Frida Kahlo
The pain and strength of the self-portrait.
Frida Kahlo was badly injured in a bus accident as a young woman and painted herself again and again. Her pictures combine Mexican folk art, politics and the body.
Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán outside Mexico City, in the Blue House, Casa Azul, where she also died. Her father was a German-born photographer and her mother was of Spanish and indigenous Mexican descent. At the age of six she contracted polio, and one leg became thinner. She studied at an elite school in Mexico City and wanted to become a doctor.
In 1925 she was badly injured in a bus accident in which an iron rod pierced her pelvis. During her long stay in hospital she began to paint, lying in bed with a mirror above her. She suffered pain and underwent many operations for the rest of her life. In 1929 she married the famous muralist Diego Rivera. They divorced in 1939 but remarried the following year.
About a third of her paintings are self-portraits. She painted on a small scale in bright colours, inspired by Mexican folk art and Catholic votive pictures. She often shows her injured body, her miscarriages and her pain, but also her political and Mexican identity, with traditional dress, monkeys, parrots and plants. The Two Fridas of 1939 is in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and The Broken Column of 1944 in the Museo Dolores Olmedo.
The Surrealist André Breton called her a Surrealist, but she rejected the label, saying that she never painted dreams but her own reality. Her exhibition in Paris in 1939 led to the Louvre buying one of her self-portraits. She was a communist and had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky, who lived in the Blue House in 1937. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico came in 1953, and she arrived there in her bed.
That same year her right leg was amputated. She died in 1954, aged 47. The Blue House became a museum in 1958. From the 1980s she became a world-famous icon of feminism, Mexican identity and personal expression, and in 2021 one of her self-portraits sold for a record price for Latin American art.