2003 Cover Article

Life Study
by Christopher Busa

Hayden Herrera's books seem written to be made into movies. They move from scene to scene, building up a picture with bits of information while isolating key points--in the manner of a spotlight focusing on an actor on the stage. Although she has published books on Pierre Matisse and Mary Frank, she is best known for her best-selling biography of Frida Kahlo, published by HarperCollins in 1983. Recently, Herrera recalled, "I felt that if I had a movie camera I would choose to stand and shoot in such and such a corner of the room. I often see written narrative as if it were a film. I imagine people moving around in a room or a garden. I certainly didn't expect my Kahlo biography to become a movie--it began as a dissertation. But once it was done, I thought it could be a good movie. I loved the movie it became. It was extraordinarily beautiful to look at. The music was incredible. Salma Hayek is perhaps more beautiful than Frida and I feared her charm would substitute for Frida's toughness. But she was not overly sweet."

Every time the actress, Salma Hayek, strikingly dressed in every detail, appeared on camera she came forth as if framed in a painting. The movie succeeds well in showing the back and forth between the artist's work and her life, how the life sustains the work and the work remakes the life. The very struggle of the artist is shown as productive; in fact, the representation of struggle is the artist's victory over past defeats. The movie's mode of translating the paintings into animated scenes from life was adopted from the example in Herrera's book, where paintings are described as the exquisite psychological offerings selected from the mess of life.

There is abundant use of the word perhaps in Herrera's newest biography, Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). One cannot be sure that an image in one of Gorky's paintings is any one thing at any one time. Herrera told me in an interview for this article: "A shape could be a rabbit, it could be a man, it could be an easel. The imagery is multiple. It's harder to write about Gorky than about Frida Kahlo because he's abstract or semi-abstract. He insisted upon ambiguity. How does one write, in a direct and forceful way, about ambiguity? With Frida, it was very clear. Her imagery is straightforward. Her work records her life. All artists work from their life, but with an abstract artist it is more difficult to pinpoint the connection in graceful writing, which I do care about."

In negotiating an artist's life study, Herrera structures her books chronologically, but in both biographies the need was to show the reader, at the onset, the character of the artist. Towards the end of writing Frida, Herrera discovered a way to mirror the last chapter in a prologue. She did the same thing in Gorky. The book begins with a prologue where the artist smells smoke and thinks it is his cigarette, not his studio, that is on fire. In the case of Gorky, Herrera's need was to establish who Gorky was as an artist before she took you through the horrors of his Armenian childhood.

Having finished most of her research for her Gorky biography, Herrera was unable to figure out how to begin writing. One day she was sitting on a beach on Cape Cod with Mary Gordon and her husband, the biographer Arthur Cash. Mary said to Herrera, "Hayden, why haven't you started the biography?" Herrera understood that when one is asked a direct question, one had the privilege of blurting out the truth. She answered, "Because I don't know how to structure it! I don't know how to retrieve all the material I've gone through and thought about. I don't know how to scoop it up."
Arthur said two words: "Index cards." Herrera remembered that that was exactly what she had done with Frida. She had structured the narrative by using index cards. For Gorky she had hoped she could do without these props. She thought the story should come out of her head the way fiction would come out of her head. But she could not make it happen and she finally went back and put Gorky's whole chronology on index cards.

Despite these factual underpinnings, Herrera's writing practice is a little closer to Abstract Expressionism. She takes a plunge and finds out where she is going once she starts. "Biography," she says, "is an invention based on facts. The writer selects and organizes the facts so as to give the fullest possible picture of his or her subject. There is always a huge amount that we cannot know. The biographer has to follow hunches, use judgment, and hope that the picture created is close to the truth. In a way, writing a biography is like getting to know a friend--you can't know everything. That's why we gather anecdotes about our subject and put them together like brushstrokes. In putting down the brushstrokes, we come to feel we understand. With Frida, I felt, for a time, that I was living inside her. I felt I was writing about her from the inside out."

