The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo, by Carole Maso
reviewed by Trey Strecker

Carole Maso. Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. Counterpoint, 2003. 170 pp. $24.00.

Amid the recent resurgence of interest in Frida Kahlo, Carole Maso’s Beauty Is Convulsive offers an intimate tribute to the life and art of the Mexican painter. Maimed in a bus accident as a teenager, Kahlo began painting self-portraits during her lengthy convalescence. In her twenties she became a member of the Communist Party and married the famous muralist Diego Rivera; although they were fervently in love with one another, infidelity, illness, and infertility injured their lifelong relationship. Beauty Is Convulsive begins with the pain of Frida Kahlo, depicting the artist as a “misshapen angel,” dreaming of “the way beauty keeps coming—the way color vibrates—convulsive—drawn / to the swirling / drawn / to the light.” Through this series of devotional prose poems, Maso imagines a scintillating dialogue between two artists—Kahlo and herself—engaged in the process of “Arranging and rearranging. Outlining the shape of a woman and gently filling her in.” Maso celebrates the artist’s intense need to paint that emerges from “the spontaneous impulse of . . . feeling” and lovingly re-creates the physical eroticism of Kahlo’s creative process. Yet while Maso’s devotions express themselves in the voices of Kahlo’s letters and lovers, her doctors and her critics, the radiant, fragmentary vision of Kahlo that Maso encounters upon this “elaborate stage” of identity is inherently personal. Maso repeatedly cites Rivera’s description of Kahlo’s art as “ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.” Without a doubt, one might apply these same words to Maso’s precise and poetic prose, which brims with emotion, imagination, intelligence, and beauty.