biography the frida kahlo

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Early years and bus accident

Marriage to diego rivera and travels to the united states, first solo exhibitions.

• The Two Fridas and later works
• The Frida Kahlo Museum and posthumous reputation

Who is Frida Kahlo?

• What was Surrealism and its goal?
• What are the characteristics of Surrealism?
• How are Surrealism and Dada related?
• Which artists practiced Surrealism?

Frida Kahlo

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• Official Site of Frida Kahlo
• Jewish Women's Archive - Biography of Frida Kahlo
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Frida Kahlo
• Artnet - Biography of Frida Kahlo
• The Art Story - Frida Kahlo
• PBS - The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo
• Art in Context - Frida Kahlo - Mother of Mexican Magical Realism
• My Hero - Biography of Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Frida Kahlo - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that deal with such themes as identity, the human body, and death. Although she denied the connection, she is often identified as a Surrealist. She was also known for her tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera.

What tragic accident happened to Frida Kahlo?

In 1925 Frida Kahlo was involved in a bus accident, which so seriously injured her that she had to undergo more than 30 medical operations in her lifetime. During her slow recovery, Kahlo taught herself to paint and studied the art of the Old Masters.

When did Frida Kahlo paint Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress ?

Kahlo painted Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress, a regal waist-length portrait of herself against a dark background with roiling stylized waves, in 1926. Although the painting is fairly abstract, Kahlo’s soft modeling of her face shows her interest in realism.

Which of Frida Kahlo's paintings is displayed in the Louvre?

The Louvre acquired Frida Kahlo's work The Frame ( c. 1938), making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to be included in the museum’s collection.

When was the Frida Kahlo Museum established?

After Kahlo’s death in 1954, Diego Rivera had redesigned Frida Kahlo's childhood home, La Casa Azul (“the Blue House”), in Coyoacán, as a museum dedicated to her life. The Frida Kahlo Museum opened to the public in 1958, a year after Rivera’s death.

Frida Kahlo (born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán , Mexico—died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán) was a Mexican painter best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that deal with such themes as identity, the human body , and death. Although she denied the connection, she is often identified as a Surrealist . In addition to her work, Kahlo was known for her tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera (married 1929, divorced 1939, remarried 1940).

Kahlo was born to a German father of Hungarian descent and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Native American descent. Later, during her artistic career, Kahlo explored her identity by frequently depicting her ancestry as binary opposites: the colonial European side and the indigenous Mexican side. As a child, she suffered a bout of polio that left her with a slight limp, a chronic ailment she would endure throughout her life. Kahlo was especially close to her father, who was a professional photographer, and she frequently assisted him in his studio, where she acquired a sharp eye for detail. Although Kahlo took some drawing classes, she was more interested in science , and in 1922 she entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City with an interest in eventually studying medicine. While there she met Rivera, who was working on a mural for the school’s auditorium.

In 1925 Kahlo was involved in a bus accident, which so seriously injured her that she had to undergo more than 30 medical operations in her lifetime. During her slow recovery, Kahlo taught herself to paint, and she read frequently, studying the art of the Old Masters. In one of her early paintings, Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress (1926), Kahlo painted a regal waist-length portrait of herself against a dark background with roiling stylized waves. Although the painting is fairly abstract, Kahlo’s soft modeling of her face shows her interest in naturalism. The stoic gaze so prevalent in her later art is already evident, and the exaggeratedly long neck and fingers reveal her interest in the Mannerist painter Il Bronzino . After her convalescence, Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), where she met Rivera once again. She showed him some of her work, and he encouraged her to continue to paint.

Soon after marrying Rivera in 1929, Kahlo changed her personal and painting style. She began to wear the traditional Tehuana dress that became her trademark. It consisted of a flowered headdress, a loose blouse, gold jewelry, and a long ruffled skirt. Her painting Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) shows not only her new attire but also her new interest in Mexican folk art . The subjects are flatter and more abstract than those in her previous work. The towering Rivera stands to the left, holding a palette and brushes, the objects of his profession. He appears as an important artist, while Kahlo, who is petite and demure beside him, with her hand in his and painted with darker skin than in her earlier work, conveys the role she presumed he wanted: a traditional Mexican wife.

Kahlo painted that work while traveling in the United States (1930–33) with Rivera, who had received commissions for murals from several cities. During this time, she endured a couple of difficult pregnancies that ended prematurely. After suffering a miscarriage in Detroit and later the death of her mother, Kahlo painted some of her most-harrowing works. In Henry Ford Hospital (1932) Kahlo depicted herself hemorrhaging on a hospital bed amid a barren landscape, and in My Birth (1932) she painted a rather taboo scene of a shrouded woman giving birth.

In 1933 Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico , where they lived in a newly constructed house comprising separate individual spaces joined by a bridge. The residence became a gathering spot for artists and political activists, and the couple hosted the likes of Leon Trotsky and André Breton , a leading Surrealist who championed Kahlo’s work. Breton wrote the introduction to the brochure for her first solo exhibition, describing her as a self-taught Surrealist. The exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, and it was a great success. The following year Kahlo traveled to Paris to show her work. There she met more Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp , the only member she reportedly respected. The Louvre also acquired one of her works, The Frame (c. 1938), making Kahlo the first 20th-century Mexican artist to be included in the museum’s collection.

Frida Kahlo

Mexican Painter

Summary of Frida Kahlo

Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological overflow. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists (including Albrecht Dürer , Francisco Goya , and Edvard Munch ), but had not yet been significantly dissected by a woman. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. By literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help explain human behaviors on the outside. She gathered together motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn created a new and articulate means to discuss the most complex aspects of female identity. As not only a 'great artist' but also a figure worthy of our devotion, Kahlo's iconic face provides everlasting trauma support and she has influence that cannot be underestimated.

Accomplishments

• Kahlo made it legitimate for women to outwardly display their pains and frustrations and to thus make steps towards understanding them. It became crucial for women artists to have a female role model and this is the gift of Frida Kahlo.
• As an important question for many Surrealists , Kahlo too considers: What is Woman? Following repeated miscarriages, she asks: to what extent does motherhood or its absence impact on female identity? She irreversibly alters the meaning of maternal subjectivity. It becomes clear through umbilical symbolism (often shown by ribbons) that Kahlo is connected to all that surrounds her, and that she is a 'mother' without children.
• Finding herself often alone, she worked obsessively with self-portraiture. Her reflection fueled an unflinching interest in identity. She was particularly interested in her mixed German-Mexican ancestry, as well as in her divided roles as artist, lover, and wife.
• Kahlo uses religious symbolism throughout her oeuvre . She appears as the Madonna holding her 'animal babies', and becomes the Virgin Mary as she cradles her husband and famous national painter Diego Rivera . She identifies with Saint Sebastian, and even fittingly appears as the martyred Christ. She positions herself as a prophet when she takes to the head of the table in her Last Supper -style painting, and her depiction of the accident which left her impaled on a metal bar (and covered in gold dust when lying injured) recalls the crucifixion and suggests her own holiness.
• Women prior to Kahlo who had attempted to communicate the wildest and deepest of emotions were often labeled hysterical or condemned insane - while men were aligned with the 'melancholy' character type. By remaining artistically active under the weight of sadness, Kahlo revealed that women too can be melancholy rather than depressed, and that these terms should not be thought of as gendered.

The Life of Frida Kahlo

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone... because I am the subject I know best." From battles with her mind and her body, Kahlo lived through her art.

Important Art by Frida Kahlo

Frieda and Diego Rivera

It is as if in this painting Kahlo tries on the role of wife to see how it fits. She does not focus on her identity as a painter, but instead adopts a passive and supportive role, holding the hand of her talented and acclaimed husband. It was indeed the case that during the majority of her painting career, Kahlo was viewed only in Rivera's shadow and it was not until later in life that she gained international recognition. This early double-portrait was painted primarily to mark the celebration of Kahlo's marriage to Rivera. Whilst Rivera holds a palette and paint brushes, symbolic of his artistic mastery, Kahlo limits her role to his wife by presenting herself slight in frame and without her artistic accoutrements. Kahlo furthermore dresses in costume typical of the Mexican woman, or "La Mexicana," wearing a traditional red shawl known as the rebozo and jade Aztec beads. The positioning of the figures echoes that of traditional marital portraiture where the wife is placed on her husband's left to indicate her lesser moral status as a woman. In a drawing made the following year called Frida and the Miscarriage , the artist does hold her own palette, as though the experience of losing a fetus and not being able to create a baby shifts her determination wholly to the creation of art.

Oil on canvas - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Henry Ford Hospital

Many of Kahlo's paintings from the early 1930s, especially in size, format, architectural setting and spatial arrangement, relate to religious ex-voto paintings of which she and Rivera possessed a large collection ranging in date over several centuries. Ex-votos are made as a gesture of gratitude for salvation, a granted prayer or disaster averted and left in churches or at shrines. Ex-votos are generally painted on small-scale metal panels and depict the incident along with the Virgin or saint to whom they are offered. Henry Ford Hospital , is a good example where the artist uses the ex-voto format but subverts it by placing herself centre stage, rather than recording the miraculous deeds of saints. Kahlo instead paints her own story, as though she becomes saintly and the work is made not as thanks to the lord but in defiance, questioning why he brings her pain. In this painting, Kahlo lies on a bed, bleeding after a miscarriage. From the exposed naked body six vein-like ribbons flow outwards, attached to symbols. One of these six objects is a fetus, suggesting that the ribbons could be a metaphor for umbilical cords. The other five objects that surround Frida are things that she remembers, or things that she had seen in the hospital. For example, the snail makes reference to the time it took for the miscarriage to be over, whilst the flower was an actual physical object given to her by Diego. The artist demonstrates her need to be attached to all that surrounds her: to the mundane and metaphorical as much as the physical and actual. Perhaps it is through this reaching out of connectivity that the artist tries to be 'maternal', even though she is not able to have her own child.

Oil on canvas - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a haunting painting in which both the birth giver and the birthed child seem dead. The head of the woman giving birth is shrouded in white cloth while the baby emerging from the womb appears lifeless. At the time that Kahlo painted this work, her mother had just died so it seems reasonable to assume that the shrouded funerary figure is her mother while the baby is Kahlo herself (the title supports this reading). However, Kahlo had also just lost her own child and has said that she is the covered mother figure. The Virgin of Sorrows , who hangs above the bed suggests that this is an image that overflows with maternal pain and suffering. Also though, and revealingly, Kahlo wrote in her diary, next to several small drawings of herself, 'the one who gave birth to herself ... who wrote the most wonderful poem of her life.' Similar to the drawing, Frida and the Miscarriage , My Birth represents Kahlo mourning for the loss of a child, but also finding the strength to make powerful art because of such trauma. The painting is made in a retablo (or votive) style (a small traditional Mexican painting derived from Catholic Church art) in which thanks would typically be given to the Madonna beneath the image. Kahlo instead leaves this section blank, as though she finds herself unable to give thanks either for her own birth, or for the fact that she is now unable to give birth. The painting seems to bring the message that it is important to acknowledge that birth and death live very closely together. Many believe that My Birth was heavily inspired by an Aztec sculpture that Kahlo had at home representing Tiazolteotl, the Goddess of fertility and midwives.

Oil and tempera on zinc - Private Collection

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)

This dream-like family tree was painted on zinc rather than canvas, a choice that further highlights the artist's fascination with and collection of 18 th -century and 19 th -century Mexican retablos. Kahlo completed this work to accentuate both her European Jewish heritage and her Mexican background. Her paternal side, German Jewish, occupies the right side of the composition symbolized by the sea (acknowledging her father's voyage to get to Mexico), while her maternal side of Mexican descent is represented on the left by a map faintly outlining the topography of Mexico. While Kahlo's paintings are assertively autobiographical, she often used them to communicate transgressive or political messages: this painting was completed shortly after Adolf Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws banning interracial marriage. Here, Kahlo simultaneously affirms her mixed heritage to confront Nazi ideology, using a format - the genealogical chart - employed by the Nazi party to determine racial purity. Beyond politics, the red ribbon used to link the family members echoes the umbilical cord that connects baby Kahlo to her mother - a motif that recurs throughout Kahlo's oeuvre .

Oil and tempera on zinc - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fulang-Chang and I

This painting debuted at Kahlo's exhibition in Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1938, and was one of the works that most fascinated André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. The canvas in the New York show is a self-portrait of the artist and her spider monkey, Fulang-Chang, a symbol employed as a surrogate for the children that she and Rivera could not have. The arrangement of figures in the portrait signals the artist's interest in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child. After the New York exhibition, a second frame containing a mirror was added. The later inclusion of the mirror is a gesture inviting the viewer into the work: it was through looking at herself intensely in a mirror in her months spent at home after her bus accident that Kahlo first began painting portraits and delving deeper into her psyche. The inclusion of the mirror, considered from this perspective, is a remarkably intimate vision into both the artist's aesthetic process and into her personal introspection. In many of Kahlo's self-portraits, she is accompanied by monkeys, dogs, and parrots, all of which she kept as pets. Since the Middle Ages, small spider monkeys, like those kept by Kahlo, have been said to symbolize the devil, heresy, and paganism, finally coming to represent the fall of man, vice, and the embodiment of lust. These monkeys were depicted in the past as a cautionary symbol against the dangers of excessive love and the base instincts of man. Kahlo again depicts herself with her monkey in both 1939 and 1940. In a later version in 1945, Kahlo paints her monkey and also her dog, Xolotl. This little dog that often accompanies the artist, is named after a mythological Aztec god, known to represent lightning and death, and also to be the twin of Quetzalcoatl, both of who had visited the underworld. All of these pictures, including Fulang-Chang and I include 'umbilical' ribbons that wrap between Kahlo's and the animal's necks. Kahlo is the Madonna and her pets become the holy (yet darkly symbolic) infant for which she longs.

