Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter whose work, mostly small self-portraits, turned physical pain and a contested national identity into one of the most recognisable bodies of art of the twentieth century. Born in Coyoacán in 1907 to a German-born photographer and a Mexican mother, she gave her birth year as 1910 to align herself with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. She contracted polio at six, which left one leg thinner than the other. On 17 September 1925, aged eighteen, the wooden bus she was travelling in was struck by a streetcar; a handrail entered her hip and exited through her pelvis, and she suffered fractures of the spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis and right leg. She began painting during the months on her back, using a mirror fixed above the bed. She endured some thirty operations over her life. She married the muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, twenty years her senior. The marriage involved affairs on both sides — his with her younger sister, hers with women and with Leon Trotsky, who stayed at her Blue House after his exile to Mexico in 1937. They divorced in 1939 and remarried in 1940. Her paintings are frequently described as surrealist, a label she rejected: she said she painted her own reality, not dreams. The Two Fridas of 1939 and Henry Ford Hospital of 1932, made after a miscarriage in Detroit, are unsparing about miscarriage, surgery and the body. She was a committed communist and, in the tradition of Mexicanidad, wore Tehuana dress and used indigenous imagery deliberately. Her first solo show in Mexico came in 1953, when she attended in a bed carried into the gallery. She died in 1954 at forty-seven.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 1954 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: painter
