Last weekend, as some friends might know, I shared my busy weekend because of getting guests. My dear and adorable friend Deborah Gregory http://www.theliberatedsheep.com/ Had kindly suggested me to tell about my experiences on this.
I don’t want to write about the common and frequent events like sitting, talking about this and that or barbeque in the backyards garden, which are happening as usual 😉 I wanna just tell about our visit in the Open Air Museum near Detmold, a small but very beautiful city in the OWL (Eastern Westphalia, Germany)
A wonderful and wide landscape in which one must have much time and of course, being young enough to reach all the places in that area.
Yes we haven’t got much 😀 only could visit the part of Paderborns village. but what we’ve got I’d tried to document by my Smartphone to share with you here. I hope you’ll enjoy 🙂 ❤
very convenient for the lazy ones 😉 I wished I’d save the smell too; it was fantastic!
To put it bluntly, I have not a tiny problem if any hit song sounds like any other song!! If you might heard about; Beatles Yesterday sounds like a piece of whom or,,, I know an example: the famous song; Hotel California seems being a sincerely copy of Jethro Tull’s “We used to know” but Ian Anderson the head of Jethro Tull after hearing this annonce, shrugged the shoulders and answered: what a… it is a wonderful song isn’t?
Anyway, I am since a long time a musician and I have some experiences about composing musics (I was not a lucky one 😀 ) and I know how it is a wonderful feeling when you get an idea from your most favourite song from your beloved musician.
only for proof; me on the stage in the 90’s
anyhow, the music world is unlimited, and also the sonority is floating all in the air, we only must keep silence a listen to them; it is just wonderful.
You might wonder what would I mean, yes, sure it looks a little weird but I can explain it; I have many experiences about finding out how many masterpieces in the music world, might be stolen or pilfered by any other song in the past. That is actually bullshits!” because, as I once was a musician and I had got also many themes from the older music hits and combine a new one, it was a great enjoyment for me as I’d believe that it would be surely a great enjoyment for the compositor for seeing how could be music unlimited.
Wayne’s World kind of ruined “Stairway to Heaven” for me. Yes, it’s been 27 years, but I still can’t help but think of Wayne turning to the camera with his stoner grin, saying “Denied!” when the guitar store clerk points out a “No Stairway to Heaven” sign. It was not a song I took particularly seriously, but I respected the fact that it took itself so seriously… and threaded my way out of the room if someone picked up a guitar, earnestly cocked an ear, and played those gentle opening notes.
Now I giggle even when I hear the magisterial original intro. This is not the fault of Zeppelin but of the many who approach the Zeppelin temple of rock grandiosity unprepared, attempting riffs that only Jimmy Page could pull off with authority. At least the joke gave us a way to talk about the phenomenon: in lesser hands than Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” can sound… well, a bit ridiculous (with apologies to Dolly Parton.) Although accused (and acquitted) of ripping off the opening notes to Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus,” the song is all Zeppelin in every possible way.
“Stairway” is a representative sampler pack of the band’s signature moves: mixing folk rock and heavy metal with a Delta blues heart; exploding in thunderheads of John Bonham drum fills and a world-famous Page solo; Plant screaming cryptic lyrics that vaguely reference Tarot, Tolkien, English folk traditions and “a bustle in your hedgerow”; John Paul Jones’ wildly underrated multi-instrumental genius; bizarre charges of Satanic messages encoded backwards in the record…. (bringing to mind another Wayne’s World actor’s character.)
“Stairway… crystallized the essence of the band,” said Page later. “It had everything there and showed us at our best. It was a milestone.” It set a very high bar for big, emotional rock songs. “All epic anthems must measure themselves against ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” writes Rolling Stone. It is “epic in every sense of the word,” says the Polyphonic video at the top, including the literary sense. It can “make you feel like you’re part of a different time, part of a different world. It can make you feel like you’re part of a story.”
That story? “One of the greatest narrative structures in human history,” the Hero’s Journey, as so famously elaborated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces—an archetypal mythological arc that has “permeated stories for as long as humans have told them.” Not only do Robert Plant’s mystical lyrics reflect this ancient narrative, but the song’s composition also enacts it, building stage by stage, from questioning to questing to battling to returning with the wisdom of how “to be a rock and not to roll.”
The song’s almost classical structure is, of course, no accident, but it is also no individual achievement. Hear the story of its composition, and why it has been so influential, despite the jokes at the expense of those it influenced, in the Polyphonic video at the top and straight from Jimmy Page himself in the interview above.