In two parts, oil on composition board (1937) with painted mirror frame (added after 1939) - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

What the Water Gave Me

In this painting most of Kahlo's body is obscured from view. We are unusually confronted with the foot and plug end of the bath, and with focus placed on the artist's feet. Furthermore, Kahlo adopts a birds-eye view and looks down on the water from above. Within the water, Kahlo paints an alternative self-portrait, one in which the more traditional facial portrait has been replaced by an array of symbols and recurring motifs. The artist includes portraits of her parents, a traditional Tehuana dress, a perforated shell, a dead humming bird, two female lovers, a skeleton, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship set sail, and a woman drowning. This painting was featured in Breton's 1938 book on Surrealism and Painting and Hayden Herrera, in her biography of Kahlo, mentions that the artist herself considered this work to have a special importance. Recalling the tapestry style painting of Northern Renaissance masters, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the figures and objects floating in the water of Kahlo's painting create an at once fantastic and real landscape of memory. Kahlo discussed What the Water Gave Me with the Manhattan gallery owner Julien Levy, and suggested that it was a sad piece that mourned the loss of her childhood. Perhaps the strangled figure at the centre is representative of the inner emotional torments experienced by Kahlo herself. It is clear from the conversation that the artist had with Levy, that Kahlo was aware of the philosophical implications of her work. In an interview with Herrera, Levy recalls, in 'a long philosophical discourse, Kahlo talked about the perspective of herself that is shown in this painting'. He further relays that 'her idea was about the image of yourself that you have because you do not see your head. The head is something that is looking, but is not seen. It is what one carries around to look at life with.' The artist's head in What the Water Gave Me is thus appropriately replaced by the interior thoughts that occupy her mind. As well as an inclusion of death by strangulation in the centre of the water, there is also a labia-like flower and a cluster of pubic hair painted between Kahlo's legs. The work is quite sexual while also showing preoccupation with destruction and death. The motif of the bathtub in art is one that has been popular since Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793), and was later taken up many different personalities such as Francesca Woodman and Tracey Emin.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

The Two Fridas

This double self-portrait is one of Kahlo's most recognized compositions, and is symbolic of the artist's emotional pain experienced during her divorce from Rivera. On the left, the artist is shown in modern European attire, wearing the costume from her marriage to Rivera. Throughout their marriage, given Rivera's strong nationalism, Kahlo became increasingly interested in indigenism and began to explore traditional Mexican costume, which she wears in the portrait on the right. It is the Mexican Kahlo that holds a locket with an image of Rivera. The stormy sky in the background, and the artist's bleeding heart - a fundamental symbol of Catholicism and also symbolic of Aztec ritual sacrifice - accentuate Kahlo's personal tribulation and physical pain. Symbolic elements frequently possess multiple layers of meaning in Kahlo's pictures; the recurrent theme of blood represents both metaphysical and physical suffering, gesturing also to the artist's ambivalent attitude toward accepted notions of womanhood and fertility. Although both women have their hearts exposed, the woman in the white European outfit also seems to have had her heart dissected and the artery that runs from this heart is cut and bleeding. The artery that runs from the heart of her Tehuana-costumed self remains intact because it is connected to the miniature photograph of Diego as a child. Whereas Kahlo's heart in the Mexican dress remains sustained, the European Kahlo, disconnected from her beloved Diego, bleeds profusely onto her dress. As well as being one of the artist's most famous works, this is also her largest canvas.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

This self-portrait shows Kahlo as an androgynous figure. Scholars have seen this gesture as a confrontational response to Rivera's demand for a divorce, revealing the artist's injured sense of female pride and her self-punishment for the failures of her marriage. Her masculine attire also reminds the viewer of early family photographs in which Kahlo chose to wear a suit. The cropped hair also presents a nuanced expression of the artist's identity. She holds one cut braid in her left hand while many strands of hair lie scattered on the floor. The act of cutting a braid symbolizes a rejection of girlhood and innocence, but equally can be seen as the severance of a connective cord (maybe umbilical) that binds two people or two ways of life. Either way, braids were a central element in Kahlo's identity as the traditional La Mexicana , and in the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects some aspect of her former identity. The hair strewn about the floor echoes an earlier self-portrait painted as the Mexican folkloric figure La Llorona , here ridding herself of these female attributes. Kahlo clutches a pair of scissors, as the discarded strands of hair become animated around her feet; the tresses appear to have a life of their own as they curl across the floor and around the legs of her chair. Above her sorrowful scene, Kahlo inscribed the lyrics and music of a song that declares cruelly, "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are hairless, I don't love you anymore," confirming Kahlo's own denunciation and rejection of her female roles. In likely homage to Kahlo's painting, Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus photographed Wedding Portraits in 1997. On the occasion of her marriage, Brotherus cuts her hair, the remains of which her new husband holds in his hands. The act of cutting one's hair symbolic of a moment of change happens in the work of other female artists too, including that of Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

The frontal position and outward stare of Kahlo in this self-portrait directly confronts and engages the viewer. The artist wears Christ's unraveled crown of thorns as a necklace that digs into her neck, signifying her self-representation as a Christian martyr and the enduring pain experienced following her failed marriage. A dead hummingbird, a symbol in Mexican folkloric tradition of luck charms for falling in love, hangs in the center of her necklace. A black cat - symbolic of bad luck and death - crouches behind her left shoulder, and a spider monkey gifted from Rivera, symbolic of evil, is included to her right. Kahlo frequently employed flora and fauna in the background of her bust-length portraits to create a tight, claustrophobic space, using the symbolic element of nature to simultaneously compare and contrast the link between female fertility with the barren and deathly imagery of the foreground. Typically a symbol of good fortune, the meaning of a 'dead' hummingbird is to be reversed. Kahlo, who craves flight, is perturbed and disturbed by the fact that the butterflies in her hair are too delicate to travel far and that the dead bird around her neck, has become an anchor, preyed upon by the nearby cat. In failing to directly translate complex inner feelings it as though the painting illustrates the artist's frustrations.

Oil on canvas on masonite - Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The Broken Column

The Broken Column is a particularly pertinent example of the combination of Kahlo's emotional and physical pain. The artist's biographer, Hayden Herrera, writes of this painting, 'A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her in two. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida's feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart'. A broken ionic column replaces the artist's crumbling spine and sharp metal nails pierce her body. The hard coldness of this inserted column recalls the steel rod that pierced the artist's abdomen and uterus during her streetcar accident. More generally, the architectural feature now in ruins, has associations of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female body. Beyond its physical dimensions, the cloth wrapped around Kahlo's pelvis, recalls Christ's loincloth. Indeed, Kahlo again displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; through identification with Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of spiritual suffering. Tears dot the artist's face as they do many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico; her eyes stare out beyond the painting as though renouncing the flesh and summoning the spirit. It is as a result of depictions like this one that Kahlo is now considered a Magic Realist. Her eyes are never-changing, realistic, while the rest of the painting is highly fantastical. The painting is not overly concerned with the workings of the subconscious or with irrational juxtapositions that feature more typically in Surrealist works. The Magic Realism movement was extremely popular in Latin America (especially with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez), and Kahlo has been retrospectively included in it by art historians. The notion of being wounded in the way that we see illustrated in The Broken Column , is referred to in Spanish as chingada . This word embodies numerous interrelated meanings and concepts, which include to be wounded, broken, torn open or deceived. The word derives from the verb for penetration and implies domination of the female by the male. It refers to the status of victimhood. The painting also likely inspired a performance and sculptural piece made by Rebecca Horn in 1970 called Unicorn . In the piece Horn walks naked through an arable field with her body strapped in a fabric corset that appears almost identical to that worn by Kahlo in The Broken Column . In the piece by the German performance artist, however, the erect, sky-reaching pillar is fixed to her head rather than inserted into her chest. The performance has an air of mythology and religiosity similar to that of Kahlo's painting, but the column is whole and strong again, perhaps paying homage to Kahlo's fortitude and artistic triumph.

Oil on masonite - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

The Wounded Deer

The 1946 painting, The Wounded Deer , further extends both the notion of chingada and the Saint Sebastian motif already explored in The Broken Column . As a hybrid between a deer and a woman, the innocent Kahlo is wounded and bleeding, preyed upon and hunted down in a clearing in the forest. Staring directly at the viewer, the artist confirms that she is alive, and yet the arrows will slowly kill her. The artist wears a pearl earring, as though highlighting the tension that she feels between her social existence and the desire to exist more freely alongside nature. Kahlo does not portray herself as a delicate and gentle fawn; she is instead a full-bodied stag with large antlers and drooping testicles. Not only does this suggest, like her suited appearance in early family photographs, that Kahlo is interested in combining the sexes to create an androgyne, but also shows that she attempted to align herself with the other great artists of the past, most of whom had been men. The branch beneath the stag's feet is reminiscent of the palm branches that onlookers laid under the feet of Jesus as he arrived in Jerusalem. Kahlo continued to identify with the religious figure of Saint Sebastian from this point until her death. In 1953, she completed a drawing of herself in which eleven arrows pierce her skin. Similarly, the artist Louise Bourgeois, also interested in the visualization of pain, used Saint Sebastian as a recurring symbol in her art. She first depicted the motif in 1947 as an abstracted series of forms, barely distinguishable as a human figure; drawn using watercolor and pencil on pink paper, but then later made obvious pink fabric sculptures of the saint, stuck with arrows, she like Kahlo feeling under attack and afraid.

Oil on masonite - Private Collection

Weeping Coconuts (Cocos gimientes)

This still life is exemplary of Kahlo's late work. More frequently associated with her psychological portraiture, Kahlo in fact painted still lifes throughout her career. She depicted fresh fruit and vegetable produce and objects native to Mexico, painting many small-scale still lifes, especially as she grew progressively ill. The anthropomorphism of the fruit in this composition is symbolic of Kahlo's projection of pain into all things as her health deteriorated at the end of her life. In contrast with the tradition of the cornucopia signifying plentiful and fruitful life, here the coconuts are literally weeping, alluding to the dualism of life and death. A small Mexican flag bearing the affectionate and personal inscription "Painted with all the love. Frida Kahlo" is stuck into a prickly pear, signaling Kahlo's use of the fruit as an emblem of personal expression, and communicating her deep respect for all of nature's gifts. During this period, the artist was heavily reliant on drugs and alcohol to alleviate her pain, so albeit beautiful, her still lifes became progressively less detailed between 1951 and 1953.

Oil on board - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacan, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was German, and had moved to Mexico at a young age where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking over the photography business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry, and raised Frida and her three sisters in a strict and religious household (Frida also had two half sisters from her father's first marriage who were raised in a convent). La Casa Azul was not only Kahlo's childhood home, but also the place that she returned to live and work from 1939 until her death. It later opened as the Frida Kahlo Museum.

Aside from her mother's rigidity, religious fanaticism, and tendency toward outbursts, several other events in Kahlo's childhood affected her deeply. At age six, Kahlo contracted polio; a long recovery isolated her from other children and permanently damaged one of her legs, causing her to walk with a limp after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very close, and particularly so after the experience of being an invalid, enrolled his daughter at the German College in Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer. All of Kahlo's sisters instead attended a convent school so it seems that there was a thirst for expansive learning noted in Frida that resulted in her father making different decisions especially for her. Kahlo was grateful for this and despite a strained relationship with her mother, always credited her father with great tenderness and insight. Still, she was interested in both strands of her roots, and her mixed European and Mexican heritage provided life-long fascination in her approach towards both life and art.

Kahlo had a horrible experience at the German School where she was sexually abused and thus forced to leave. Luckily at the time, the Mexican Revolution and the Minister of Education had changed the education policy, and from 1922 girls were admitted to the National Preparatory School. Kahlo was one of the first 35 girls admitted and she began to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. She excelled academically, became very interested in Mexican culture, and also became active politically.

Early Training

When Kahlo was 15, Diego Rivera (already a renowned artist) was painting the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater of her Preparatory School. Upon seeing him work, Kahlo experienced a moment of infatuation and fascination that she would go on to fully explore later in life. Meanwhile she enjoyed helping her father in his photography studio and received drawing instruction from her father's friend, Fernando Fernandez - for whom she was an apprentice engraver. At this time Kahlo also befriended a dissident group of students known as the "Cachuchas", who confirmed the young artist's rebellious spirit and further encouraged her interest in literature and politics. In 1923 Kahlo fell in love with a fellow member of the group, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and the two remained romantically involved until 1928. Sadly, in 1925 together with Alejandro (who survived unharmed) on their way home from school, Kahlo was involved in a near-fatal bus accident.