From Linda Nochlin, who taught art history at the City University of New York, Herrera learned a freewheeling method of structuring essays. Nochlin saw that some students were afraid of writing and Herrera remembered her advice: "Don't try to make a linear outline. Just take a piece of paper and put everything down that you think you want to say. Then just draw lines between the ideas, and figure out which one is going to be first."

Looking at the paintings themselves (or reproductions) generates almost all Herrera's ideas about Gorky and Kahlo's art. She believes in keeping images right in front of her while writing. "You know, Ethel Schwabacher borrowed Gorky's paintings in order to write her monograph on him [Arshile Gorky, 1957]. That's the best way to write." At the same time the concept of milieu is crucial to Herrera in providing the context in which art is produced. Gorky was a non-native speaker and when he spoke his voice sounded more poetic than native poets. His apercus became folklore: "He left out definite and indefinite articles and transformed words the way he transformed shapes," Herrera says. "His malapropisms sounded like metaphors." Stuart Davis, Gorky's close friend, said Gorky's "complex personal jive" was "no simple matter of a foreign accent, although that was present, but an earthquake-like effect on sentence structure and a savagely perverse use of words to mean something they didn't."

He was a tall, handsome fellow known for his succession of beautiful studios, always kept spare. He scrubbed the wooden floors with bleach and loved to pace barefoot on the immaculate surface. His eyes were round and brown. His drooping moustache smiled more than his mouth. Herrera suggests that "the wary, wounded, angry look we see in Gorky's self-portraits may have something to do with thwarted love."

Something changed in 1943 when Gorky began visiting his wife's family in Virginia. He was more secure, emotionally and financially. Not only was he married, but also he was making love to the woman he loved. In a few short years they produced two daughters, Maro and Natasha. Following years of apprenticeship, Gorky now forgot his mentors and studied nature with the innocence of a child. As he had done on his mother's apron, he put his face in the grass and looked sideways, his eyes half-closed, looking at and through the embroidery, formed by blades of living grass, toward something beyond.

Frida drew crudely while Gorky drew like an angel. For all the damage to her body, she knew nothing about drawing anatomy. If Gorky departed from anatomy, dismembering, relocating, reassembling, he knew the organic source that organized what he would accept as a drawing by Gorky. Gorky did not say his first word until he was six years old. He did not know why and we do not know why. But his late development in speaking does parallel his extended apprenticeship in painting, suggesting a need beyond mere knowledge. Gorky borrowed from artists he respected before the word "borrow" had been translated into the postmodern vocabulary of "appropriation." Perhaps what defines our moment is that people now absorb the history of art in a frank way. Previously, to be original meant that it was bad to borrow. But the rule could be broken. T. S. Eliot wrote that "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." That's what Picasso did when he went to Braque's studio. He declared his ambition the way a rival would claim another's love object, insisting his need was greater. When critics dismissed Gorky's painting as derivative, he would amiably agree: "Yes, C_zanne is my father and Picasso is my mother."
FRIDA

As a schoolgirl in Mexico City, Frida was a tomboy who enjoyed enlivening dull moments with impish pranks. At the prestigious National Preparatory School, where the country's future diplomats were bred, she and a few members of her intelligently rebellious circle arranged to ride a donkey through the halls.

At this time, the early '20s, Mexico's most famous artist, Diego Rivera, was commissioned to paint a mural in the school's auditorium. Frida had an instinct for attracting notice; she got her future husband's attention by calling him "Old Fatso" while he was up on the scaffold absorbed painting muses. The auditorium was off-limits, but Frida found access, ate from the artist's lunch basket, and even met the beautiful model, Lupe Marin, whom Rivera would marry before he married Frida. Rivera was obese but moved with amazing grace. He was a fat person who danced beautifully, as if he carried his partner in his being. If Frida planned to have Diego's baby, she was simultaneously very passionately aligned with the leader of her school's circle of friends, Alejandro Arias.

