines Heritage?
Mindfulness in the Museum: Art for Mental Wellbeing
Mindfulness in the Museum: Healing through Mindfulness
Mindfulness in the Museum: Lessons from a Meditation Guide
The Art of Gardening: California Native Plants
The Art of Gardening: Tomatomania!
The Art of Gardening: Storytelling with Plants at Disneyland
Reflecting on 25 Years of the Getty Center
Black Photographers Represent Their World
Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles
Uta Barth’s Atmospheric Photographs
Imagining the Afterlife through Ancient Vases
Damaged de Kooning on Display at Last
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
50 Tastes Of Gray
Dear Alice | Interior Design
Spider-Man Crawlspace Podcast
The Federalist Papers
The Story of Mankind
The Magnus Archives
Fresh Air