Kahlo suffered multiple fractures throughout her body, including a crushed pelvis, and a metal rod impaled her womb. She spent one month in the hospital immobile, and bound in a plaster corset, and following this period, many more months bedridden at home. During her long recovery she began to experiment in small-scale autobiographical portraiture, henceforth abandoning her medical pursuits due to practical circumstances and turning her focus to art.

During the months of convalescence at home Kahlo's parents made her a special easel, gave her a set of paints, and placed a mirror above her head so that she could see her own reflection and make self-portraits. Kahlo spent hours confronting existential questions raised by her trauma including a feeling of dissociation from her identity, a growing interiority, and a general closeness to death. She drew upon the acute pictorial realism known from her father's photographic portraits (which she greatly admired) and approached her own early portraits (mostly of herself, her sisters, and her school friends) with the same psychological intensity. At the time, Kahlo seriously considered becoming a medical illustrator during this period as she saw this as a way to marry her interests in science and art.

By 1927, Kahlo was well enough to leave her bedroom and thus re-kindled her relationship with the Cachuchas group, which was by this point all the more political. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and began to familiarize herself with the artistic and political circles in Mexico City. She became close friends with the photojournalist Tina Modotti and Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It was in June 1928, at one of Modotti's many parties, that Kahlo was personally introduced to Diego Rivera who was already one of Mexico's most famous artists and a highly influential member of the PCM. Soon after, Kahlo boldly asked him to decide, upon looking at one of her portraits, if her work was worthy of pursuing a career as an artist. He was utterly impressed by the honesty and originality of her painting and assured her of her talents. Despite the fact that Rivera had already been married twice, and was known to have an insatiable fondness for women, the two quickly began a romantic relationship and were married in 1929. According to Kahlo's mother, who outwardly expressed her dissatisfaction with the match, the couple were 'the elephant and the dove'. Her father however, unconditionally supported his daughter and was happy to know that Rivera had the financial means to help with Kahlo's medical bills. The new couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos where Kahlo devoted herself entirely to painting.

Mature Period

By the early 1930s, Kahlo's painting had evolved to include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity, a facet of her artwork that had stemmed from her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and from her interest in preserving the revival of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe. Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her German roots is evidenced in her name change from Frieda to Frida, and furthermore in her decision to wear traditional Tehuana costume (the dress from earlier matriarchal times). At the time, two failed pregnancies augmented Kahlo's simultaneously harsh and beautiful representation of the specifically female experience through symbolism and autobiography.

During the first few years of the 1930s Kahlo and Rivera lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York whilst Rivera was creating various murals. Kahlo also completed some seminal works including Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States (1932) with the latter expressing her observations of rivalry taking place between nature and industry in the two lands. It was during this time that Kahlo met and became friends with Imogen Cunningham , Ansel Adams , and Edward Weston . She also met Dr. Leo Eloesser while in San Francisco, the surgeon who would become her closest medical advisor until her death.

Soon after the unveiling of a large and controversial mural that Rivera had made for the Rockefeller Centre in New York (1933), the couple returned to Mexico as Kahlo was feeling particularly homesick. They moved into a new house in the wealthy neighborhood of San Angel. The house was made up of two separate parts joined by a bridge. This set up was appropriate as their relationship was undergoing immense strain. Kahlo had numerous health issues while Rivera, although he had been previously unfaithful, at this time had an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina which understandably hurt Kahlo more than her husband's other infidelities. Kahlo too started to have her own extramarital affairs at this point. Not long after returning to Mexico from the States, she met the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was on holiday in Mexico. The two began an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted 10 years, and it is Muray who is credited as the man who captured Kahlo most colorfully on camera.

While briefly separated from Diego following the affair with her sister and living in her own flat away from San Angel, Kahlo also had a short affair with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi . The two highly politically and socially conscious artists remained friends until Kahlo's death.

In 1936, Kahlo joined the Fourth International (a Communist organization) and often used La Casa Azul as a meeting point for international intellectuals, artists, and activists. She also offered the house where the exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, could take up residence once they were granted asylum in Mexico. In 1937, as well as helping Trotsky, Kahlo and the political icon embarked on a short love affair. Trotsky and his wife remained in La Casa Azul until mid-1939.

During a visit to Mexico City in 1938, the founder of Surrealism , André Breton , was enchanted with Kahlo's painting, and wrote to his friend and art dealer, Julien Levy , who quickly invited Kahlo to hold her first solo show at his gallery in New York. This time round, Kahlo traveled to the States without Rivera and upon arrival caused a huge media sensation. People were attracted to her colorful and exotic (but actually traditional) Mexican costumes and her exhibition was a success. Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the notable guests to attend Kahlo's opening. Kahlo enjoyed some months socializing in New York and then sailed to Paris in early 1939 to exhibit with the Surrealists there. That exhibition was not as successful and she became quickly tired of the over-intellectualism of the Surrealist group. Kahlo returned to New York hoping to continue her love affair with Muray, but he broke off the relationship as he had recently met somebody else. Thus Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City and upon her return Rivera requested a divorce.

Later Years and Death

Following her divorce, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul. She moved away from her smaller paintings and began to work on much larger canvases. In 1940 Kahlo and Rivera remarried and their relationship became less turbulent as Kahlo's health deteriorated. Between the years of 1940-1956, the suffering artist often had to wear supportive back corsets to help her spinal problems, she also had an infectious skin condition, along with syphilis. When her father died in 1941, this exacerbated both her depression and her health. She again was often housebound and found simple pleasure in surrounding herself by animals and in tending to the garden at La Casa Azul.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1940s, Kahlo's work grew in notoriety and acclaim from international collectors, and was included in several group shows both in the United States and in Mexico. In 1943, her work was included in Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York. In this same year, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at a painting school in Mexico City (the school known as La Esmeralda ), and acquired some highly devoted students with whom she undertook some mural commissions. She struggled to continue making a living from her art, never accommodating to clients' wishes if she did not like them, but luckily received a national prize for her painting Moses (1945) and then The Two Fridas painting was bought by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. Meanwhile, the artist grew progressively ill. She had a complicated operation to try and straighten her spine, but it failed and from 1950 onwards, she was often confined to a wheelchair.

She continued to paint relatively prolifically in her final years while also maintaining her political activism, and protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, her first and only solo show in Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed following on the back of a truck. The bed was then placed in the center of the gallery so that she could lie there for the duration of the opening. Kahlo died in 1954 at La Casa Azul. While the official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism, questions have been raised about suicide - either deliberate of accidental. She was 47 years old.

The Legacy of Frida Kahlo

As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with Primitivism , Indigenism , Magic Realism , and Surrealism . Posthumously, Kahlo's artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon. The artist's celebrity status for mass audiences has at times resulted in the compartmentalization of the artist's work as representative of interwar Latin American artwork at large, distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's deeply personal subject matter. Recent exhibitions, such as Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago have attempted to reframe Kahlo's cultural significance by underscoring her lasting impact on the politics of the body and Kahlo's challenge to mainstream aesthetics of representation. Dreamers Awake (2017) held at The White Cube Gallery in London further illustrated the huge influence that Frida Kahlo and a handful of other early female Surrealists have had on the development and progression of female art.

The legacy of Kahlo cannot be underestimated or exaggerated. Not only is it likely that every female artist making art since the 1950s will quote her as an influence, but it is not only artists and those who are interested in art that she inspires. Her art also supports people who suffer as result of accident, as result of miscarriage, and as result of failed marriage. Through imagery, Kahlo articulated experiences so complex, making them more manageable and giving viewers hope that they can endure, recover, and start again.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Frida Kahlo

• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo: Her Photos By Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
• Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up Our Pick By Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa
• Frida Kahlo at Home Our Pick By Suzanne Barbezat
• Frida Kahlo: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series) By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo I Paint My Reality By Christina Burrus
• Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life By Cateherine Reef
• The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait Our Pick By Carlos Fuentes
• Frida by Frida By Frida Kahlo and Raquel Tibol
• Frida Kahlo: The Paintings Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo By Emma Dexter, Tanya Barson
• Frida Kahlo Retrospective By Peter von Becker, Ingried Brugger, Salamon Grimberg, Cristina Kahlo, Arnaldo Kraus, Helga Prignitz-Poda, Francisco Reyes Palma, Florian Steininger, Jeanette Zqingenberger
• Frida Kahlo Masterpieces of Art By Julian Beecroft
• Kahlo (Basic Art Series 2.0) Our Pick By Andrea Kettenmann
• Frida Kahlo's Gadren Our Pick By Adriana Zavala
• The Museum of Modern Art: Discussion of Portrait with Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo: The woman behind the legend - TED_Ed
• Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas” - Great Art Explained Our Pick
• Frida Kahlo: Life of an Artist - Art History School Our Pick
• A Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House – La Casa Azul
• La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick The artist's house museum
• Works from La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick By The Google Cultural Institute
• Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern Website of the 2005 Exhibition
• Why Contemporary Art Is Unimaginable Without Frida Kahlo By Priscilla Frank / The Huffington Post / April 29, 2014
• Diary of a Mad Artist By Amy Fine Collins / Vanity Fair / July 2011
• The People's Artist, Herself a Work of Art Our Pick By Holland Cotter / The New York Times / February 29, 2008
• Let Fridamania Commence By Adrian Searle / The Guardian / June 6, 2005
• The Trouble with Frida Kahlo By Stephanie Mencimer / Washington Monthly / June 2002
• Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading Our Pick By Liza Bakewell / Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies / 1993
• Frida Kahlo: Portrait of Chronic Pain By Carol A. Courtney, Michael A. O'Hearn, and Carla C. Franck / Physical Therapy / January 2017
• Medical Imagery in the Art of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By David Lomas, Rosemary Howell / British Medical Journal / December 1989
• Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in “Gringolandia" Our Pick By Rebecca Block and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep / Women’s Art Journal / 1999
• Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A Comparison of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices By Elizabeth Garber / Art Education / March 1992
• NPR: Mexican Artist Used Politics to Rock the Boat Artist Judy Chicago discusses the book she co-authored: "Frida Kahlo: Face to Face"
• Frida Our Pick A 2002 Biographical Film on Frida Kahlo, Starring Salma Hayek
• The Frida Kahlo Corporation A Company with Products Inspired by Frida Kahlo
• How Frida Kahlo Became a Global Brand By Tess Thackara / Artsy.com / Dec 19, 2017 /

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Content compiled and written by Katlyn Beaver

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

- Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo and her paintings

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.

Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera , who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

The devastation to her body from the bus accident is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column . Kahlo is depicted nearly naked, split down the middle, with her spine presented as a broken decorative column. Her skin is dotted with nails. She is also fitted with a surgical brace.

Kahlo's first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress in 1926. It was painted in the style of 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who themselves were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. She also sometimes drew from the Mexican painters in her use of a background of tied-back drapes. Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1929), Portrait of a Woman in White (1930) and Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) all bear this background.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

In her second-self portrait, "Time Flies," Kahlo uses a folk style and vibrant colors. She wears peasant clothing, and the red, white and green in the painting are the colors of the Mexican flag.

During her life, self portrait is a subject that Frida Kahlo always returns to, as artists have always returned to their beloved themes - Rembrandt his Self Portrait , Vincent van Gogh his Sunflowers , and Claude Monet his Water Lilies .

Frida and Diego: Love and Pain

Kahlo and Rivera had a tumultuous relationship, marked by multiple affairs on both sides. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo is depicted in a man's suit, holding a pair of scissors, with her fallen hair around the chair in which she sits. This represents the times she would cut the hair Rivera loved when he had affairs.

The 1937 painting Memory, the Heart , shows Kahlo's pain over her husband's affair with her younger sister Christina. A large broken heart at her feet shows the intensity of Kahlo's anguish. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, but reunited a year later and remarried. The Two Fridas (1939) depicts Kahlo twice, shortly after the divorce. One Frida wears a costume from the Tehuana region of Mexico, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a European dress as the woman who Diego betrayed and rejected. Later, she is back in Tehuana dress in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) and Self Portrait (1948).

Pre-Columbian artifacts were common both in the Kahlo/Rivera home (Diego collected sculptures and idols, and Frida collected Jewelry) and in Kahlo's paintings. She wore jewelry from this period in Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1926), Self-Portrait With Monkey (1938) and Self-Portrait With Braid (1941), among others. Other Pre-Columbian artifacts are found in The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City (1938), Girl With Death Mask (1938) and Self-Portrait With Small Monkeys (1945).

My painting carries with it the message of pain." - Frida Kahlo

Surreal or Realist?

Frida Kahlo participated in the "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in 1940 at the Galeria de Arte, Mexicano. There, she exhibited her two largest paintings: The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table (1940). Surrealist Andrew Breton considered Kahlo a surrealistic, a label Kahlo rejected, saying she just painted her reality. However, In 1945, when Don Jose Domingo Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read the book Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud - whose psychoanalysis works Surrealism is based on - and paint her understanding and interpretation of this book. Frida Kahlo painted Moses , and this painting was recognized as second prize at the annual art exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime, although she painted occasional portraits on commission. She had only one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, just a year before her death at the age of 47.

Today, her works sell for very high prices. In May 2006, Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Roots , was sold for $5.62 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York, sets a record as the most expensive Latin American work ever purchased at auction, and also makes Frida Kahlo one of the highest-selling woman in art.

