Classic 1932 Ford sedan….
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90 Years of the ’32 Ford at the Petersen Automotive Museum - Mark Vaughn @Autoweek
90 Years of the ’32 Ford at the Petersen Automotive Museum – Mark Vaughn @Autoweek
A little over 90 years ago, on March 31, 1932, Ford brought power to the people—V8 power, which up until then could only be found in Cadillacs, Lancias, and cars like that. With the all-new 1932 Model 18, Henry Ford democratized the V8. Suddenly just about anyone could buy a powerful car that also looked good. And as soon as ’32 Fords got to be old cars, they and their flathead engines were…
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In her 1932 painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, a defiant Frida straddles an imaginary boundary between Mexico and Detroit, where she was living at the time with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The Mexican side is strewn with skulls, ruins, plants, and flowers with thick roots burrowed deep into the soil. The Detroit side contains factories, skyscrapers, and plumes of smoke—an industrial city that hides the natural cycle of life and death.
While living in Detroit, Kahlo became pregnant. She wrote of the pregnancy to her former physician, Leo Eloesser, her devoted correspondent from 1932 to 1951. She worried that pregnancy was too dangerous, that her body had been damaged by the famous streetcar accident that shattered part of her pelvis and punctured her uterus. Kahlo reported that her doctor in Detroit “gave me quinine and very strong castor oil for purge.” When the chemicals failed to end the pregnancy, her doctor declined to perform a surgical abortion, and Kahlo faced the prospect of carrying the risky pregnancy to term. She begged Eloesser to write to her doctor in Detroit, “since performing an abortion is against the law, maybe he is scared or something, and later it would be impossible to undergo such an operation.” We don’t know how Eloesser responded to Kahlo’s request, but two months later, she suffered a violent miscarriage.
In a painting she created after her experience, Henry Ford Hospital (La cama volando), Frida lies naked on a hospital bed, the sheets soaked with blood. Objects float in the space around her, attached to her stomach by umbilical cords made of red ribbon: a male fetus (her son), medical objects, and symbols like a snail and an orchid. Detroit’s stark, manufacturing skyline disturbs the background.
Regardless of her visceral distaste for Detroit and the horrible misfortune that occurred there, art historian Victor Zamudio Taylor claims it was here that “Kahlo, for the first time, consciously decides that she will paint about herself, and that she will paint the most private and painful aspects of herself.”
— From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty
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Joan Blondell and Wallace Ford for Central Park, 1932
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