FRIDA KAHLO

Frida Kahlo (Mexico, 1907 – 1954) 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 that surrealist André Breton once described as “a ribbon around a bomb.”

Born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, Mexico, to a German father and a Mexican mother. In her youth, she studied philosophy and medicine. At age 18, she was involved in a traumatic bus accident, sustaining severe injuries and leaving her bedridden for several months.

During her slow recovery, she began to paint herself from her bed, consequently abandoning her academic studies. By 1927, she was able to leave her house again, joining the Mexican Communist Party and meeting the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera through mutual friends.

The two artists married in 1929, maintaining a tumultuous and often conflictual relationship for years, in which both were unfaithful. Her 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. Over the next decade, Kahlo painted extensively and was the subject of exhibitions in both the USA 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), where she was born and died, was converted into the Museo Frida Kahlo.

Today, the artist’s work is part of 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 Arts in Washington, D.C., among others.