Frida's youthful enchantment was interrupted by a terrible accident. Buses, new to Mexico, were crammed with crowds who had deserted the obsolete trolleys. Herrera writes in her biography: "Then, as now, they were driven with toreador bravado, as if the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe dangling near the front window made the driver invincible." Frida and Alejandro were packed in a bus along with a workman carrying a bag of gold dust used in church restoration. A collision threw everybody together. When Alejandro became aware, he saw Frida, bloody and bleeding. Her clothes were torn off, but her body was glittering with gold dust, mixed in with the blood. People, thinking she was an injured dancer, screamed, La Bailarina!

Frida later wrote about the accident: "It is a lie that one is aware of the crash, a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears. The crash bounced us forward and a handrail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull. A man saw me having a tremendous hemorrhage." The man kneeled on Frida's body and pulled out the rod of iron that had pierced the very middle of her body. Just then, the Red Cross ambulance arrived; people said Frida's scream was louder than the siren. "The steel handrail," Herrera writes, "had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the left side, it had come out through her vagina." Her lower lumbar column was broken in three places. "I lost my virginity," Frida said.

She made drawings in her journals and wrote down what the drawings meant to her. The drawings were a riddle that could be resolved through the writing and the writing was a way to make the drawings clearer. Her paintings were the picture album of her life, but her journals were a way of working out the ideas that came to fruition in her paintings. Once married, she would show and tell the drama of keeping Diego in love with Frida. A school classmate described her early doodling: "the lines meet among themselves and after two or three sinuous arcs she made them meet again." Frida's big round penmanship is childlike and earnest. Her drawing is awkward and honest, compelling. It was when her bones were healing in a plaster cast that Frida began drawing on this virgin white surface. She tattooed not her body but the medium that bound her body. Painting was becoming the way to record the joy--the alegria--she needed to balance the constant pain in her life.

She had always loved nature. Now she loved it more. She had always loved animals. Now she loved them more. Her monkeys and parrots, the flowers and bees in her garden, all this immediate life came alive in her art. She lived for nearly three decades after her accident and she lived every day with a passion controlled by love.
"As she recovered, relapsed, recovered again," Herrera writes, "she invented herself. She created a person who could be mobile and make mischief in her imagination rather than with her legs." Frida created the person who would paint the paintings. A secret had been revealed and the knowledge altered her. "It is as if I learned everything in seconds," she said. "I became old in instants."

Frida's mode of self-presentation became the model she used for her paintings. She was her own subject. Her Tehuana costumes became a motif, devoid of the person who wore them, yet shaped by the memory of that person, just as shoes retain the shape of their owner's feet. Frida's blouses and long, ruffled skirts; her look, at once simple and elegant, raw and refined, were enhanced by clunky stone Pre-Columbian jewelry. She invented hairstyles. Her bows, clips, and combs were as functionally beautiful and intimate as her bandages and braces.

In 1929 Frida did marry Diego, but, starting with a miscarriage in Detroit in 1932, all her efforts to have children resulted in failure. In Detroit, she recovered and immediately set about documenting her sufferings in art. From Detroit, she and Diego went to New York, where Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center. "They were thrown into the city," Herrera writes, "like "revolutionaries in the temple of finance."

In New York Frida spent little time painting. She visited with friends, went to movies, and spent a lot of time shopping. Otherwise, she became indolent. In eight months she produced one painting. She watched Diego paint on the scaffold while she "sucked hard candies." Herrera adds, "Another pastime was the game of cadavre exquis [exquisite corpse], an old parlor game adopted by the Surrealists as a technique to explore the mystique of accident. The first player starts by drawing the top of a body and then folds the paper so that the next player draws the next section without seeing how the figure has been begun. When Frida was a player, the resulting monsters were hilarious. She had a lurid imagination, and her fascination with sexual organs, also seen in the drawings in her journal and in a number of paintings, burst forth in the exquisite corpses." Frida was bad. One player recalls, "Some made me blush, and I do not blush easily." She would show an enormous penis, dripping with semen. When they unfolded the paper, they found a well-dressed woman with big bosoms, until they got to the penis. Diego laughed and said, "You know, women are far more pornographic than men."