Out of all of Zeppelin’s many epic journeys, “Stairway” best represents “the reason,” as cultural critic Steven Hyden writes, “why that band endures… the mythology, that Joseph Campbell idea of an epic journey into the wild that Zeppelin’s music represents, the sense that when you listen to this band, you feel like you’re plugging into something bigger and more profound than a band.” Or that the band is opening a doorway to something bigger and more profound than themselves.
I must confess that if I have ever like any “ism” I’d rather be Feminist! They are unpredictable!
You know, Men. I mean we all men, we have ruled the world since the religions began to rule and we were so satisfied with our result that we have hidden our heads (and in the same way our brains) in the sand with our regulated, controlled, fixed way of life to settle everything, according to our wish, and thought laughingly; all is the best!
But now, if we really look around us with the opened eyes (opened-minded) we can clearly see what we have failed; to ignore the fear and make something new.
Yes my dear same gender, we have made so many rules for our benefits and missed the point of; “just let it run free”. now there they are; Women and they rock definitely. There here, is one of my most recommended favourites. ❤
There is nothing more to say but enjoy this essential be presented. 🙂 🙂
When we admire a famous artist from the past, we may wish to know everything about their lives—their private loves and hates, and the inner worlds to which they gave expression in canvases and sculptures. A biography may not be strictly necessary for the appreciation of an artist’s work. Maybe in some cases, knowing too much about an artist can make us see the autobiographical in everything they do. Frida Kahlo, on the other hand, fully invited such interpretation, and made knowing the facts of her life a necessity.
She can hardly “be accused of having invented her problems,” writes Deborah Solomon at The New York Times, yet she invented a new visual vocabulary for them, achieving her mostly posthumous fame “by making her unhappy face the main subject of her work.”
Her “specialty was suffering”—her own—“and she adopted it as an artistic theme as confidently as Mondrian claimed the rectangle or Rubens the corpulent nude.” Kahlo treated her life as worthy a subject as the respectable middle-class still lifes and aristocratic portraits of the old masters. She transfigured herself into a personal language of symbols and surreal motifs.
This means we must peer as closely into Kahlo’s life as we are able if we want to fully enter into what Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe called“her construction of a theater of the self.” But we may not feel much closer to her after reading her wildly-illustrated diary, which she kept for the last ten years of her life, and which was locked away after her death in 1954 and only published forty years later, with an introduction by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. The diary was then republished by Abrams in a beautiful hardcover edition that retains Fuentes’ introduction.
If you’re looking for a historical chronology or straightforward narrative, prepare for disappointment. It is, writes Kathryn Hughes at The Telegraph, a diary “of a very particular kind. There are few dates in it, and it has nothing to say about events in the external world—Communist Party meetings, appointments at the doctor’s or even trysts with Diego Rivera, the artist whom Kahlo loved so much that she married him twice. Instead it is full of paintings and drawings that appear to be dredged from her fertile unconscious.”
This descriptions suggests that the diary substitutes the image for the word, but this is not so—it is filled with Kahlo’s experiments with language: playful prose-poems, witty and cryptic captions, free-associative happy accidents. Like the visual autobiography of kindred spirit Jean-Michel Basquiat, her private feelings must be inferred from documents in which image and word are inseparable. There are “neither startling disclosures,” writes Solomon, “nor the sort of mundane, kitchen-sink detail that captivates by virtue of its ordinariness.” Rather than exposition, the diary is filled, as Abrams describes it, with “thoughts, poems, and dreams… along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations.”
Kahlo’s diary allows for no “dreamy identification with its subject” notes Solomon, through Instagram-worthy summaries of her dinners or wardrobe woes. Unlike her many, gushing letters to Rivera and other lovers, the “irony is that these personal sketches are surprisingly impersonal.” Or rather, they express the personal in her preferred private language, one we must learn to read if we want to understand her work. More than any other artist of the time, she turned biography into mythology.
Knowing the bare facts of her life gives us much-needed context for her images, but ultimately we must deal with them on their own terms as well. Rather than explaining her painting to us, Kahlo’s diary opens up an entirely new world of imagery—one very different from the controlled self-portraiture of her publicbody of work—to puzzle over.
One can really explore this genius for a long time and never get tired of!
He was and is the genius of all time as we look not only to his fascinating paintings but into his experiments and researches in all about.
And now I have found another genius work as he drew a map exactly as we’d see in our time only with the help of satellites!
