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A recently unearthed audio clip featured in the 1955 pilot episode of Mexican radio show “El Bachiller” could represent the only known example of Frida Kahlo’s voice, the National Sound Library of Mexico announced this week.
According to The New York Times’ Alex Marshall and Mark A. Walsh, the recording, which likely dates to 1953 or '54, introduces its speaker as a female painter “who no longer exists”—a point in favor of the Kahlo attribution, since the artist died on July 13, 1954, shortly before the program’s release.
In the 90-second clip, the unidentified speaker reads excerpts from a Kahlo essay titled “Portrait of Diego.” In the piece, published in 1949 as part of the catalogue for a retrospective centered on husband and fellow artist, Diego Rivera, Kahlo describes the Mexican muralist as a “gigantic, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze.”
“His high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost come out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids—like a toad’s. They allow his gaze to take in a much wider visual field, as if they were built especially for a painter of large spaces and crowds,” the piece continues, per an Agence France-Presse translation quoted by the Guardian’s Steph Harmon.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Hilda Trujillo, director of the Frida Kahlo Museum, cautions that there is “still a long way to go” before the voice can be definitively identified as Kahlo’s. But Trujillo says she remains optimistic that the clip includes “enough elements to do a rigorous analysis” involving library officials, engineers, audio experts and still-living individuals who knew the great artist.
Read more: This May Be the Only Known Recording of Frida Kahlo’s Voice | Smart News | Smithsonian
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It would be really cool if it was.
According to The New York Times’ Alex Marshall and Mark A. Walsh, the recording, which likely dates to 1953 or '54, introduces its speaker as a female painter “who no longer exists”—a point in favor of the Kahlo attribution, since the artist died on July 13, 1954, shortly before the program’s release.
In the 90-second clip, the unidentified speaker reads excerpts from a Kahlo essay titled “Portrait of Diego.” In the piece, published in 1949 as part of the catalogue for a retrospective centered on husband and fellow artist, Diego Rivera, Kahlo describes the Mexican muralist as a “gigantic, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze.”
“His high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost come out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids—like a toad’s. They allow his gaze to take in a much wider visual field, as if they were built especially for a painter of large spaces and crowds,” the piece continues, per an Agence France-Presse translation quoted by the Guardian’s Steph Harmon.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Hilda Trujillo, director of the Frida Kahlo Museum, cautions that there is “still a long way to go” before the voice can be definitively identified as Kahlo’s. But Trujillo says she remains optimistic that the clip includes “enough elements to do a rigorous analysis” involving library officials, engineers, audio experts and still-living individuals who knew the great artist.
Read more: This May Be the Only Known Recording of Frida Kahlo’s Voice | Smart News | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! Give the gift of Smithsonian
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
It would be really cool if it was.
