ISOLDA P. KAHLO

A tradition rooted in the mythology of romanticism and its conception of the artist as a cultural hero would want to believe that everything pertaining to the life of a genius has to bear the mark of the sublime. Everything in their lives -gestures, decisions, personality traits, eccentricities, even the most dissonant mistakes- are thus transformed into esthetic substance. We would want their lives to be masterworks, a perfect coherence- and continuity between the work and its creator. Roland Barthes has criticized this conception as a basically bourgeois aberration - the perennial realism of the bourgeois culture, its need to identify the signified with the signifier. And then we learn about the real human dimension of these heroes- their pettiness, narcissism, avariciousness, arbitrariness, and childishness, all of which are no more than their human specificity. We are scandalized; either the work or the figure lies.A harmonious painting, a novel or masterful symphony cannot possibly be the product of a person capable of such spiritual smallness. Then we are left with two choicesto dismiss the work as an essentially hypocritical utterance, or to disqualify the creator as the accidental author of some work that happened to be marvelous but was simply by virtue of a great skill, not supported by an equally admirable human quality.

La autora, sobrina de la pintora, nos relata sus vivencias de la mano de los duendes infantiles, recorriendo de nuevo la "Casa Azul" de Coyoacán. Abre puertas cerradas, pasajes ocultos, silencios que

Isolda P. Kahlo, única sobreviviente de la familia Kahlo, ha dejado estas memorias: de la mano de sus duendes infantiles recorre de nuevo la "Casa Azul" de Coyoacán, entre sombras crecidas: su infancia ha sido un mar turbulento. Abre puertas cerradas, pasajes ocultos... No puede llevarse toda esa carga de silencios a cuestas, ni es posible apostarle por mas tiempo al espejismo engañador. Ofrece su album de fotografias ineditas al ojo de los lectores y documentos que avalan lo dicho. Al caer las piezas que lo maquillaban surge una verdad clave en la interpretacion de los hechos."La historia relatada en este libro, es una nueva verdad que se suma a otras historias subjetivas e investigaciones hechas en torno a la figura de Frida Kahlo. Ya se sabe: No hay una sola verdad ni existe un criterio universal para juzgar, con justeza, a un personaje. Sin embargo, una nieta se cansa de ver rodar las lagrimas de su abuela, quien no encuentra en tantos libros publicados, a esa Frida que ella conocio y quiso; a la que vivio a su lado y compartio con ella tantos momentos."