How could he see these, with a clandestine satellite?! Stunningly he was always speaking of the power of simplicity.
No, surely not. He could do it with his imaginations. I can remember as a young boy, watching old wonderful science fiction TV series, in one of them; it was about a man who has been found on a planet lonesome, the finders asked him to come with them on their spaceship to explore the universe but he didn’t want to leave his planet; I can fly all over where I want, in my dreams, with my imagination, he said.
Yes, Leonardo was also able to use his. Actually, we must try using our imagination to find out how Leonardo da Vinci could draw so precisely the Imola city of Italy without a spaceship! 😉 It blows one’s mind to try doing it!
So, here I share again an article about this great genius, hoping you enjoy it. With thanks ❤
When I look at maps from centuries ago, I wonder how they could have been of any use. Not only were they filled with mythological monsters and mythological places, but the perspectives mostly served an aesthetic design rather than a practical one. Of course, accuracy was hard to come by without the many mapping tools we take for granted—some of them just in their infancy during the Renaissance, and many more that would have seemed like outlandish magic to nearly everyone in 15th century Europe.
Everyone, it sometimes seems, but Leonardo da Vinci, who anticipated and sometimes steered the direction of futuristic public works technology. None of his flying machines worked, and he could hardly have seen images taken from outer space. But he clearly saw the problem with contemporary maps. The necessity of fixing them led to a 1502 aerial image of Imola, Italy, drawn almost as accurately as if he had been peering at the city through a Google satellite camera.
“Leonardo,” says the narrator of the Vox video above, “needed to show Imola as an ichnographic map,” a term coined by ancient Roman engineer Vitruvius to describe ground plan-style cartography. No streets or buildings are obscured, as they are in the maps drawn from the oblique perspective of a hilltop or mountain. Leonardo undertook the project while employed as Cesare Borgia’s military engineer. “He was charged with helping Borgia become more aware of the town’s layout.” For this visual aid turned cartographic marvel, he drew from the same source that inspired the elegant Vitruvian Man.
While the visionary Roman builder could imagine a god’s eye view, it took someone with Leonardo’s extraordinary perspicacity and skill to actually draw one, in a startlingly accurate way. Did he do it with grit and moxie? Did he astral project thousands of miles above the city? Was he in contact with ancient aliens? No, he used geometry, and a compass, the same means and instruments that allowed ancient scientists like Eratosthenes to calculate the circumference of the earth, to within 200 miles, over 2000 years ago.
Leonardo probably also used an instrument called a bussola, a device that measures degrees inside a circle—like the one that surrounds his city map. Painstakingly recording the angles of each turn and intersection in the town and measuring their distance from each other would have given him the data he needed to recreate the city as seen from above, using the bussola to maintain proper scale. Other methods would have been involved, all of them commonly available to surveyors, builders, city planners, and cartographers at the time. Leonardo trusted the math, even though he could never verify it, but like the best mapmakers, he also wanted to make something beautiful.
It may be difficult for historians to determine which inaccuracies are due to miscalculation and which to deliberate distortion for some artistic purpose. But license or mistakes aside, Leonardo’s map remains an astonishing feat, marking a seismic shift from the geography of “myth and perception” to one of “information, drawn plainly.” There’s no telling if the archetypal Renaissance man would have liked where this path led, but if he lived in the 21st century, he’d already have his mind trained on ideas that anticipate technology hundreds of years in our future.
I lost my mother when I was eighteen years old, and I must confess that from this time, I have found out how worthy she was for my brother and me, though our lifetime together was not so easy.
I miss you, but your love and all you have done for us remain in my heart and mind.
Love to all you friends with your thoughts on your loving mother. ❤ ❤
That’s of course, the title of the BBC article about the Genius of the all centuries. But as we actually know; He is standing still there, all the time, to make us wondering again and again about his ability and curiosity to find the answers to “all” questions.
First, after many thanks to luisa zambrottahttps://wordsmusicandstories.wordpress.com/ to mention this memorandum though, Leonardo da Vinci is not just an Italian but one part of the human beings,,, (if it’s so, should we be proud of it? Anyway, I hope we’ve deserved it), somehow, he belongs to the very special.
As I remember, in the early 70’s we’ve watched a TV serials on Persian TV: The Life of Leonardo da Vinci. As I remember with a wonderful soundtrack.
It was a fantastic production as BBC had often those days. (I was lucky also to see a many made of, from the Charles Dickens books)
And the other one was a very nice work too:
Anyway, it doesn’t have to be an advertisement for this English broadcasting but I have enjoyed a lot those days with all these wonderful illustrations.