Diego was working long hours on the Rockefeller mural, under the watchful eye of the New York press. Before the world, he succeeded in altering the portrait of an anonymous "labor leader" into a likeness of Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller wrote a letter to Diego, expressing his concern that a portrait of Lenin would "seriously offend a great many people." Rivera was tormented by a moral dilemma. He offered a compromise: he would balance the head of Lenin with the head of Lincoln, whom he described as the American hero of the laborer. Rockefeller came to the site with a check for $14,000, the balance due on Rivera's contract. Rivera accepted the check, but the fat man who walked with "liquid grace" now "walked woodenly to the work shack and changed out of his overalls. More guards appeared and pushed the moveable scaffold away from the wall. Within half an hour Radio City personnel had covered the mural with tarpaper."

Back in Mexico after four years in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, Diego and Frida moved into separate houses, connected by a bridge. The bridge was a deep metaphor that appeared in Frida's work as a thin line linking her to the nourishment of ancestry. The thin line was the extended umbilical cord, a linkage that connected the dead to the living, as a woman's blood vessels sustained an unborn child in her womb. Roots of plants in her paintings became fuses that blossomed into colors exposed in bright sunlight. Frida would pick bunches of bougainvillea, fixing the stems in her hair. Now, with a mirror, she would begin to paint a self-portrait that exposed her will to endure and her reverence for life--her alegria.

When Diego, after painting a portrait of Frida's younger sister, Cristina, posing her as an allegorical nude, proceeded to consummate his visual contact with intimate contact, Frida simply cut her long hair short. Her husband had so loved her long hair and she was glad to hurt him. Also she ceased to wear the native costumes that he thought Mexican women should wear in order not to pander to European style. Too angry to speak directly, Frida found a persona in a portrait called "A Few Small Nips." The painting is inspired by a newspaper report of a drunken man who threw his girlfriend on a cot and stabbed her 20 times. In the courtroom, he stated, "but I only gave her a few small nips." Herrera writes, "In the painting we are presented with the immediate aftermath of the murder: the killer, holding a bloody dagger, looms over his dead victim, who lies sprawled on a bed, her naked flesh covered with bloody gashes. As if the small sheet of tin cannot contain the horror, splotches of blood spurt onto the painting's frame, becoming life-size red splashes. The impact on the viewer is immediate, almost physical. We feel that someone in our actual space--perhaps oneself--has committed this violence. The transition from fiction to reality is made by a trail of blood."

Frida was highly sexual and she felt no shame about bisexual affairs, however discreetly she kept them. Herrera cautions us not to over-emphasize Frida's lesbianism. If Frida was boyish, she drove men crazy. Her lesbianism, Herrera writes, is suggested in her double portraits: "It emerges in many of her paintings as a kind of atmosphere, a sensuality so deep that it was stripped of conventional sexual polarities, a hunger for intimacy so urgent that it ignored gender. Like Picasso, who is reported to have said that the intensity of his friendship with the poet Max Jacob made him able to imagine making love to him in order to know him more completely, Frida, when she loved someone, wanted the absolute connection of physical union."

Diego was untroubled by his wife's female flings, but he flew into fury when he was confronted with indirect knowledge of her heterosexual affairs. Frida's retort was to schedule a major exhibition of her work in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery. Andre Breton was ecstatic in his catalogue preface: "This art even contains that drop of cruelty and humor uniquely capable of blending the rare effective powers that compound together to form the philter that is Mexico's secret." Her art was the drug that made Diego fall in love with her.

In the movie, Frida, based on Herrera's biography, Frida, bedridden, a few months from death and ordered by her doctor not to attend the opening of her first retrospective in Mexico, arrives in an ambulance, the siren quieting the buzzing crowd. Her four-poster bed is set up in the gallery and she is carried in and placed in the bed, creating a spectacle that is too serious to be Surrealist. Diego, in the movie, says so well at this occasion what he actually wrote later: "I recommend her to you not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life." He knew from the beginning and he said at her end, "If I had died without knowing her, I would have died without knowing what a real woman was."

