Beauty Is Convulsive

By Carole Maso

Book Overview

Maso's incantatory description of her conjured-up subject's embrace takes on extraordinary power . . . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times

At the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.

A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430896
• ISBN13: 9781582430898
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Dancing with Frida

After having read Kahlo's diary she kept in her final days, Maso became inspired by not only Kahlo's art, but by her vision of the world, and has created in "Beauty Is Convulsive" a marvelous series of prose poems. Incorporating aspects of Kahlo's life into meditations on suffering and pain as art, these poems weave a tapestry of Kahlo's artistic mind, which was deeply affected by her physical ailments that persisted throughout her life. This is not a biography, but rather a side dish for readers enthralled by Kahlo's (or Maso's, for that matter) powerful art. Reaching back to the styles used in her previous book "Aureole", Carole Maso has written a fascinating, complex, and unique book celebrating a passionate artist.

Maso, Kahlo, and a cigarette

This work adds to Maso's reputation as one of the most significant writers today. As Maso has suggested in the past, why are less known artists ignored in media, at the expense of well-known writers. Hopefully, this smart, beautifully engaging, and funny text will introduce a new audience to two influential and important artists.