Here is some “self portraits” plus more: isn’t it amazing this man? ❤ ❤
This portrait, newly identified as Leonardo da Vinci, is going on display in London as the world marks the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist and inventor.
Only one other portrait has survived from the artist’s lifetime, aside from self-portraits.
Martin Clayton was researching an exhibition for The Queen’s Gallery in London when he identified the sketch as a study of Leonardo made by an unidentified assistant shortly before the master’s death in 1519.
The only other contemporary image is by his pupil, Francesco Melzi, created around the same time, seen below.
“In the sketch, he is aged about 65 and appears a little melancholy and world-weary. If you compare this sketch with Francesco Melzi’s portrait of Leonardo, you can see strong indications that this too is a depiction of the artist,” says Mr Clayton of the Royal Collection Trust.
“The elegant straight nose, the line of the beard rising diagonally up the cheek to the ear, a ringlet falling from the moustache at the corner of the mouth, and the long wavy hair are all exactly as Melzi showed them in his portrait.
“Leonardo was renowned for his well-kept and luxuriant beard, at a time when relatively few men were bearded – though the beard was rapidly coming into fashion at this time.”
Museums and galleries are marking the Leonardo da Vinci anniversary. Here is a selection of his work, which will go on display in Italy, France and the UK.
At the master’s birthplace, Museo Leonardiano, Vinci, Italy
In the village of Vinci, the Museo Leonardiano is exhibiting the artist’s first known drawing, dated 5 August 1473, seen below.
Entitled Landscape 8P, it was sketched when the artist was 21. The museum describes the image as “a kind of palimpsest for all of Leonardo’s future output”.
The drawing includes a written reference to the Catholic festivity of Santa Maria della Neve (Our Lady of the Snow).
The museum say details in the sketch suggest the setting may be a combination of different places, including the Montalbano mountain ridge and the Valdinievole region in Tuscany.
A high-resolution three-dimensional digital version of the drawing will also be available at the exhibition, allowing visitors to see details not visible to the naked eye.
The sketch will be on display until 26 May and will then return to the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Loire Valley, France
A tapestry based on Leonardo’s mural painting The Last Supper will be displayed at the Château du Clos Lucé in France, where he spent the final years of his life, between 1516 and 1519.
It is the first time the tapestry has been been outside the Vatican museum since the 16th Century.
The silk tapestry was woven for Louise of Savoy and her son, the future king of France, Francis I, some time before 1514. The new king invited Leonardo to move to France and much of the artist’s work went with him.
The original mural, seen above, is one of only around 20 paintings Leonardo completed and was commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, Louvre museum, Paris, France
The Louvre in Paris expects huge demand for its forthcoming Leonardo da Vinci exhibition this October, urging visitors to book a time slot ahead of their visit.
The museum holds the largest collection of his paintings, the best known of them being the Mona Lisa, seen above.
The gallery says the new exhibition will be the culmination of more than 10 years of work, including scientific examinations of the paintings.
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing, The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London
Until 6 May, 144 of Leonardo’s drawings are on display in 12 simultaneous exhibitions across the UK in venues including Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow.
The exhibitions are collectively called Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing.
From 24 May to 13 October, a single exhibition will open in The Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace, featuring 200 drawings, before moving to The Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh.
The drawings on display include The head of Leda in lack chalk, pen and ink (above) and A man tricked by Gypsies (from 1493, below).
Da Vinci has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of pages that survived from his notebooks show his diverse interests and achievements, including work on geology, anatomy, flight, gravity and optics.
He is often credited with coming up with concepts for the bicycle, aeroplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.
Image captionA study of a woman’s handsImage captionStudies of hands for the Adoration of the Magi painting in 1481, seen under ultraviolet light
Da Vinci produced ground-breaking work as an anatomist by dissecting 30 human corpses, which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately.
The notes that accompany much of his work were written left-handed in mirror scripts.
Image captionThe foetus in the womb, from 1511Image captionThe skull sectioned, from 1489Image captionA design for an equestrian monument, made around 1485Image captionA star-of-Bethlehem and other plantsImage captionA drawing of cats, lions and a dragonImage captionThe head of Judas
Yes! This word is getting more and more familiar to me nowadays.
At first, I wanted to thank you all my adorable and honourable friends for your kindness and generosity to let me feel at home to open my heart once more for you.
