Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter best known for her vivid self-portraits, which combined her own experience of pain and illness with imagery drawn from Mexican folk art and Indigenous tradition. Working mostly in her family home in Coyoacán, on the edge of Mexico City, she spent the decades after the Mexican Revolution helping to shape a new sense of Mexican identity in art. Little known outside artistic circles at her death in 1954, she has since become one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón came into the world in Coyoacán on 6 July 1907. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a photographer who had emigrated from Germany; her mother, Matilde Calderón, a native of Oaxaca, had a Spanish-descended mother and an Indigenous father. The revolution that began in 1910 hurt her father's business, and Kahlo later liked to claim 1910 as her birth year, calling herself a daughter of the revolution.

Polio at the age of six left her right leg thinner and shorter than the left. In 1922 she entered the elite National Preparatory School, one of only a few dozen girls among about 2,000 students, aiming to study medicine.

On 17 September 1925 the bus she was riding home from school collided with a tram. An iron handrail pierced her pelvis, and her spine, right leg and foot were badly broken. The injuries ended her plans to become a doctor and caused pain and repeated operations for the rest of her life. Confined to bed, she began to paint, with a mirror above her easel.

In 1928, through left-wing friends in the Mexican Communist Party, she met the muralist Diego Rivera, 21 years her senior, and asked him to judge whether she had the talent to become an artist. They married in Coyoacán on 21 August 1929. Their marriage was stormy, marked by infidelities on both sides, a divorce in 1939 and remarriage in December 1940.

From 1930 to 1933 Kahlo followed Rivera to San Francisco, New York and Detroit, where he painted murals for wealthy patrons. She developed her folk-inspired style there, painting small works on metal sheets in the manner of Mexican votive retablos. A miscarriage in Detroit in 1932 inspired her painting Henry Ford Hospital. She disliked much of American society and its contrasts of wealth and hunger.

Back in Mexico, in 1937 she and Rivera helped the exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky obtain asylum, and he lived in Kahlo's Blue House until 1939. The French surrealist André Breton championed her work, and in 1938 she held her first solo exhibition, at a gallery in New York, where she sold about half of the paintings shown. A 1939 show in Paris was less successful, but the Louvre bought her painting The Frame, the first work by a Mexican artist in its collection. Kahlo, for her part, had little patience with the Paris surrealists.

Major works from these years include The Two Fridas (1939) and The Broken Column (1944). In 1943 she began teaching at the national art school known as La Esmeralda, where a group of devoted students became known as Los Fridos.

Her health declined steadily in the 1940s, and a spinal operation in New York in 1945 failed. In April 1953 she attended her first solo exhibition in Mexico lying in her own four-poster bed, carried into the gallery. Her right leg was amputated at the knee that August. She died at home on 13 July 1954, aged 47; the official cause was a pulmonary embolism, though some biographers believe she took an overdose.

Feminist scholars and the Chicano movement revived interest in her work from the late 1970s, and in 1984 Mexico declared her paintings part of the national heritage. In 2025 her 1940 self-portrait The Dream (The Bed) sold for $54.7 million, a record at auction for a woman artist.

Our 1914, 1930 and 1945 maps show Mexico during and after the revolution that framed her life and art.