In small, stunningly rendered self-portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself cracked open, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage, anesthetized on a hospital gurney, and weeping beside her own extracted heart. Her works are so incendiary in emotion and subject matter that one art critic suggested the walls of an exhibition be covered with asbestos.

In this beautiful book, art historian Hayden Herrera brings together numerous paintings and sketches by Kahlo, documenting each with explanatory text that probes the influences in Kahlo’s life and their meaning for her work.

Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full color paintings, as well as dozens of black and white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little-known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.”