Frida Kahlo

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. Her art was shaped by her experiences, including her lifelong health struggles and disability after a near-fatal bus accident, her Mexican and European heritage, and her complicated marriage to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (married 1929, divorced 1939, remarried 1940). During her lifetime Kahlo was respected in creative circles in Mexico and elsewhere—she participated in a handful of exhibitions, sold a small number of paintings, and received several commissions—but she struggled to make money from her art. Her work was often overshadowed by the murals of Rivera, one of Mexico’s most celebrated painters. Kahlo’s reputation grew steadily after her death, however, reaching what some critics called “Fridamania” by the 21st century.

Early years and bus accident

Key Dates in Frida Kahlo’s Life

• 1907: Born in Coyoacán, Mexico, on July 6.
• 1913: Contracts polio, which leaves Kahlo with a slight limp.
• 1925: Seriously injured while riding a bus home from school when it collides with a trolley. During her slow recovery Kahlo teaches herself to paint.
• 1929: Marries fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
• 1930–33: Accompanies Rivera to the United States, where he has received commissions for murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City, and loses several pregnancies during her time abroad.
• 1938: Struggles to make money from her art but makes her first major sale when American actor Edward G. Robinson purchases four of her paintings. She also has her first solo exhibition, at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York City. While there, Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce commissions Kahlo to paint a tribute to actress Dorothy Hale, who had died by suicide earlier that year.
• 1939: Shows her work in “Mexique,” a group exhibition at Galerie Renou et Colle, Paris, organized by André Breton. She also sells her painting The Frame to the French government. Later that year she divorces Rivera.
• 1940: Kahlo’s work is shown in the “International Exhibition of Surrealism” at Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City, and in “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. She remarries Rivera at the end of the year.
• 1943–54: Teaches at La Esmeralda (previously known as the Ministry of Public Education’s School of Painting and Sculpture), Mexico City, holding classes from her home at La Casa Azul (“The Blue House”) when she is too ill to travel.
• 1953: Kahlo has her first solo exhibition in her home country, at Galería de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. She attends in a bed because of illness. Her right leg is amputated later that year as a result of gangrene.
• 1954: Dies in her home in Coyoacán, Mexico, on July 13, days after her 47th birthday.

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, an ailment she endured throughout her life.

Kahlo was especially close to her father, 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 riding a bus home from school when it collided with a trolley. She was seriously injured in the accident, with multiple fractures in her spine, right leg, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis. Her shoulder was dislocated, her right foot crushed, and her abdomen and uterus punctured by an iron handrail. She later joked that this was the moment she lost her virginity. The injuries plagued Kahlo for the rest of her life, and she underwent more than 30 medical procedures in subsequent decades.

While bedridden 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 waist-length portrait of herself against a dark background with 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.

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Marriage to Diego Rivera and travels to the United States

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 may have presumed he wanted: that of a traditional Mexican wife.

Kahlo painted that work while traveling in the United States (1930–33) with Rivera, who had received commissions for murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. During this time, she experienced a few 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 woman, shrouded in a white sheet, giving birth.

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First solo exhibitions and travel to Paris

In 1933 Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico, where they lived in a newly constructed house in Mexico City 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 was instrumental in organizing her first solo exhibition, in 1938 at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York City. Breton wrote the introduction to the brochure, describing her as a self-taught Surrealist. That same year Kahlo made one of her first sales; the actor and collector Edward G. Robinson purchased four of her pieces.

Kahlo’s success continued the next year, when her art was included in a group exhibition in Paris. She traveled there on her own and met additional Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp, the only member of the movement she reportedly respected. One of her works, The Frame (c. 1938), was acquired by the French government, making Kahlo the first 20th-century Mexican artist to be included in the state’s collection.