Widely known for her Marxist leanings, Frida, along with Marxism Revolutionary Che Guevara and a small band of contemporary figures, has become a countercultural symbol of the 20th century, and created a legacy in art history that continues to inspire the imagination and mind. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahlo achieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far beyond Mexico's borders, although nothing like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her indelible image recognizable everywhere.

At the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, her personal belongings are on display throughout the house, as if she still lived there. Kahlo was born and grew up in this building, whose cobalt walls gave way to the nickname of the Blue House. She lived there with her husband for some years, and she died there. The facility is the most popular museum in the Coyoacan neighborhood and among the most visited in Mexico City.

The Two Fridas

Self-portrait with thorn necklace & hummingbird, viva la vida, watermelons, the wounded deer, self portrait with monkeys, without hope, me and my parrots, what the water gave me, frida and diego rivera, the wounded table, diego and i, my dress hangs there, henry ford hospital, self portrait as a tehuana, fulang chang and i.

Encyclopedia of Humanities

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Frida Kahlo

We explain who Frida Kahlo was, and explore her childhood and the development of her works. In addition, we discuss her style and death.

Who was Frida Kahlo?

Frida Kahlo, original name Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, was a Mexican painter born in Coyoacán on July 6, 1907 . She died on July 13, 1954.

As a child, Frida contracted polio and, at the age of 18, she suffered a severe bus accident that nearly took her life . As a result, she had to undergo 32 surgeries over the years. The hardships she faced are vividly reflected in her artwork.

She was the wife of renowned Mexican painter Diego Rivera , who introduced her to the circle of the most prominent artists of the time, and received acclaim from notable art figures such as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso.

Frida Kahlo’s works also convey her political and social commitment. Widespread recognition came posthumously , especially from the 1970s onward, and she is now regarded as one of the major artists in Latin America .

• See also: Eva Perón

Birth and childhood of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico, on July 6, 1907. Her father, German photographer Guillermo Kahlo, was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and her mother, Matilde Calderón, was Mexican of Spanish and indigenous ancestry, born in Mexico City.

As a child, Frida learned to develop, retouch, and color photographs under her father's guidance , which later influenced her passion for painting.

At the age of six, she contracted polio , and her father took care of her during the six months of her recovery. As a consequence of the disease, she was afflicted with a limp throughout her life.

Accident and painting of Frida Kahlo

In 1922, Frida entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, her intention being to study medicine. However, on September 17, 1925, the bus in which she was traveling collided with a streetcar , and Frida was severely injured.

Although she managed to survive, she suffered multiple injuries that would shape her life. Her spine suffered several fractures and, over the years, she underwent over 30 surgeries and had to wear plaster corsets. During the initial months of convalescence, she was bedridden; she abandoned the idea of studying medicine and began painting . In 1926, she painted her first self-portrait.

Frida Kahlo and the Communist Party

Two years after the accident, Frida had recovered sufficiently to reconnect with friends and associate with personalities in the fields of art, thought, and politics. She identified with a cultural movement seeking to recover elements of the Mexican popular tradition , including indigenous influences.

In 1928, her friend Germán del Campo introduced her to Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, who was in exile in Mexico with his partner, Italian photographer Tina Modotti. Frida began attending meetings of the Mexican Communist Party and became romantically involved with Diego Rivera, who had been a member of the party since 1922.

Following a stay in the United States between 1930 and 1933 with Rivera, whom she had married in 1929, she returned to Mexico City. Between 1937 and 1939, she provided refuge to Russian communist exile Leon Trotsky , persecuted by the Stalinist government, who was eventually assassinated in 1940.

Frida maintained her adherence to communism for the rest of her life . Upon her death, her coffin was draped with the flag of the Mexican Communist Party.

Frida Kahlo's marriage to Diego Rivera

Frida met muralist Diego Rivera in 1922 , when he was painting a mural at the National Preparatory School she attended. However, their romantic relationship only began in 1928 when they were introduced by communist activists Julio Antonio Mella and Tina Modotti.

Frida shared her artwork with Rivera, who encouraged her to continue painting. They married in 1929. She was 22 years old and he was 42 . The marriage was tumultuous, marred by extramarital affairs from both parties, most notably Rivera's relationship with Frida's younger sister, which led to their divorce in 1939. However, they remarried at the end of 1940.

Frida's relationship with Rivera influenced not only her artistic style but also the way she dressed. She usually wore colorful garments characteristic of indigenous women in some regions of Mexico, particularly the Tehuana dresses, which pleased her husband. These included necklaces, ornamental combs, or flower headdresses, which became a hallmark of Frida Kahlo's image.

Attempts at motherhood and death

Frida became pregnant with Rivera's child on three occasions but, due to her health problems, she lost each pregnancy . Some of her artwork conveys her thwarted desire for motherhood and the pain from the lost pregnancies.

Throughout her life, Frida continued to suffer from ailments and medical treatments. Her health deteriorated towards 1950, and she eventually died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47 , due to a pulmonary embolism. Some versions suggested it might have been a suicide, but no evidence has ever appeared to support this theory.

She had expressed her wish not to be buried , on the grounds that she had been bedridden for many years. Her body was cremated and her ashes were placed in a pre-Columbian urn at The Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán, where she had lived most of her life and which today houses the Frida Kahlo Museum.

The Blue House

In the famous Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán (Mexico City), on the corner of Londres and Allende streets , Frida Kahlo was born, grew up, and produced much of her great artistic work.

Diego Rivera also lived in this house during the time they were married, and it was frequented by artists and intellectuals . Moreover, the Blue House sheltered communist militant refugees, among them Leon Trotsky and his wife.

Following Frida's death, the Blue House and its gardens became home to the Frida Kahlo Museum , which opened on July 12, 1958. Today, it exhibits paintings and personal objects of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as documents, books, furniture, dresses, and pre-Columbian sculptures that were the environment in which Frida created her works.

The work of Frida Kahlo

Her artistic style.

Frida Kahlo's art largely consisted of paintings that conveyed the suffering and torments she experienced throughout her life. She painted numerous self-portraits in which she crudely expressed her personal experiences and also distanced herself from the artistic stereotypes about femininity, which later influenced her image's revival by feminist movements after her death.

In her nearly 200 works, in addition to self-portraits, she painted still lifes and touched upon social and political themes . Her art often portrayed Mexican folklore since, like many artists and intellectuals following the Mexican Revolution, she was concerned with rescuing aspects of Mexican folk art.

She also incorporated into her art symbolism and images from the recent history of communism , which had made an international impact after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and whose ideology was embraced by Frida.

Frida Kahlo's style is difficult to classify. On one occasion, her work was defined as surrealist , which she rejected claiming that her art dealt with her own real life. She has also been associated with primitivism and expressionism.

Her most renowned works include Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926), Henry Ford Hospital (1932), The Frame (1938), The Two Fridas (1939), The Broken Column (1944), Moses (1945), The Wounded Deer (1946), and Diego and I (1949).

Her color choice

In her works, Frida used bright vibrant colors, which became hallmarks of her style. According to the artist, the colors she used bore specific meanings:

• Good warm light.
• Blood (the red color in her paintings and some of her frames may have symbolized the blood she shed throughout her life: in the accident, surgeries, and miscarriages).
• Madness, fear, illness, mystery.
• Love, purity, electricity, distance, and tenderness.

Exhibition of her artworks

Frida Kahlo's first solo exhibition took place in November 1938 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Her work had been promoted by surrealist writer André Breton , who had traveled to Mexico and had been impressed by her work. In 1939, she exhibited in Paris, and the Louvre Museum acquired her piece "The Frame" ( El marco ). In subsequent years, she exhibited in other cities, especially in the United States.

Frida had only one solo exhibition in her home country . On the opening day, April 13, 1953, her health was so deteriorated that her doctor advised against getting out of bed. Nonetheless, Frida chose to arrive by ambulance and attended the event lying on a hospital bed.

Following her death, and particularly from the 1970s onward, her work acquired widespread recognition, and her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide .

Explore next:

• Che Guevara
• Nelson Mandela
• Thales of Miletus
• Jean Monnet (1888-1979)
• Kahlo 1907-1954. Dolor y pasión . Kettenmann, A. (1999). Taschen.
• "Frida Khalo" en Museo Frida Kahlo .
• "Frida Kahlo. Un ícono del siglo XX" Sadurní, J. M. (2021) en Historia National Geographic .
• "Frida Kahlo" Zelazko, A. (2022) en Encyclopedia Britannica .

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Frida Kahlo

Mexican, 1907–1954.

“They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Frida Kahlo began to paint in 1925, while recovering from a near-fatal bus accident that devastated her body and marked the beginning of lifelong physical ordeals. Over the next three decades, she would produce a relatively small yet consistent and arresting body of work. In meticulously executed paintings, Kahlo portrayed herself again and again, simultaneously exploring, questioning, and staging her self and identity. She also often evoked fraught episodes from her life, including her ongoing struggle with physical pain and the emotional distress caused by her turbulent relationship with celebrated painter Diego Rivera .

Such personal subject matter, along with the intimate scale of her paintings, sharply contrasted with the work of her acclaimed contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists. Launched in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and backed by the government, the Mexican Muralist movement aimed to produce monumental public murals that mined the country’s national history and identity. An avowed Communist, like her peers Rivera, José Clemente Orozco , and David Alfaro Siqueiros , Kahlo at times expressed her desire to paint “something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement,” yet her art remained “very far from work that could serve the Party.” 1 She nonetheless participated in her peers’ exaltation of Mexico’s indigenous culture, avidly collecting Mexican popular art and often making use of its motifs and techniques. In My Grandparents, My Parents, and I , for example, she adopted the format of retablos, small devotional paintings made on metallic plates. She also carefully crafted a flamboyant Mexican persona for herself, wearing colorful folk dresses and pre-Columbian jewelry, in a performative display of her identity.

Kahlo’s early recognition was prompted by French poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton , who enthusiastically embraced her art as self-made Surrealism, and included her work in his 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City. Yet if her art had an uncanny quality akin to the movement’s tenets, Kahlo resisted the association: “They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn’t,” she said. “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” 2

Charlotte Barat, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2016 The research for this text was supported by a generous grant from The Modern Women's Fund.

Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo, An Intimate Self-Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 252.

“Mexican Autobiography,” Time , April 27, 1953, 92.

Associated art terms include Feminist art , Self-portrait , and Surrealism .

3 works online

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

Gallery 517

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I

Fulang-Chang and I

1937 (assembled after 1939)

Exhibitions

521: visual vernaculars.

Collection gallery

517: Surrealist Objects

Artist’s choice: herzog & de meuron, perception restrained.

Jun 21–Sep 25, 2006

Painting & Sculpture II

Nov 20, 2004–Aug 5, 2015

MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art

Mar 4–Jul 25, 2004

Making Choices

Mar 16–Sep 26, 2000

Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century

Jun 6–Sep 7, 1993

Art of the Forties

Feb 24–Apr 30, 1991

View all 17 exhibitions

Publications

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ARTS & CULTURE

Frida kahlo.

The Mexican artist’s myriad faces, stranger-than-fiction biography and powerful paintings come to vivid life in a new film

Phyllis Tuchman

Frida Kahlo, who painted mostly small, intensely personal works for herself, family and friends, would likely have been amazed and amused to see what a vast audience her paintings now reach. Today, nearly 50 years after her death, the Mexican artist’s iconic images adorn calendars, greeting cards, posters, pins, even paper dolls. Several years ago the French couturier Jean Paul Gaultier created a collection inspired by Kahlo, and last year a self-portrait she painted in 1933 appeared on a 34-cent U.S. postage stamp. This month, the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as her husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera, opens nationwide. Directed by Julie Taymor, the creative wizard behind Broadway’s long-running hit The Lion King , the film is based on Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography, Frida. Artfully composed, Taymor’s graphic portrayal remains, for the most part, faithful to the facts of the painter’s life. Although some changes were made because of budget constraints, the movie “is true in spirit,” says Herrera, who was first drawn to Kahlo because of “that thing in her work that commands you—that urgency, that need to communicate.”

Focusing on Kahlo’s creativity and tumultuous love affair with Rivera, the film looks beyond the icon to the human being. “I was completely compelled by her story,” says Taymor. “I knew it superficially; and I admired her paintings but didn’t know them well. When she painted, it was for herself. She transcended her pain. Her paintings are her diary. When you’re doing a movie, you want a story like that.” In the film, the Mexican born and raised Hayek, 36, who was one of the film’s producers, strikes poses from the paintings, which then metamorphose into action-filled scenes. “Once I had the concept of having the paintings come alive,” says Taymor, “I wanted to do it.”

Kahlo, who died July 13, 1954, at the age of 47, reportedly of a pulmonary embolism (though some suspected suicide), has long been recognized as an important artist. In 2001-2002, a major traveling exhibition showcased her work alongside that of Georgia O’Keeffe and Canada’s Emily Carr. Earlier this year several of her paintings were included in a landmark Surrealism show in London and New York. Currently, works by both Kahlo and Rivera are on view through January 5, 2003, at the SeattleArt Museum. As Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and one of the organizers of a 1993 exhibition of Kahlo’s work, points out, “Kahlo made personal women’s experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers—men and women—be moved by them.”

