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.
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Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo
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A Walk in Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden
William Blake’s Eccentric Arts
Photographer Dorothea Lange’s California, Then and Now
Art and Writing in Early Mesopotamian Cities
Rescuing Art by Women in Florence
The Legacy of European Art and Curiosity Cabinets
The Buddha’s First Sermon in Sarnath
Reading Ancient Scrolls with Modern Technology
Reflections: Maite Alvarez on Luisa Roldán
Reevaluating French Colonialism through Visual Culture
Reflections: Lyra Kilston on Richard Neutra and Julius Shulman
Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta
Reflections: Alex Jones on Charles Brittin
An American Odyssey: Mary Schmidt Campbell on Artist Romare Bearden [rebroadcast]
Reflections: Laura Gavilán Lewis on Jacques-Louis David
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