Over 1200 separate artifacts: clothing, jewelry, portraits, personal letters, recipes, sketches, jewelry and small collectibles are contained within the five cases belonging to the Noyola antique shop in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  Levine's book carefully and artfully examines the objects through a series of beautiful and revealing photographs, taken in the room where she first encountered the collection.  Photo courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press

It is a story almost too good to be real: in an antique store in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a curator finds a trove of personal effects from one of the twentieth century’s most beloved artists. In an exquisite new book titled Finding Frida Kahlo, Barbara Levine, the former director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, explores a trove of artist Frida Kahlo’s personal effects; the sort of stuff we throw out. The odds and ends give us more of what we have longed for… more images and insight into the life of an artist who built her career on looking at her life. The book itself is a precious and intimate experience. We get to share in Levine’s experience, carefully opening the chests, suitcase, box and trunk which contained some 1,200 personal items belonging to Kahlo. In turning the pages we feel we are standing beside Levine in La Buhardilla Antiquarios (The Attic Antiques) as she carefully sifts through the material, trying to document, preserve and understand it all.

The Kahlo cache includes 16 small oil paintings, 23 watercolors and pastels, 59 notebook pages (diary entries, recipes, etc.), 73 anatomical studies (some dated prior to Kahlo's disfiguring 1925 trolley accident), 128 pencil and crayon drawings, 129 illustrated prose-poems, and 230 letters to Carlos Pellicer, the Modernist poet. The collection also includes random flotsam, including a small box holding 11 taxidermied hummingbirds; pistols, such as an ornate 1870 Remington; a tricolor Mexican flag with its central white panel altered to celebrate Leon Trotsky ("Troski") and the Communist Party to which Kahlo and Diego Rivera belonged; hotel bills; photographs; receipts for sales of Rivera paintings; an embroidered huipil, a traditional Mayan blouse; and a collection of newspaper comics lovingly pasted into a scrap book. In another box lies a French medical text on amputation, describing the very procedure that was performed on one of Kahlo’s legs, painted over with blood-red pigments.

The discovery of the Kahlo archive and the subsequent publication of the book have sparked an art world controversy over the authenticity of the collection. Yet it

has been verified by those closest to the artist, including the Fridos, the students of Kahlo who lived with her and Rivera for nearly ten years. Regardless of this, the book is an intimate glimpse into a personal life where objects and papers have been carefully saved for reasons lost to us now. Levine is herself a collector of vintage scrapbooks and photos, and the book opens with her thoughtful essay exploring the poignancy of personal effects, the discarded or lost material culture of others; and how somehow when we uncover other people’s personal stuff it opens a dialog within ourselves.

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the collection is Kahlo's personal collection of recipes and menus for various occasions.  This one contains a series of entrees, each of which has been appointed a corresponding body part from one of the assumed guests: crab pincher soup for Orozco's hands; a goat soup for Trotsky's head; frog's legs for Diego's feet, and shredded pork for Kahlo's legs.  Photo courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press