I’m almost a newcomer here but unfortunately, I am probably spending the last quartal of my life session though, I wished I’d be a young newcomer with a great ambitions with a bright look at my future.
That’s just because I lived my life mostly to present my brother for his success in his life; become a famous writer as he, in his whole almost short life, could and wanted to be. You know; to be a body for this soul. I might decide to do it just like my mother, she did it for my father from the beginning of their marriage till father’s death. that’s another story which I’ll write it down one day.
Of course, I have to mention that I, also have some talents in arts as I’ve tried sometimes; in the music and in the theatres, and the effects were not disappointing. To point it out here; my brother’s wished also to see me succeed in.
But for me, it was clear if I’d dive deeply too into the world of arts, we might both get lost without any success.
Anyhow, our fate wasn’t so fair and my effort to show the world his genius talent failed, he left this planet and I had to discover myself again as a newborn child, digging the oppressed talents and wishes, but to find out that it isn’t so easy. Let’s back to my condition with the symptom “Burnout”
After this short announcement above, I try to explain why I feel it so; as I keep working in the week the job which I just do it financially, I try to clean my soul at the weekend by actuating my inner spirit. But lately, I felt it’s getting too much!! It is at first because of my interests to several objects like; Archaeology(Egyptology), Psychology, Philosophy, Social Politics (I worked as a political journalist once in Iran) and for all these, I have only time in the weekends. on the other side, I try not to miss anything in through the weeks as I doing my job, by looking permanently on my poor Smartphone (Smallphone!! 😀 ) and you can’t imagine how big is the difference between these two worlds; the job which I earn money by it and there is no need for any talent or creativity, and the lovely work which I do on the weekends. they are two different worlds. There I noticed by the way, that I’m getting confused. You know; forgetting this or mix-up that and making mistakes. I am not the youngest one who I once was anymore, you know? Therefore, I decided to reduce the themes at the weekend, it is a pity but the only chance not to lose my mind! I’d rather reduce the job in the week but unfortunately, I can’t because of the financial situation. the only hope is my retirement that will be in the next year and if I stay alive, I will surely work on my lovely part more.
At the end, I just wanna say that it is very nice and calming for me to open my heart and share my thoughts with you dear friends, you’re much appreciated and wishing you all the best. ❤ ❤
There’s no doubt that any thinker is somehow fascinated over this man; Nietzsche. As I once in my youth was interested in Philosophy, after struggling to understand Socrates by Plato, got a book about the story of philosophy; by Will Durant ” William James “Will” Durant ” of course translated in Persian, by Abbas Zirab-Khuii, a great historian and translator in Iran, from Plato to the new world philosophers like William James. You can imagine the situation for a young man about 20 years old, to handle all these new thoughts (for me of course!) and to process with.
Anyway, one of these highly recommended geniuses was Friedrich Nietzsche, who got my not only thoughts but also soul occupied or more engaged to keep thinking about him and to understand this madness!
I adore Socrates and I love Espinoza and I’d stared in front of Schuppenhauer but Nietzsche makes me crazy!! his determination over “Selbstüberwindung” overcome self, or “übermensch” Superman. or his desperation about God’s creation;
or his doubt of a God who wants to be adored;
or “Sklavenmoral” slave morality. especially the latest; I was and am also against this term; Moral or Morality, this is a social problem! as history tells us, the moral has been changing all through the time especially, in the time of wars in according with the situation. I prefer to use “Conscience” as in German: “Gewissen”; that has nothing to do with the mass, it is individual, it is the self; you with you yourselves conscience, and nobody else.
There’s no shame if you’ve never known how to pronounce Friedrich Nietzsche’s name correctly. Even less if you never remember how to spell it. If these happen to be the case, you may be less than familiar with his philosophy. Let Alain de Botton’s animated School of Life video briefly introduce you, and you’ll never forget how to say it: “Knee Cha.” (As for remembering the spelling, you’re on your own.) You’ll also get a short biography of the disgruntled, dyspeptic German philosopher, who left a promising academic career at the University of Basel in his mid-20s and embarked to the Swiss Alps to write his violently original books in solitude before succumbing to a mental breakdown at 44 when he saw a cart driver beating a horse.
Nietzsche died after remaining almost entirely silent for 11 years. In these years and after his death, thanks to the machinations of his sister Elizabeth, his thought was twisted into a hateful caricature. He has since been rehabilitated from associations with the Nazis, but he still calls up fear and loathing for many people because of his relentless critiques of Christianity and reputation for staring too long into abysses. Maybe we can’t help but hear fascistic overtones in his concept of the ubermensch, and his ideas about slave morality can make for uncomfortable reading. Those steeped in Nietzsche’s thought may not feel that de Botton’s commentary gives these ideas their proper critical due.