Kahlo produced only about 200 paintings—primarily still lifes and portraits of herself, family and friends. She also kept an illustrated journal and did dozens of drawings. With techniques learned from both her husband and her father, a professional architectural photographer, she created haunting, sensual and stunningly original paintings that fused elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore into powerful narratives. In contrast to the 20th-century trend toward abstract art, her work was uncompromisingly figurative. Although she received occasional commissions for portraits, she sold relatively few paintings during her lifetime. Today her works fetch astronomical prices at auction. In 2000, a 1929 self-portrait sold for more than $5 million.

Biographies of the artist, which have been translated into many languages, read like the fantastical novels of Gabriel García Márquez as they trace the story of two painters who could not live with or without each other. (Taymor says she views her film version of Kahlo’s life as a “great, great love story.”) Married twice, divorced once and separated countless times, Kahlo and Rivera had numerous affairs, hobnobbed with Communists, capitalists and literati and managed to create some of the most compelling visual images of the 20th century. Filled with such luminaries as writer André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, playwright Clare Boothe Luce and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Kahlo’s life played out on a phantasmagorical canvas.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón July 6, 1907, and lived in a house (the Casa Azul, or Blue House, now the Museo Frida Kahlo) built by her father in Coyoacán, then a quiet suburb of Mexico City. The third of her parents’ four daughters, Frida was her father’s favorite—the most intelligent, he thought, and the most like himself. She was a dutiful child but had a fiery temperament. (Shortly before Kahlo and Rivera were wed in 1929, Kahlo’s father warned his future son-in-law, who at age 42 had already had two wives and many mistresses, that Frida, then 21, was “a devil.” Rivera replied: “I know it.”)

A German Jew with deep-set eyes and a bushy mustache, Guillermo Kahlo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19. After his first wife died in childbirth, he married Matilde Calderón, a Catholic whose ancestry included Indians as well as a Spanish general. Frida portrayed her hybrid ethnicity in a 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (opposite).

Kahlo adored her father. On a portrait she painted of him in 1951, she inscribed the words, “character generous, intelligent and fine.” Her feelings about her mother were more conflicted. On the one hand, the artist considered her “very nice, active, intelligent.” But she also saw her as fanatically religious, calculating and sometimes even cruel. “She did not know how to read or write,” recalled the artist. “She only knew how to count money.”

A chubby child with a winning smile and sparkling eyes, Kahlo was stricken with polio at the age of 6. After her recovery, her right leg remained thinner than her left and her right foot was stunted. Despite her disabilities or, perhaps, to compensate for them, Kahlo became a tomboy. She played soccer, boxed, wrestled and swam competitively. “My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles,” the artist later recalled. (As an adult, she collected dolls.)

Her father taught her photography, including how to retouch and color prints, and one of his friends gave her drawing lessons. In 1922, the 15-year-old Kahlo entered the elite, predominantly male NationalPreparatory School, which was located near the Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City.

As it happened, Rivera was working in the school’s auditorium on his first mural. In his autobiography— My Art, My Life —the artist recalled that he was painting one night high on a scaffold when “all of a sudden the door flew open, and a girl who seemed to be no more than ten or twelve was propelled inside. . . . She had,” he continued, “unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes.” Kahlo, who was actually 16, apparently played pranks on the artist. She stole his lunch and soaped the steps by the stage where he was working.

Kahlo planned to become a doctor and took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Her knowledge of these disciplines would later add realistic touches to her portraits. She also had a passion for philosophy, which she liked to flaunt. According to biographer Herrera, she would cry out to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, “lend me your Spengler. I don’t have anything to read on the bus.” Her bawdy sense of humor and passion for fun were well known among her circle of friends, many of whom would become leaders of the Mexican left.

Then, on September 17, 1925, the bus on which she and her boyfriend were riding home from school was rammed by a trolley car. A metal handrail broke off and pierced her pelvis. Several people died at the site, and doctors at the hospital where the 18-year-old Kahlo was taken did not think she would survive. Her spine was fractured in three places, her pelvis was crushed and her right leg and foot were severely broken. The first of many operations she would endure over the years brought only temporary relief from pain. “In this hospital,” Kahlo told Gómez Arias, “death dances around my bed at night.” She spent a month in the hospital and was later fitted with a plaster corset, variations of which she would be compelled to wear throughout her life.

Confined to bed for three months, she was unable to return to school. “Without giving it any particular thought,” she recalled, “I started painting.” Kahlo’s mother ordered a portable easel and attached a mirror to the underside of her bed’s canopy so that the nascent artist could be her own model.

Though she knew the works of the old masters only from reproductions, Kahlo had an uncanny ability to incorporate elements of their styles in her work. In a painting she gave to Gómez Arias, for instance, she portrayed herself with a swan neck and tapered fingers, referring to it as “Your Botticeli.”

During her months in bed, she pondered her changed circumstances. To Gómez Arias, she wrote, “Life will reveal [its secrets] to you soon. I already know it all. . . . I was a child who went about in a world of colors. . . . My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants.”

As she grew stronger, Kahlo began to participate in the politics of the day, which focused on achieving autonomy for the government-run university and a more democratic national government. She joined the Communist party in part because of her friendship with the young Italian photographer Tina Modotti, who had come to Mexico in 1923 with her then companion, photographer Edward Weston. It was most likely at a soiree given by Modotti in late 1928 that Kahlo re-met Rivera.

They were an unlikely pair. The most celebrated artist in Mexico and a dedicated Communist, the charismatic Rivera was more than six feet tall and tipped the scales at 300 pounds. Kahlo, 21 years his junior, weighed 98 pounds and was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He was ungainly and a bit misshapen; she was heart-stoppingly alluring. According to Herrera, Kahlo “started with dramatic material: nearly beautiful, she had slight flaws that increased her magnetism.” Rivera described her “fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face,” and compared her thick eyebrows, which met above her nose, to “the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.”

Rivera courted Kahlo under the watchful eyes of her parents. Sundays he visited the Casa Azul, ostensibly to critique her paintings. “It was obvious to me,” he later wrote, “that this girl was an authentic artist.” Their friends had reservations about the relationship. One Kahlo pal called Rivera “a pot-bellied, filthy old man.” But Lupe Marín, Rivera’s second wife, marveled at how Kahlo, “this so-called youngster,” drank tequila “like a real mariachi.”

The couple married on August 21, 1929. Kahlo later said her parents described the union as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.” Kahlo’s 1931 Colonial-style portrait, based on a wedding photograph, captures the contrast. The newlyweds spent almost a year in Cuernavaca while Rivera executed murals commissioned by the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Kahlo was a devoted wife, bringing Rivera lunch every day, bathing him, cooking for him. Years later Kahlo would paint a naked Rivera resting on her lap as if he were a baby.

With the help of Albert Bender, an American art collector, Rivera obtained a visa to the United States, which previously had been denied him. Since Kahlo had resigned from the Communist party when Rivera, under siege from the Stalinists, was expelled, she was able to accompany him. Like other left-wing Mexican intellectuals, she was now dressing in flamboyant native Mexican costume—embroidered tops and colorful, floor-length skirts, a style associated with the matriarchal society of the region of Tehuantepec. Rivera’s new wife was “a little doll alongside Diego,” Edward Weston wrote in his journal in 1930. “People stop in their tracks to look in wonder.”

The Riveras arrived in the United States in November 1930, settling in San Francisco while Rivera worked on murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and Kahlo painted portraits of friends. After a brief stay in New York City for a show of Rivera’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, the couple moved on to Detroit, where Rivera filled the Institute of Arts’ garden court with compelling industrial scenes, and then back to New York City, where he worked on a mural for Rockefeller Center. They stayed in the United States for three years. Diego felt he was living in the future; Frida grew homesick. “I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste,” she observed. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.”

In Manhattan, however, Kahlo was exhilarated by the opportunity to see the works of the old masters firsthand. She also enjoyed going to the movies, especially those starring the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy. And at openings and dinners, she and Rivera met the rich and the renowned.

But for Kahlo, despair and pain were never far away. Before leaving Mexico, she had suffered the first in a series of miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. Due to her trolley-car injuries, she seemed unable to bring a child to term, and every time she lost a baby, she was thrown into a deep depression. Moreover, her polio-afflicted and badly injured right leg and foot often troubled her. While in Michigan, a miscarriage cut another pregnancy short. Then her mother died. Up to that time she had persevered. “I am more or less happy,” she had written to her doctor, “because I have Diego and my mother and my father whom I love so much. I think that is enough. . . . ” Now her world was starting to fall apart.

Kahlo had arrived in America an amateur artist. She had never attended art school, had no studio and had not yet focused on any particular subject matter. “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,” she would say years later. Her biographers report that despite her injuries she regularly visited the scaffolding on which Rivera worked in order to bring him lunch and, they speculate, to ward off alluring models. As she watched him paint, she learned the fundamentals of her craft. His imagery recurs in her pictures along with his palette—the sunbaked colors of pre- Columbian art. And from him—though his large-scale wall murals depict historical themes, and her small-scale works relate her autobiography—she learned how to tell a story in paint.

Works from her American period reveal her growing narrative skill. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline betweenMexico and the United States, Kahlo’s homesickness finds expression in an image of herself standing between a pre-Columbian ruin and native flowers on one side and Ford Motor Company smokestacks and looming skyscrapers on the other. In HenryFordHospital, done soon after her miscarriage in Detroit, Kahlo’s signature style starts to emerge. Her desolation and pain are graphically conveyed in this powerful depiction of herself, nude and weeping, on a bloodstained bed. As she would do time and again, she exorcises a devastating experience through the act of painting.

When they returned to Mexico toward the end of 1933, both Kahlo and Rivera were depressed. His RockefellerCenter mural had created a controversy when the owners of the project objected to the heroic portrait of Lenin he had included in it. When Rivera refused to paint out the portrait, the owners had the mural destroyed. (Rivera later re-created a copy for the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.) To a friend Kahlo wrote, Diego “thinks that everything that is happening to him is my fault, because I made him come [back] to Mexico. . . . ” Kahlo herself became physically ill, as she was prone to do in times of stress. Whenever Rivera, a notorious philanderer, became involved with other women, Kahlo succumbed to chronic pain, illness or depression. When he returned home from his wanderings, she would usually recover.

Seeking a fresh start, the Riveras moved into a new home in the upscale San Angel district of Mexico City. The house, now the Diego Rivera Studio museum, featured his-and-her, brightly colored (his was pink, hers, blue) Le Corbusier-like buildings connected by a narrow bridge. Though the plans included a studio for Kahlo, she did little painting, as she was hospitalized three times in 1934. When Rivera began an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, Kahlo moved into an apartment. A few months later, however, after a brief dalliance with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Kahlo reconciled with Rivera and returned to San Angel.

In late 1936, Rivera, whose leftist sympathies were more pronounced than ever, interceded with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to have the exiled Leon Trotsky admitted to Mexico. In January 1937, the Russian revolutionary took up a two-year residency with his wife and bodyguards at the Casa Azul, Kahlo’s childhood home, available because Kahlo’s father had moved in with one of her sisters. In a matter of months, Trotsky and Kahlo became lovers. “El viejo” (“the old man”), as she called him, would slip her notes in books. She painted a mesmerizing fulllength portrait of herself (far right), in bourgeois finery, as a gift for the Russian exile. But this liaison, like most of her others, was short lived.

The French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, also spent time with the Riveras in San Angel. (Breton would later offer to hold an exhibition of Kahlo’s work in Paris.) Arriving in Mexico in the spring of 1938, they stayed for several months and joined the Riveras and the Trotskys on sight-seeing jaunts. The three couples even considered publishing a book of their conversations. This time, it was Frida and Jacqueline who bonded.

Although Kahlo would claim her art expressed her solitude, she was unusually productive during the time spent with the Trotskys and the Bretons. Her imagery became more varied and her technical skills improved. In the summer of 1938, the actor and art collector Edward G. Robinson visited the Riveras in San Angel and paid $200 each for four of Kahlo’s pictures, among the first she sold. Of Robinson’s purchase she later wrote, “For me it was such a surprise that I marveled and said: ‘This way I am going to be able to be free, I’ll be able to travel and do what I want without asking Diego for money.’”

Shortly after, Kahlo went to New York City for her first one-person show, held at the Julien Levy Gallery, one of the first venues in America to promote Surrealist art. In a brochure for the exhibition, Breton praised Kahlo’s “mixture of candour and insolence.” On the guest list for the opening were artist Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom Kahlo later wrote a fan letter, art historian Meyer Schapiro and Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce, who commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of a friend who had committed suicide. Upset by the graphic nature of Kahlo’s completed painting, however, Luce wanted to destroy it but in the end was persuaded not to. The show was a critical success. Time magazine noted that “the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s . . . wife, Frida Kahlo. . . . Frida’s pictures, mostly painted in oil on copper, had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition, the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.” A little later, Kahlo’s hand, bedecked with rings, appeared on the cover of Vogue .

