Frida Kahlo

(Mexican, 1907–1954)

Frida Kahlo was a celebrated Mexican painter known for her complex self-portraits. Inspired by pre-Columbian artifacts and Mexican folk art, Kahlo produced bizarre yet beautiful works which the Surrealist André Breton once described as a “ribbon around a bomb.” “My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently,” she once said of her work. “My painting contains in it the message of pain.” Born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, Mexico to a German-born father and Mexican mother, she studied philosophy and medicine as a youth. At the age of 18, Kahlo was involved in a traumatic bus accident that left her badly injured and confined to a bed for months. During her slow recovery, she took up painting from her bed, and subsequently abandoned her academic pursuits. Able to leave her house once more in 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party and through mutual friends was introduced to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. The two artists married in 1929, maintaining a tumultuous and often combative relationship over the years, in which both were unfaithful. Kahlo’s several lovers included the photographer Nickolas Murray, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. Though Kahlo and Rivera divorced in 1939, they remarried a year later. During the following decade, Kahlo painted prolifically and was the subject exhibitions in both the United States and Europe, despite chronic pain and destabilizing health problems. She died in Mexico City, Mexico on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47. In 1958, her home, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in which she was born and died, was converted into the Museo Frida Kahlo. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the National Museum of Women in the Art in Washington, D.C., among others.