Rivera saw Kahlo's art as specifically feminine. Herrera agrees. It is precisely, she says, "Kahlo's insistence on the concrete and personal that distinguishes her from the Surrealists. The Surrealists invented images of threatened sexuality. Frida made images of her own ruined reproductive system. When in Roots (1943) she joined her own body with a green vine, she was communicating a specific personal feeling--a childless woman's longing for fertility. Her emotion is utterly clear. Eroticism ran more through Frida's veins than in her head--for her, sex was less Freudian mystification than a fact of life. Similarly, she did not need the tutoring of de Sade to depict with a frankness that verged on ferocity the drama of physical suffering. This bluntness contrasts in the strongest fashion with Surrealist indirection and ellipses."

GORKY

In January 1946 Gorky's rented studio in the Connecticut countryside caught fire and 27 major works, produced at the height of his power, were destroyed. He had been preparing a new show for his dealer in New York, Julien Levy, whose prestigious gallery was located on 57th Street. The fire started when Gorky's red-hot stovepipe, not insulated, ignited a nearby beam of dry wood. Gorky, confused, wondered if his first obligation was to save the owner's tools or his own paintings. He ran back and forth up a hill fetching water with a bucket, trying to douse the flames. The barn owner heard the cri de coeur that Gorky murmured, almost sotto voce, while running up and down the hill, Studio on fire! During this trauma Gorky may have been mesmerized by the memory and family tales of the massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. Frida said of her traumatic joust with a steel handrail, "it is a lie that one cries." Just so, Gorky's memories, familiar to his friends, seem to have been burnt into his consciousness even before he was born. His future manner of drawing depended on his early use of his hands and his discovery of the power of their facility. De Kooning described Gorky's habit of sharpening his pencil when a belligerent Pollock insulted him. Gorky handled his pencil as if it were a "surgical instrument," de Kooning said. Gorky performed dissections between past, present, and future, insuring that his shapes, like layering in anatomical studies, have been "elevated spiritually," meaning that a part had been separated from the whole or an object from its context. Gorky's shapes derived from nature, retrieved through a haze of memory, strive to be representational, yet they are disguised or camouflaged in dazzle patterns of figure/ground confusion.

Gorky's maternal grandmother was made a widow when her husband, a priest, was nailed to his church door. Gorky's mother, Shushan, married for the first time when she was 14, not uncommon in turn-of-the-century Armenia. She quickly had two daughters. Two years later she heard thumping at her door. Two Turks pushed her husband into his own house, his hands bound, and the Turks shouting, "Christian dog!" The Turks took out a knife and began to flay him. He was blood-soaked when the Turks pushed his face in front of Shushan, pulling her eyelids up so she would be forced to see her husband suffer. Doubtless, she was raped.

Three years later Shushan married a widower who lived in a small farming village near Lake Van. An ancient destination, a mile above sea level, south of Mt. Ararat, Turkey's largest mountain, Lake Van is known for the light-infused pastel colors of the water, caused by its high salt content, seven times saltier than the ocean. The landscape is barren of trees but abundant with wildflowers and many species of birds. The stem and avian forms of Gorky's later work have their origin here.

(The recent movie, Ararat, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, focuses on the Armenian genocide, but it includes moments in Gorky's childhood and his reliving it years later when he painted The Artist and His Mother (1926-36). It also includes an art historian whose expertise is Gorky's work.)

At the end of the day, the young Gorky would rest with his head cradled in his mother's white apron. One of her aprons was embroidered and Gorky remembered falling asleep to her stories as his eyes closed on the patterns that hemmed the apron. In 1919 Gorky's mother, age 39, died of hunger. Gorky was an 18-year-old orphan, except he had a father, separated by an ocean, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Money was sent for Gorky and his younger sister's passage. Two decades later, Gorky remarked that he was amazed, when he first came to America, that a barking dog in the old country sounded the same as a barking dog in the new country. In Russian the name "Gorky" means "bitter one." In America Gorky took the last name because he greatly admired Maxim Gorky, whom he pretended was his cousin.