Heady with success, Kahlo sailed to France, only to discover that Breton had done nothing about the promised show. A disappointed Kahlo wrote to her latest lover, portrait photographer Nickolas Muray: “It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people—good for nothing—are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.” Marcel Duchamp— “The only one,” as Kahlo put it, “who has his feet on the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the Surrealists”—saved the day. He got Kahlo her show. The Louvre purchased a self-portrait, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist. At the exhibition, according to Rivera, artist Wassily Kandinsky kissed Kahlo’s cheeks “while tears of sheer emotion ran down his face.” Also an admirer, Pablo Picasso gave Kahlo a pair of earrings shaped like hands, which she donned for a later self-portrait. “Neither Derain, nor I, nor you,” Picasso wrote to Rivera, “are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.”

Returning to Mexico after six months abroad, Kahlo found Rivera entangled with yet another woman and moved out of their San Angel house and into the Casa Azul. By the end of 1939 the couple had agreed to divorce.

Intent on achieving financial independence, Kahlo painted more intensely than ever before. “To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult,” she would tell the group of students—known as Los Fridos—to whom she gave instruction in the mid-1940s. “It is necessary . . . to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting.” It was during this period that Kahlo created some of her most enduring and distinctive work. In self-portraits, she pictured herself in native Mexican dress with her hair atop her head in traditional braids. Surrounded by pet monkeys, cats and parrots amid exotic vegetation reminiscent of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, she often wore the large pre-Columbian necklaces given to her by Rivera.

In one of only two large canvases ever painted by Kahlo, The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait done at the time of her divorce, one Frida wears a European outfit torn open to reveal a “broken” heart; the other is clad in native Mexican costume. Set against a stormy sky, the “twin sisters,” joined together by a single artery running from one heart to the other, hold hands. Kahlo later wrote that the painting was inspired by her memory of an imaginary childhood friend, but the fact that Rivera himself had been born a twin may also have been a factor in its composition. In another work from this period, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo, in a man’s suit, holds a pair of scissors she has used to sever the locks that surround the chair on which she sits. More than once when she discovered Rivera with other women, she had cut off the long hair that he adored.

Despite the divorce, Kahlo and Rivera remained connected. When Kahlo’s health deteriorated, Rivera sought medical advice from a mutual friend, San Francisco doctor Leo Eloesser, who felt her problem was “a crisis of nerves.” Eloesser suggested she resolve her relationship with Rivera. “Diego loves you very much,” he wrote, “and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves—1) Painting 2) Women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous.” Kahlo apparently recognized the truth of this observation and resigned herself to the situation. In December 1940, the couple remarried in San Francisco.

The reconciliation, however, saw no diminution in tumult. Kahlo continued to fight with her philandering husband and sought out affairs of her own with various men and women, including several of his lovers. Still, Kahlo never tired of setting a beautiful table, cooking elaborate meals (her stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera filled a cookbook with Kahlo’s recipes) and arranging flowers in her home from her beloved garden. And there were always festive occasions to celebrate. At these meals, recalled Guadalupe, “Frida’s laughter was loud enough to rise above the din of yelling and revolutionary songs.”

During the last decade of her life, Kahlo endured painful operations on her back, her foot and her leg. (In 1953, her right leg had to be amputated below the knee.) She drank heavily—sometimes downing two bottles of cognac a day—and she became addicted to painkillers. As drugs took control of her hands, the surface of her paintings became rough, her brushwork agitated.

In the spring of 1953, Kahlo finally had a one-person show in Mexico City. Her work had previously been seen there only in group shows. Organized by her friend, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, the exhibition was held at Alvarez Bravo’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. Though still bedridden following the surgery on her leg, Kahlo did not want to miss the opening night. Arriving by ambulance, she was carried to a canopied bed, which had been transported from her home. The headboard was decorated with pictures of family and friends; papier-mâché skeletons hung from the canopy. Surrounded by admirers, the elaborately costumed Kahlo held court and joined in singing her favorite Mexican ballads.

Kahlo remained a dedicated leftist. Even as her strength ebbed, she painted portraits of Marx and of Stalin and attended demonstrations. Eight days before she died, Kahlo, in a wheelchair and accompanied by Rivera, joined a crowd of 10,000 in Mexico City protesting the overthrow, by the CIA, of the Guatemalan president.

Although much of Kahlo’s life was dominated by her debilitated physical state and emotional turmoil, Taymor’s film focuses on the artist’s inventiveness, delight in beautiful things and playful but caustic sense of humor. Kahlo, too, preferred to emphasize her love of life and a good time. Just days before her death, she incorporated the words Viva La Vida (Long Live Life) into a still life of watermelons. Though some have wondered whether the artist may have intentionally taken her own life, others dismiss the notion. Certainly, she enjoyed life fully and passionately. “It is not worthwhile,” she once said, “to leave this world without having had a little fun in life.”

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Frida Kahlo

Mexican painter (1907–1954) / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about Frida Kahlo?

Summarize this article for a 10 year old

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán   – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum . Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until being injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, [1] through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera . The couple married in 1929 [1] [5] and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling in Mexico and the United States together. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture , and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings raised the interest of surrealist artist André Breton , who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo, The Frame , making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. [1] Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (" La Esmeralda ") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana . Kahlo's always-fragile health began to decline in the same decade. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos , the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community. Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. [6]

Biography of Frida Kahlo, Mexican Surrealist and Folk Art Painter

Her life was dramatized in a biopic nearly 50 years after her death

Ivan Dmitri / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

• Important Figures
• History Of Feminism
• Women's Suffrage
• Women & War
• Laws & Womens Rights
• Feminist Texts
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• B.A., Mundelein College
• M.Div., Meadville/Lombard Theological School

Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954), one of the few women painters that many can name, was known for her surrealistic paintings, including many emotionally intense self-portraits. Stricken with polio as a child and injured badly in an accident when she was 18, she struggled with pain and disability all her life. Her paintings reflect a modernist take on folk art and integrate her experience of suffering. Kahlo was married to artist Diego Rivera .

Fast Facts: Frida Kahlo

• Known For : Mexican surrealist and folk art painter
• Also Known As : Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon, Frieda Kahlo, Frida Rivera, Mrs. Diego Rivera.
• Born : July 6, 1907 in Mexico City
• Parents : Matilde Calderón, Guillermo Kahlo
• Died : July 13, 1954 in Mexico City
• Education : National Preparatory School in Mexico City, entered 1922, studied medicine and medical illustration
• Famous Paintings : The Two Fridas (1939), Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)
• Awards and Honors : National Prize of Arts and Sciences (conferred by the Mexican Ministry of Public Education, 1946)
• Spouse : Diego Rivera (m. Aug. 21, 1929–1939, remarried 1940–1957)
• Children : None
• Notable Quote : "I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."

Kahlo was born in a suburb of Mexico City on July 6, 1907. She later claimed 1910 as her year of birth because 1910 was the beginning of the Mexican Revolution . She was close to her father but not so close to her often-depressed mother. She was struck with polio when she was about 6 years old and while the illness was mild, it did cause her right leg to be withered—which led to the twisting of her spine and pelvis.

She entered the National Preparatory School in 1922 to study medicine and medical illustration, adopting a native style of dress.

The Trolley Accident

In 1925, Kahlo was nearly fatally injured when a trolley collided with the bus on which she was riding. She broke her back, pelvis, collarbone, and two ribs, her right foot was crushed, and her right leg was broken in 11 places. A handrail of the bus impaled her in the abdomen. She had surgeries throughout her life to try to correct the disabling effects of the accident.

Diego Rivera and Marriage

During the convalescence from her accident, she began to paint. Self-taught, in 1928 Kahlo sought out Mexican painter Diego Rivera, more than 20 years her senior, whom she'd met when she was in preparatory school. She asked him to comment on her work, which relied on bright colors and Mexican folk images. She joined the Young Communist League, which Rivera headed.

In 1929, Kahlo married Rivera in a civil ceremony despite her mother's protests. The couple moved to San Francisco for a year in 1930. It was his third marriage and he had many affairs, including with Kahlo's sister Cristina. Kahlo, in turn, had her own affairs, with both men and women. One of her brief affairs was with American painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

She changed the spelling of her first name from Frieda, the German spelling, to Frida, the Mexican spelling, in the 1930s as a protest against fascism . In 1932, Kahlo and Rivera lived in Michigan, where Kahlo miscarried a pregnancy. She immortalized her experience in a painting titled, "Henry Ford Hospital."

From 1937–1939, Leon Trotsky lived with the couple. Kahlo had an affair with the Communist revolutionary. She was often in pain from her disabilities and emotionally distraught from the marriage, and probably addicted to painkillers for a long time. Kahlo and Rivera divorced in 1939, but then Rivera convinced her to remarry the next year. Kahlo made that marriage contingent on remaining sexually separate and on her financial self-support.

Art Success

Kahlo's first solo show was in New York City, in 1938, after Rivera and Kahlo had moved back to Mexico. She had another show in 1943, also in New York. Kahlo produced many paintings in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was not until 1953 that she finally had a one-woman show in Mexico. Her long struggle with her disabilities, however, had left her by this point an invalid, and she entered the exhibit on a stretcher and rested on a bed to receive visitors. Her right leg was amputated at the knee when it became gangrenous.

Kahlo died in Mexico City in 1954. Officially, she died of a pulmonary embolism, but some believe she deliberately overdosed on painkillers, welcoming an end to her suffering. Even in death, Kahlo was dramatic; when her body was being put into the crematorium, the heat caused her body to suddenly sit up.

Kahlo's work began to come to prominence in the 1970s. Much of her work is at the Museo Frida Kahlo (the Frida Kahlo Museum), also called the Blue House for its cobalt blue walls, which opened in 1958 in her former Mexico City residence. She is considered a forerunner to feminist art .

Indeed, Kahlo's life was depicted in the 2002 biopic, "Frida," starring Salma Hayek as the title character. The film received a 75 percent critic's score and an 85 percent audience score on the movie review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. It also received six Academy Award nominations (winning for Best Makeup and Best Original Score), including Hayek's nomination in the Best Actress category for her dramatic portrayal of the long-departed artist.

• “ 17 Frida Kahlo Quotes to Inspire You to Turn Pain Into Beauty. ”  Goalcast , 19 Dec. 2018.
• Anderson, Kelli, and Shovova. “ Art History: The Stories and Symbolism Behind 5 of Frida Kahlo's Most Well-Known ."
• “ Major Achievements. ”  Frida Kahlo.
• “ MUSEO FRIDA KAHLO. ”  Frida Kahlo Museum.
• Paintings. ”  My Modern Met , 23 Aug. 2018.
• “ Frida Kahlo and Her Paintings. ”  Henri Matisse.
• “ Frida (2002) .”  Rotten Tomatoes.
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Articles and Features

Female Iconoclasts: Frida Kahlo

By Shira Wolfe

“I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”  Frida Kahlo

Who is Frida Kahlo?

Our “Female Iconoclasts” series highlights some of the most boundary-breaking works of our time, crafted by women who defied conventions in contemporary art and society in order to pursue their passion and contribute their unique vision to the world. This week, we focus on Frida Kahlo, one of the greatest artistic icons ever to have lived, whose life has become just as iconic as her body of work. Her art was deeply personal and political, reflecting her own turbulent personal life, her physical ailments, her relationship with the great muralist Diego Rivera , and the Mexico she so loved and fought for. Since the 1970s she has grown into a feminist icon and the past decade has seen her persona and art become co-opted by pop culture.

During her lifetime she was called a ‘surrealist’ by André Breton, and a ‘realist’ by her husband Diego Rivera. Kahlo, however, eschewed labels; in fact, one of the most famous quotes by the artist reads: “I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.” 

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born as Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón on 6 July 1907 in the Casa Azul, her family home in the Mexico City municipality Coyoacán.

The Family of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo’s father, Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, was a photographer of German-Jewish descent who had immigrated to Mexico. Her mother was the Mexican Matilde Calderón. Frida had three sisters, Matilde, Adriana, and Cristina.

The Early Life of Frida Kahlo

Frida’s early life was marked by severe health issues. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, causing her right leg to remain slightly shorter than the left one. At 18, she suffered a tragic accident that would haunt her for the rest of her life: a streetcar crashed into the bus she was travelling in, and she was terribly injured: she was impaled by the metal bannister, fractured many bones, suffered severe damage to her spinal cord, and dislocated her shoulder and foot. During the hard recuperation period, she lay practically immobilized in her bed and took up painting. Her mother had an easel built that allowed her to paint while lying in bed and mounted a mirror above her bed so she could paint herself. 

For Frida, painting became a mode of survival and self-expression, which helped her to cope with her tortuous chronic pain, prolonged periods of bed rest and physical fragility that frustrated the enigmatic woman with such a lust for life. Throughout her life, Frida underwent several intense operations in order to attempt to improve the quality of her life following the accident. These operations were followed by long convalescences and had serious consequences, including having to wear corsets to correct her posture and suffering three miscarriages.