Likewise, Nietzsche himself is treated as something of an ubermensch, an approach that pulls him out of his social world. Important figures who had a tremendous impact on his personal and intellectual life—like Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard and Cosima Wagner, Lou Salomé, and Nietzsche’s sister—don’t even receive a mention. But this is a lot to ask from a six-minute summary. De Botton hits some of philosophical highlights and explains some misconceptions. Yes, Nietzsche held no brief for Christianity at all, but this was because it caused tremendous suffering, he thought, by making people morally stunted and bitterly resentful.
Instead, he argued, we should embrace our desires, and use so-called sinful passions like envy to leverage our ambitions. Nietzsche is not a seducer, corrupting the youth with promises of greatness. You may very well fail, he admitted, and fail miserably. But to deny yourself is to never become who you are. Nietzsche scholar Babette Babich has described this aspect of the philosopher’s thought as the ethics of the supportive friend. She quotes David B. Allison, who writes that Nietzsche’s advice comes to us “like a friend who seems to share your every concern—and your aversions and suspicions as well. Like a true friend, he rarely tells you what you should do.”
Except that he often does. Babich also writes about Nietzsche as educator, and indeed he considered education one of the highest human goods, too precious to be squandered on those who do not appreciate it. His philosophy of education is consistent with his views on culture. Since God is Dead, we must replace scripture and liturgy with art, literature, and music. So far, so many a young Nietzsche enthusiast, pursuing their own form of Nietzschean education, will be on board with the philosopher’s program.
But as de Botton also explains, Nietzsche, who turned Dionysus into a philosophical ideal, might have issued one prescription too many for the average college student: no drinking. If that’s too much to stomach, we should at least take seriously that stuff about staring into abysses. Nietzsche meant it as a warning. Instead, writes Peter Prevos at The Horizon of Reason, “we should go beyond staring and bravely leap into the boundless chasm and practice philosophical base jumping.” No matter how much Nietzsche you read, he’s never going to tell you that means. We only become who we are, he suggests, when we figure it on our own.
Reducing an artist’s work to their biography produces crude understanding. But in very many cases, life and work cannot be teased apart. This applies not only to Sylvia Plath and her contemporary confessional poets but also to James Joyce and Marcel Proust and writers they admired, like Dante and Cervantes.
Such an artist too is Frida Kahlo, a practitioner of narrative self-portraits in a modernizing idiom that at the same time draws extensively on tradition. The literary nature of her art is a subject much neglected in popular discussions of her work. She wrote passionate, eloquent love poems and letters to her husband Diego Rivera and others, full of the same kind of visceral, violent, verdant imagery she deployed in her paintings.
More generally, the “obsession with Kahlo’s biography,” writes Maria Garcia at WBUR, ends up focusing “almost voyeuristically—on the tragic experiences of her life more than her artistry.” Those terribly compounded tragedies include surviving polio and, as you’ll learn in Iseult Gillespie’s short TED-Ed video above, a bus crash that nearly tore her in half. She began painting while recovering in bed. She was never the same and lived her life in chronic pain and frequent hospitalizations.
Perhaps a certain cult of Kahlo does place morbid fascination above real appreciation for her vision. “There’s a compulsion that’s satiated only through consuming Kahlo’s agony,” Garcia writes. But it’s also true that we cannot reasonably separate her story from her work. It’s just that there is so more to the story than suffering, all of it woven into the texts of her paintings. Kahlo’s mythology, or “inspirational personal brand,” ties together her commitments to Marxism and Mexico, indigenous culture, and native spirituality.
Like all self-mythologizing before her, she folded her personal story into that of her nation. And unlike European surrealists, who “used dreamlike images to explore the unconscious mind, Kahlo used them to represent her physical body and life experiences.” The experience of disability was no less a part of her ecology than mortality, symbolic landscapes, floral tapestries, animals, and the physically anguished experiences of love and loss.
Generous approaches to Kahlo’s work, and this short overview is one of them, implicitly recognize that there is no need to separate the life from the work, to the extent that the artist saw no reason to do so. But also, there is no need to isolate one narrative theme, whether intense physical or emotional suffering, from themes of self-transformation and transfiguration or experiments in re-creating personal identity as a political act.
lampmagician 
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