When he was a boy, Gorky painted Easter eggs so skillfully that people in the village paid him to paint their eggs. Intricate flowers, birds, and trees appeared, making somersaults like a weave in an Oriental carpet. The money he made painting Easter eggs, he used to buy paper and pencils. During the worst days of the Depression in America, Gorky possessed a cache of linen, drawing paper, stretchers, boxed tubes of paint, and well-cleaned, top-quality brushes grouped by size and placed in coffee cans like quivers of sorted arrows. He is said to have taken his first name from the Greek warrior Achilles, who was mortally wounded by an arrow in a vulnerable tendon.

Instinctively, Gorky took it upon himself to turn his life into legend. He changed dates. He changed names. He changed travel destinations and fibbed about attending the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Newly arrived in America, he hardly spoke English. Later, he wrote love letters to his wife by copying the sentiments of others. He was so shameless in his plagiarism that it is obvious that Gorky the foreigner was only innocently seeking suitable English to say what was available to any native speaker. Following the same logic, Gorky apprenticed himself to a succession of modern masters--Ingres, C_zanne, Picasso, Miro--until, when he married Mougouch and spent a succession of summers in the Virginia countryside, he began to paint Gorkys. He came back one afternoon with a drawing, asking Mougouch, Have I done something crazy here?

Three years later, in February 1946, one month after the studio fire, Gorky was operated upon for colon cancer. The doctors negotiated the elimination of his bowels via an exit created on one side of his body near his stomach. Gorky and Mougouch were living in Sherman, Connecticut. In July the Gorky family went to spend their third summer in Virginia. The following summer in June, Mougouch left New York for the coast of Maine, taking her young daughters, Maro and Natasha, with her. Mougouch welcomed the separation because it offered relief from Gorky's dark depression.

Late in the summer of '47, Gorky left New York and visited Mougouch in Maine for five days. They picnicked. They conversed about art. Gorky drew and helped his wife with drawing. "I have a drawing that's partly by me and partly by Gorky," Moughouch said. "He explained to me how everything in your picture has to be in relation to something through tension, a relationship of tension between whatever part of the object you were looking at--say a part of a tree--and something equally strong, like a cloud. I can't describe it, but at the time I was quite aware of it. Suddenly he did on my drawing what took on a completely different life. None of these relationships are accidental."

Gorky seldom drank, but at parties, lacking practice, he sometimes drank too much. He sang with a passionate, deep baritone and he was a good dancer who performed, at least on one occasion, an Armenian Sword Dance, pushing the kitchen table aside and picking up two carving knives. He worked himself into a frenzy, singing and leaping in the air, swirling the knives above his head and slapping the flat side against his thighs. He began nicking himself and a witness said, "Blood spurted all over the place. He was slipping and dancing in his own blood."

More than once after the last summer in Maine, Gorky slammed the door in Connecticut with a rope slung across his shoulder, announcing that he was looking for a nice tree to hang himself. Mougouch sent little Maro after her father, telling her to please ask her father to make a swing for her, so she could play.

Gorky's life closed in calamity. Two years after the studio fire and the insult of his colostomy, his neck was broken when he was a passenger in a car driven by Julien Levy. The last straw was his wife's affair with Matta Echauren. Gorky was crushed when he learned of it. Many times in the past Gorky threatened to kill himself. This time he told a friend he was "going on a long journey." He removed the neck brace that held his broken neck in alignment, put the noose where the brace had been, and at last succeeded in hanging himself. His body hovered less than a foot off the ground.

Gorky, a few days before the end, confessed to a friend, "You know, I made a terrible mistake getting in with these Surrealist people. The husbands sleep with each other's wives. The wives sleep with each other. And the husbands sleep with each other. They're terrible people. I never should have let Mougouch get mixed up with them."

No doubt Mougouch's affair with Matta destroyed something fundamental in Gorky, but Gorky used his own suicide as a way to punish those who loved him. The only time artists are depressed is when they are not working, and Gorky was in despair over his inability to move forward in his painting. Gorky's suicide was an aggressive act that he had rehearsed all his life. He had practiced his death to perfection but he would not die until he no longer needed to paint.