The Relationship with Diego Rivera

The other event that shook Frida’s life to the core was her meeting and forming a relationship with renowned artist Diego Rivera. Diego was a huge supporter of her art and started frequenting the Casa Azul. The couple married in 1929, when Rivera was 43 years old, and Frida just 22. Their marriage was described by Frida’s mother as “the wedding between an elephant and a dove.” The love between Frida and Diego was strong and passionate, yet their relationship was also volatile and tumultuous, with many affairs on both sides shaking things up. On an artistic level, they supported each other unconditionally and each considered the other to be the greatest living Mexican painter. They also shared a passion for politics and the revolutionary ideals of the time. Both were affiliated with the Communist Party of Mexico, and they even took in the Russian dissident Leon Trotsky for two years, between 1937 and 1939, who was being persecuted by Stalin. The couple resided in different intervals at the Casa Azul, at Diego’s studio in San Ángel, in Cuernavaca, and in various cities in the United States. Frida and Diego spent three years in the United States from 1930 to 1933, living in New York, Detroit and San Francisco.

Following deep emotional crises as a result of Diego’s many infidelities, Frida divorced him in 1939, only to remarry him one year later with a mutual agreement that they would lead autonomous sex lives.

How Frida Kahlo Died

Toward the end of her life, Frida’s health deteriorated and she was confined to the Hospital Inglés from 1950 to 1951. Her right leg was amputated in 1953, due to a threat of gangrene, and Frida died at the Casa Azul on 13 July 1954. The National Institute of Fine Arts was just in the process of preparing a retrospective exhibition as a national tribute to her. Following her wishes, the Casa Azul was turned into a museum several years after her death, and it remains one of the most important spaces in Mexico, filled with her being and her objects.     

“ I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration .” Frida Kahlo

Themes, styles and approach

Frida Kahlo found a way to express herself and survive the difficult episodes in her life through art. She was determined to paint her own reality, and two-thirds of her paintings are self-portraits, revealing her keen interest in exploring her own being and identity in depth. She once said: “I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration.” Her self-portraits are beautiful and honest, showing images of herself with her signature moustache and unibrow, and in moments of suffering and pain, as such boldly defying conventional beauty norms.

At the same time, Frida was interested in reclaiming the roots of Mexican folk art and culture through her daily life and her art. She dressed in indigenous Mexican attire and avidly collected Mexican folk art. All these influences were reflected in her painting. Although the Surrealists tried to claim her as one of their own and Frida was interested in their work, she preferred to avoid any labels when it came to her art. For her, the surrealist images in her paintings were actually her reality. She never painted her dreams, but painted what was happening to her and passing through her mind at that very moment.  

The Most Famous Art by Frida Kahlo

The two fridas.

Frida painted The Two Fridas in 1939, the year she divorced Diego Rivera. The painting shows two Frida Kahlos sitting side by side. Both their hearts are revealed, and they are distinguished from one another through their clothing. The one on the left wears a traditional Tehuana costume and her heart is torn open; the one on the right wears a more modern outfit. The main artery leading from the torn open heart of the traditional Frida connects to the modern Frida’s heart, wraps around her arm, and is cut off with a pair of scissors by the traditional Frida. The modern Frida holds a pendant with a portrait of a young Diego Rivera. This powerful painting shows two sides of Frida Kahlo, suffering from heartache while also remembering the good aspects of her love for Diego.

Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana)

Frida started painting Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana) in 1940 when the couple were still divorced, and finished it in 1943, at which point they had reconciled. The painting shows Frida wearing a traditional Tehuana costume, with the face of Diego as a third eye in her forehead. The painting shows how she cannot stop thinking about him, despite his betrayals and their separation. 

The Broken Column

The Broken Column is a painting from 1944. It depicts Frida after spinal surgery, bound and constrained by a cage-like body brace. She is missing flesh, and a broken column is exposed where her spine should be. Metal nails pierce Frida’s face, breasts, arms, torso and upper thigh, and tears are streaming down her face. This is one of her most brutally revealing self-portraits where she deals with her physical suffering. 

The Wounded Deer

The Wounded Deer is a 1946 painting, which Frida painted following another spinal operation in New York that same year. We see Frida as a young deer in the forest, fatally wounded by several arrows. She had hoped that the New York surgery would free her from her severe physical pain, but it failed, and this painting expresses her disappointment following the procedure. 

Where to Find Frida Kahlo’s Work

During her lifetime, Frida held several exhibitions internationally: at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, at the Renou et Colle Gallery in Paris, and at the Lola Álvarez Bravo Gallery in Mexico. She also participated in the Group Surrealist Show at the Mexican Art Gallery. In 1939, The Louvre acquired her painting The Frame (1938). Today, Frida Kahlo’s paintings can be found in numerous private collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. A current exhibition at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, brought together an impressive selection of works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and several other Mexican contemporaries of theirs. But by far the most moving experience is to experience the full essence of Frida Kahlo in her Casa Azul in Mexico City, which is still left almost exactly in the same condition as when Frida herself lived there. Several of her and Diego Rivera’s paintings are on display there, as well as the Mexican folk art that they collected, and the many objects that were important to Frida.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frida Kahlo was born in Casa Azul, her family home in the Mexico City Coyoacán.

Frida Kahlo died at an age of 47.

Relevant  sources to learn more

The excellent exhibition “Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: A Love Revolution” is on show at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen, the Netherlands through 26 September 2021

Discover the art of María Izquierdo, a contemporary of Kahlo and Rivera who was far less known but also made an important contribution to Mexican art

Read more about Art Movements and Styles Throughout History here

You may also like: The Fantastic Women of Surrealism

How a Horrific Bus Accident Changed Frida Kahlo’s Life

The crash left the painter with life-long pain and injuries that would fuel the vibrant, intensely personal artwork that would make her famous.

Bad timing led to her fateful accident

While attending school, Kahlo befriended a group of fellow left-leaning students, who dubbed themselves the Cachuchas. One of those students was Alejandro Gómez Arias, with whom Kahlo began her first serious relationship. The two exchanged passionate love letters despite physical separation caused by political unrest in Mexico — and her parents’ displeasure at the match.

As Arias and Kahlo would later recall, the couple was returning home from school on September 17, 1925, a gray, rainy, overcast day. They boarded one bus, but got off to look for an umbrella Kahlo realized she had lost. They boarded a second, more crowded bus, and took seats towards the back. Minutes later, the bus driver tried to pass in front of an oncoming electric streetcar, which crashed into the side of the bus, dragging it for a number of feet. Several passengers were killed instantly, and several later died from their injuries.

READ MORE: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: 8 Photos of Their Colorful Love Story

Kahlo somehow miraculously survived the crash

Arias escaped with only minor injuries, but he immediately saw that Kahlo was gravely injured. An iron handrail had impaled her through her pelvis, as, she would later say, piercing “the way a sword pierces a bull.” Arias and others removed the handrail, causing Kahlo immense pain.

Kahlo’s pelvic bone had been fractured and the rail had punctured her abdomen and uterus. Her spine had been broken in three places, her right leg in 11 places, her shoulder was dislocated, her collarbone was broken, and doctors later discovered that three additional vertebrae had been broken as well.

She took up painting during her long recovery

Kahlo remained in the hospital for a month, undergoing additional surgery, and then was nearly bed-ridden for several months at home, wearing a plaster cast. Although she initially hoped to combine her love of medicine and sketching to become a medical illustrator, the lingering pain from her injuries forced her to abandon the idea and drop out of school. She turned to painting to fill the hours, using a specially-made lap easel that allowed her to paint from bed. Already deeply introspective, she became her first artistic subject, using an overhead mirror in her bed’s canopy to begin painting the first in long series of self-portraits.

Kahlo never directly painted a depiction of the near-fatal bus accident, although she did create a sketch drawing of the incident. She more closely alluded to it a later work, “The Bus,” which some art historians believe shows her and a group of other passengers awaiting a bus, just moments before their fateful journey.

Adding to Kahlo’s pain was the end of her relationship with Arias, who reportedly did not visit her during her long convalesce. His absence and her loneliness left her vulnerable. When she was introduced to Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera in 1928 (they had briefly met several years earlier), the pair quickly began a relationship, despite a 20-year age gap. Thanks in a part to Rivera’s support of her painting — and despite his constant womanizing — the pair married in August 1929.

The crash likely contributed to Kahlo’s inability to have children

Pain from her injuries plagued Kahlo for the rest of her life. She had more than 30 additional surgeries, including one in which her back was re-broken and re-set. Kahlo turned this latest setback into an opportunity, artfully painting her body cast. Despite her increasing ill health, Kahlo and Rivera traveled widely, although their relationship was tested by mutual jealousy and infidelity (including Kahlo’s rumored affair with Marxist leader Leon Trotsky ).

Kahlo desperately hoped to give Rivera a child, but several pregnancies were medically terminated when doctors feared Kahlo’s life was at risk. Another pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage became the focus of one of Kahlo’s most well-known and harrowing paintings. “Henry Ford Hospital,” painted in 1932, shows a naked Kahlo in bed, with images of a snail (meant to represent her fertility problems and slowness to have a child), a fetus and her abdomen, attached to her body by umbilical cords. Twelve years later, in 1944, Kahlo painted “The Broken Column,” in which her chest is split open to reveal the metal and leatherback brace she frequently wore in the wake of the accident.

Kahlo continued to paint her intense and often macabre self-portraits (many of which depicted her wearing traditional Mexican costumes and highlighted her prominent unibrow) for the rest of her life. She and Rivera divorced and later reconciled, but she was in failing health. In 1953, illness forced her to attend her first solo exhibition in an ambulance, and that same year, nearly 40 years after the bus accident, old wounds flared up again, leading to the amputation of a gangrenous right leg. Seemingly well aware that the end was near, she took to sketching images of angels and skeletons in her journal. She died, aged just 47, on July 13, 1954, of a pulmonary embolism.

PHOTOS: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera's Colorful Love Story

1_during a pause in the 'fake trial' of Leon TROTSKY. Diego RIVERA, a mural painter and militant in the Mexican Revolutionary Communist Patry had let TROTSKY stay at his home during his exile. (Photo by Keystone-France:Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

2_Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) read and work in a studio. Kahlo's self-portrait, 'The Two Fridas' (1939), hangs in the background with other works. (Photo by Hulton Archive:Getty Images)

3_Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) pets a monkey, possibly Fulang-Chang, clinging to the jacket of her husband, Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957). (Photo by Wallace Marly:Hulton Archive:Getty Images)

4_Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) walk on a path through their garden, which is filled with stone statues and a bird cage, Mexico. Kahlo is holding a monkey. (Photo by Wallace Marly:Hulton Archive:Getty Images)

5_Diego Rivera, celebrated artist and dissident Communist, who charged, Dec. 8, that German Nazis and Stalin Communists were 'converging' Mexico into a base of operations against all of the Americas

6_Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) and Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957) stand together with a pet dog in front of thatchted-roof hut which houses a number of archeological artifacts, Mexico City, Mexico, 1940s. (Photo by Hulton Archive:Getty Images)

7_Frieda and Diego Kahlo standing in doorway, circa 1932. (Photo by Fotosearch:Getty Images).

8_Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) and Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957) stand together with a pet monkey in front of thatchted-roof hut which houses a number of archeological artifacts, Mexico City, Mexico, 1940s. (Photo by Graphic House:Getty Images)

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Art History and Artists

Frida kahlo.

• Occupation: Artist
• Born: July 6, 1907 Mexico City, Mexico
• Died: July 13, 1954 Mexico City, Mexico
• Famous works: Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, The Two Fridas, Memory, the Heart, Henry Ford Hospital
• Style/Period: Surrealism

• Her full name is Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon.
• In 1984, Mexico declared the works of Frida Kahlo part of the country's national cultural heritage.
• Her painting The Frame was the first painting by a Mexican artist acquired by the Louvre.
• Her paintings often featured aspects of Aztec Mythology and Mexican folklore.
• The major motion picture Frida told the story of her life and earned 6 Academy Award nominations.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

• Art History
• U.S. History

Frida Kahlo

Born on July 6, 1907, her real name is Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón. Her dad was a German immigrant, and her mom was Spanish and American Indian. She was the third out of four siblings, all girls. She also had two half-sisters from her father’s previous marriage.

The Mexican Revolution started in 1910, when she was three years old. She remembered when the gun shots would begin, her mother would usher her into the house and pray. Sometimes, revolutionaries would hop the fence to their yard, and her mom would feed them. Later in life, she would tell people that she was born in 1910, to say she was a product of the revolution, because she sympathized with them.

At the age of six, she contracted polio, which left her right leg considerably thinner than the left. To hide it, she would always wear long, colorful skirts so the defect would not show. She loved to play sports, especially boxing with the neighborhood kids. She was what we say now-a-days a “tom boy.”

In 1922, Frida enrolled in a Preparatoria, which was a girl’s school that is similar to a college at her mother’s request. There were only 35 girls that went to the school, and it was one of the best in all of Mexico. She was going to be a nurse, or something in the medical field. Unfortunately, on September 17, 1925, a bus that she was riding on crashed into a trolley. She almost died, but her injuries turned out to be treatable, however severe they were. Her spinal column, collar bone, ribs, pelvis, and right leg were broken, and her right foot and shoulder were dislocated. The worst part though, an iron handle bar had pierced her abdomen, destroying her reproductive parts and causing internal bleeding.

