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.
Composer John Adams Part 1
Mario Vargas Llosa on Culture
Nancy Perloff on Russian Futurist Book Art
Kenneth Breisch on the Los Angeles Central Library
Anne Woollett on “Rembrandt Laughing”
David Brafman on Alchemy
Sunil Khilnani on India’s History in Fifty Lives
Scott Allan on Manet’s “Jeanne (Spring)”
Beyond Boundaries: Visual Culture in the Provinces of Ancient Rome
Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles Part 4
Giovanni di Paolo’s Branchini Altarpiece
Walter Grasskamp on André Malraux
The Making of an Exhibition Part 2
Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles Part 3
The Getty Bronze
The Making of an Exhibition Part 1
Lee Hendrix on “Noir”
Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles Part 2
Cave Temples of Dunhuang
Valerie Hansen on the Silk Road and Dunhuang
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