HAYDEN

Hayden Herrera has evolved from being an art historian with an exceptional eye to being a writer with an ability to make the artist's biography jump to life through tellingly vivid descriptions of the paintings. We, the readers, become privy to what made the artist make her mark or his mark, her or his particular scribble, in the first place. Herrera's underlying assumption is that the art an artist produces is a distillation of the self; as time has told us, this is the part of the artist's biography that will outlive the person. Herrera makes us see that a living hand made the paintings.

Herrera's childhood is a checkerboard; she hopped back and forth between divorced parents--each parent married five times. She went to 16 schools, including Dalton in New York, Truro Public School, and three different English-language schools in Mexico. She lived with her grandmother in Cambridge for a year, attending Buckingham, Brown, and Nichols after three years of boarding school in Putney, Vermont.

She spent her senior year at the American Community School in Paris, living in an apartment in a large house owned by Pierre Colle, whose gallery had exhibted Frida Kahlo in her one show in Paris. Hayden, following Paris, attended Radcliffe for two years, married Philip Herrera, a journalist, and then finished her undergraduate studies at Barnard College in New York. Before graduating, she was the mother of two little children. After teaching kindergarten for three years, she went to Hunter College and earned a master's degree by writing a thesis on Gorky's Garden in Sochi series.

She continued working towards a doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She had planned to write on Gorky, but this plan changed when she visited her mother in Mexico. At dinner with Joyce and Max Kozloff (Max had been her teacher and was an editor at Artforum), she was presented with a catalogue of work by Frida Kahlo. Max Kozloff suggested she write about this artist for his magazine. Herrera's art history studies, decidedly "Euro-centric," as she put it, prompted her to go to the Kahlo exhibition with low expectations. She had never paid attention to Mexican art. Not knowing anything about Kahlo's life, Herrera set off to see her show. "The paintings," she remembered recently, "were so strong, so moving, I thought, what's going on here, why did Kahlo need to make them? Curiosity drove me."

In Artforum she published a groundbreaking feature on Frida Kahlo, based on an independent studies paper supervised by feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. After the article was published, Fran McCulloch, an editor at HarperCollins wrote Herrera a brief note, "Why don't you write a biography?"

A lot of material already had been published on Gorky and almost nothing on Kahlo. The excitement of original research and the idea of writing about a woman lured Herrera. Her advisor was the scholar of early 20th-century American art, Milton Brown. "I went to him and asked if it was OK to write a dissertation about Frida Kahlo, thinking he might object since she was Mexican and my field was 20th century American art. His perspective was broad enough to include Mexican-Americans, but most art history departments at that time would not have allowed it. I then said, 'Is it all right if this is a biography?' I worried he would say no, that the topic had to be more strictly abstract, more theoretical. But he said yes, and I was puzzled. I asked him why it was all right. He said the reason most people don't do biographies is that they are so much work. Of course I didn't pay any attention to that advice. Frida took five years, Gorky eight or nine."
Herrera pursued an interest in painting that grew out of her childhood experience of living with Gorky paintings. This came about when Herrera's father, John Phillips, married Mougouch, Gorky's widow.

Mougouch and John Phillips lived in a dilapidated house on Beacon Hill in Boston with Maro and Natasha Gorky, Mougouch's small children. Filling the walls were numerous paintings by Gorky. "When you are 12 years old," Herrera recalled to me, "you are trying to understand the adult world. Looking at these paintings, I was always thinking, Why did he paint them? Why did he make those shapes, so peculiar--just when they begin to look like real things, they change into something else! Maro and Natasha and I would invent things out of those paintings. One we called the 'Bugs Bunny' painting.

It's in my Gorky book under the title To Project, To Conjure. For us children, naturally projecting and conjuring, there was a rabbit on the right hand side of the painting."
Why did she chose to make a life study of these two artists, Frida and Gorky, each tragic figures who died with the kind of religious pain we associate with Christian suffering? This is the question the readers of her books will ask, and she will not tell. For all we know, she may be writing a novel.

CHRISTOPHER BUSA is editor of Provincetown Arts