She spent a majority of the next year in a full body cast, and took up painting to pass time. All her life, this accident haunted her. Sometimes, she would have periods of extreme pain, and would be bed ridden for a few weeks up to a month. She had over 35 surgeries to fix her broken bones. Her spinal column would never be fully heal though, and she wore a back brace to support it for the rest of her life, (although, she never wore it in public). She had to learn to walk again, and her family considered it a miracle that she did.

After she left the hospital, she didn’t go back to finish her schooling. Instead, she kept painting. She felt as if it helped her express her feelings, even when she couldn’t. Her main subject was herself, for, according to her, “I paint myself because I am often alone, and I am the subject I know best.” One of her most famous is The Broken Column, painted in 1940. She has her back brace on, and her top half is nude. Her body is pierced by many nails, and she is crying. This painting reflects her frustration about the accident. The column that is her spine is broken, like her back, and the nails represent the amount of pain she was and is in. Like all her pictures, it is very personal, and expresses all her emotions in one image.

During the few years after the accident, she met Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist artist. He recognized her talent, and encouraged her to paint more. They fell in love, and in 1929, they were married, but her mother highly disapproved. The relationship was rocky from the start. Diego was jealous that Frida might become more famous than him, and he was angry that she could not bear any children. Frida was frustrated at herself for her inability to have kids, beacause she really wished that she could. In turn, Diego started cheating on Frida, and she started cheating too. Frida was bisexual, and Diego didn’t mind when she had a female partner, but he became insanely jealous when she had another male one. She even cheated with the women that Diego would cheat on her with. It was when Frida found out that Diego had had an affair with her sister that they finally divorced.

In 1939, at the request of Andre Breton, a Surrealist artist, that she went to Paris. She brought some of her work with her, and it was displayed with the other Surrealist work. One of her paintings, The Frame , was bought by the Louvre, and at it was the work by a Mexican artist to be purchased by a big, renowned museum.

Diego and Frida remarried in 1940, for they had been getting along since they had divorced. Again, this relationship was just like the first one, and they just separated for good. Both of them were communists, and they invited Leon Trotsky and his wife over when they were visiting Mexico. The Russians stayed in their houses with them, and eventually moved to Mexico when they became politically disfavored by Stalin.

A few days before she died, Frida wrote in her diary, “I hope the exit is joyful-and I hope I never return.” Frida hated her life when she was older, because her injuries hurt her more than ever, and the leg that had been broken had to be amputated for it had contracted gangrene. On July 13, 1954, she passed away. Diego, late made a statement, saying that the day Frida died was the worst day of his life, because he realized that when he was with her he was the happiest, and that he regretted not appreciating her more while he had the chance.

Frida only became famous in the 1980’s when the feminists were reviving all artwork by women. Her contribution to art was finally recognized, and now is one of the most prominent artists of all time. The symbolism in her art keeps her from being classified as a Surrealist, and her significant influence in Mexican culture makes it unique.

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• Cultura Genial
• Frases y discursos

Las 9 frases de Frida Kahlo más inspiradoras (explicadas)

Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) es una de las figuras más populares en el imaginario colectivo. La artista mexicana ha traspasado fronteras con una obra llena de simbolismos, muy representativa de la identidad latinoamericana.

Su vida estuvo marcada por el sufrimiento que logró convertir en arte. Así, sus pinturas están cruzadas por el dolor y la expresión de un mundo interior en el que abundan la luz y la oscuridad.

En el siguiente listado se pueden encontrar algunas de sus frases más famosas en las que reflexiona sobre la existencia, el amor y la superación personal.

El arte más poderoso de la vida es hacer del dolor un talismán que cura, una mariposa que renace florecida en fiesta de colores

Frida Kahlo tuvo que enfrentar diversas situaciones complejas en su vida. En 1913, cuando tenía seis años, contrajo poliomielitis, una enfermedad muy dolorosa que le dejó una secuela permanente: su pierna derecha era mucho más delgada que la izquierda.

Más tarde, en 1925, tuvo un accidente que marcó su existencia. El autobús en el que viajaba fue impactado por un tranvía y un tubo de hierro le perforó la pelvis y fracturó su columna vertebral en tres partes. Además, tuvo fracturas en la clavícula, en dos costillas y en la pierna derecha, ya afectada desde pequeña.

Debido a la gravedad de las heridas, tuvo que estar más de un año en reposo y nunca logró recuperarse del todo. Esta situación coartó sus posibilidades de seguir estudiando en la universidad y fue así que comenzó a pintar, lo que la llevó a convertirse en una gran artista.

Aun así, no sólo se trató de dolor físico, sino que tuvo que lidiar con la imposibilidad de ser madre y los múltiples engaños de su marido. Todo esto se convirtió en combustible para una obra que rebosa color y fantasía.

Pies para qué los quiero, si tengo alas para volar

La artista padeció durante toda su vida diversos dolores e incomodidades, debido al accidente que sufrió en su juventud. Tuvo que someterse a numerosas operaciones y le dijeron que quizás no volvería a caminar. Por ello, aprendió que, a pesar de las adversidades, era necesario encontrar dentro de sí misma la fuerza para salir adelante.

En 1953 tuvieron que amputarle la pierna por sus complicaciones de salud. En esa época escribió esta frase en su diario como una especie de motivación, además de enaltecer el poder que tiene la imaginación en la vida del ser humano. Gracias a ella, era capaz de resistir.

Descubre más sobre Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar

Tan absurdo y fugaz es nuestro paso por este mundo, que solo me deja tranquila el saber que he sido auténtica, que he logrado ser lo más parecido a mi misma

Las diversas experiencias que atravesó a lo largo de su vida, le hicieron entender que la existencia debía entenderse como un valioso regalo. Por ello, lo más importante era descubrirse a sí misma y ser honesta con su esencia.

Así, cada desafío que enfrentó pudo sortearlo de manera creativa. Cuando tuvo que usar un corset de fierro, decidió adoptar un nuevo tipo de vestimenta que terminó por convertirse en su estilo, por el que es reconocida hasta el día de hoy.

Me pinto a mí misma, porque soy a quien mejor conozco

Gran parte de la obra de la artista se compone de autorretratos. Cuando la acusaron de ser egocéntrica al escogerse siempre como tema, declaró que lo hacía porque era a quien mejor conocía.

Con el tiempo, la frase se convirtió en una defensa del autoconocimiento. No hay nada mejor que conocerse en profundidad a uno mismo, para así tener las herramientas para desarrollar el amor propio y la fuerza de voluntad para el cambio.

Enamórate de ti, de la vida y luego de quien tú quieras

Esta es una de las frases más famosas de Frida Kahlo. Aunque mantuvo una relación compleja con su pareja, Diego Rivera, siempre consideró el amor como uno de los grandes motores de su vida.

Aquí busca establecer la importancia de quererse a uno mismo y la existencia que se lleva antes de poder establecer un vínculo romántico con alguien más.

Pinto flores para que así no mueran

Dentro del imaginario de Frida Kahlo están muy presentes las flores y el mundo natural. A pesar de que muchas veces trabajó temas como el dolor o la angustia, siempre se encontraban revestidos de color y energía.

Amurallar el propio sufrimiento es arriesgarte a que te devore desde el interior

El dolor fue uno de los grandes temas dentro de la obra de la artista. En sus cuadros expresó directamente sus emociones. Por ejemplo, en "La columna rota" (1944) muestra la realidad que tuvo que enfrentar después del accidente.

Frida Kahlo fue sometida a más de 30 operaciones y se vio obligada a utilizar corsés de metal y otros artilugios para intentar llevar una vida normal. En el autorretrato se muestra atravesada por miles de clavos que simbolizan el constante dolor. Sin embargo, su mirada se mantiene firme y estoica ante el martirio.

Por ello, en esta frase destaca lo necesario que es sentir cada una de nuestras emociones. Sólo al procesar el sufrimiento, se puede hacer algo para enfrentarlo.

Y una cosa puedo jurar: yo que me enamoré de tus alas, jamás te las voy a querer cortar

Esta es una de las frases que más se recuerdan de la pintora. En ella busca establecer que en una relación romántica siempre se debe garantizar la libertad del otro.

Así, asegura que el motivo por el que se enamoró de su pareja fue debido a su genio creativo e imaginación. Esta va a ser una característica que busca honrar y respetar.

¿Se pueden inventar verbos? Quiero decirte uno: Yo te cielo, así mis alas se extienden enormes para amarte sin medida

Para Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera fue el amor y centro de su existencia. Eso es lo que intenta describir en esta frase, donde declara que las palabras no son suficientes para expresar lo que sentía por su marido.

Así, decide jugar con la idea del cielo como un nuevo verbo que sea capaz de demostrar de una manera renovada la intensidad de su pasión.

Ver también:

• Frida Kahlo: biografía, pinturas y características de las obras de la artista mexicana
• Obras claves de Frida Kahlo
• Cuadro Las Dos Fridas de Frida Kahlo: significado y análisis
• Frases estoicas que cambiarán tu perspectiva sobre la vida
• Frases de libros famosos para reflexionar sobre la vida

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Official Trailer for Stellar 'Frida' Documentary About Artist Frida Kahlo

by Alex Billington March 7, 2024 Source: YouTube

"Many lives would not be enough to paint everything I want." Prime Video has unveiled the official trailer for the documentary film Frida , which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival a few months back. Not to be confused with the narrative feature also called Frida (from 2002 which won Best Original Score & Best Make-Up Oscars), this is the comprehensive documentary version of her story. Frida is a raw, magical journey into the life of iconic artist Frida Kahlo , told through her own words from diaries, letters, essays, interviews. Vividly brought to life with lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork. An intensive journey spanning two years, director Carla Gutiérrez and her formidable team of artisans, most of whom are women and proudly Latine, crafted a singular cinematic experience that could be no ordinary art history lesson. A living portrait emboldened by the magical realism befitting Kahlo's remarkable life emerges. Yet, her voice ultimately remains supreme, a complex and powerful "multitude of Fridas": fearless, seductive, defiant, vulnerable, raucous, wonderfully alive. If that isn't a compelling pitch, I don't know what is! Enjoy.

Here's the main official trailer (+ poster) for Carla Gutiérrez's doc Frida , from Prime Video's YouTube :

Official synopsis from Prime Video: An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo , the Frida documentary is told through her own words for the very first time, drawn from her famed illustrated diary, revealing letters, essays, and candid print interviews — and brought vividly to life by lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork. The feature film directorial debut of acclaimed documentary editor Carla Gutiérrez , Frida posits a striking context as to why the artist – and her art – remains as powerful as ever. Covering more than 40 years of her life, the filmmakers received unrestricted access to research materials, much never shown to the public before. What is extraordinary about Kahlo's life & art is how her images would galvanize multiple generations of admirers worldwide, doing more than simply solidifying her status as a modern artist of timeless import.

Frida is directed by acclaimed editor / filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez , making her directorial debut with this film, after working as an editor on docs including La Corona, Tales of the Waria, Reportero, Las Marthas, Kingdom of Shadows, When Two Worlds Collide, RBG, The Last Out , and Julia previously. She also edited this film. Produced by Katia Maguire, Sara Bernstein, Justin Wilkes, Loren Hammonds, Alexandra Johnes. This initially premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it also won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award. Amazon will debut Gutiérrez's Frida doc in select US theaters in Mexico on May 9th this summer. It'll be streaming on Prime Video worldwide starting March 14th, 2024 coming soon.

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TUD x Frida Kahlo: Inside The Ugly Duck’s Latest Art-Fuelled Collaboration

Two striking art toys from the Dubai-based company The Ugly Duck pay tribute to the spirit of the iconic artist

Known for her unique artistic style and passion for life, Frida Kahlo remains a giant of the contemporary art world. The Mexican artist left behind a remarkable legacy of vibrant and highly distinctive artwork in her short life – a legacy that is now being honoured with a pair of sculptures by Dubai-based company The Ugly Duck (TUD).

Each limited to 350 highly collectible pieces, TUD x Frida Kahlo “Flowers” and TUD x Frida Kahlo “Viva la Vida” represent the power of art to transcend adversity and reveal the beauty within us all, a belief shared by both the famed artist and TUD.

Inspired by her love for floral motifs that often appeared in her art, TUD x Frida Kahlo “Flowers” is a 60cm piece that celebrates life, beauty, and resilience while paying homage to the powerful emotion embedded in her paintings.

TUD x Frida Kahlo “Viva la Vida”, meanwhile, echoes the profound themes of life and death that ran throughout Frida’s output until her death, aged 47, in 1954. This 90cm piece is inspired by El Día de Muertos (the Day of the Dead), a national Mexican holiday, which was a significant influence for Frida.

Moving depictions of individuality and self-expression, both TUD pieces demonstrate Frida’s artistic authenticity, her determination to overcome challenges in life, and her famous motto ‘Viva la vida!’ that was the heartbeat of her existence.

Consistently drawn to geniuses who refuse to conform to conventional categorisation, TUD feel an innate connection to Frida and her philosophy, making this latest release of striking art toys a perfectly symbiotic artistic event. Previously, TUD have produced innovative art pieces that paid tribute to the work of the iconic Jean-Michel Basquiat, LA artist PunkMeTender, the Pantone Color Institute and the beloved Chupa Chups lollipop.

For more information about the TUD x Frida Kahlo collection that celebrates a true visionary, visit tudtoy.com.

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