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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Getty at 20: Stephen Rountree
Stephanie Schrader on Rembrandt and India
Werner Busch on Adolph Menzel
Interviewing Anselm Kiefer
Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas
The Making of an Exhibition Part 3
Jerald Podair on Dodger Stadium and Los Angeles
Walter Hopps: The Dream Colony
In the Galleries: Borghese-Windsor Cabinet and Bust of Pope Paul V
Anka Muhlstein on Artists and Authors in 19th-Century France
Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” Part 2
Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” Part 1
Chris Killip on Photographing People and Places
B. V. Doshi: Modern Architecture in India Part 2
Maristella Casciato: Modern Architecture in India Part 1
Season 2 Trailer
Jane and Louise Wilson on Creating Together
David Saunders on Museum Conservation and Lighting
Composer John Adams Part 2
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