Kahlo, Frida (1907-1954)

Mexican painter. Using vivid colour and a naive style that was deliberately based on Mexican folk art, she created deeply personal, moving, and emotional paintings. Often referred to as an ‘autobiographical’ artist, she is known primarily for her surreal self-portraits in which she explored her physical disabilities (she was crippled in a bus accident when 15), her stormy marriage with the artist Diego Rivera, and her involvement with communism and the Mexican revolution. Her paintings, such as The Little Deer (1946; private collection, Houston), are rich in symbolism and personal imagery. Although her work was prized throughout her career, its popularity rose in the 1980s, and she is now considered one of the most exciting and influential artists of the 20th century.

Kahlo's love of indigenous Mexican culture was reflected in both her artistic style and her fashion - she always wore traditional Mexican clothing. Her paintings, which were often small in size, were based on Mexican retablos, small religious pictures dedicated in Mexican churches. Although her career was short, Kahlo was well known among her contemporaries in Europe and the USA. While many European surrealists wanted to place her work within their movement, Kahlo herself felt that, although stylistically her work could be perceived as surreal, or dreamlike, her subject matter was her actual reality and not, in fact, a dream.

Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico, just outside Mexico City. Her father was a Hungarian-Jewish photographer from Germany and her mother was of American Indian and Spanish descent. At the age of six Kahlo contracted polio and was left with a limp, the first of the physical traumas she was to suffer in her life. Although she studied art at the prestigious National Preparatory School, she did not really begin to paint until a bus accident in 1925 left her with a broken spinal column, pelvis, and collarbone, as well as a severely fractured leg and crushed right foot. Confined to bed, and in a full body cast, she used a lap easel and a mirror on the ceiling to paint the first of many self-portraits. The accident incapacitated Kahlo for the rest of her life and eventually led to her death; not only was she unable to have children, but she also suffered long periods of exhaustion and numerous operations.

In 1929 Kahlo married the painter and muralist Diego Rivera. Although they greatly supported each other's art, they had an extremely turbulent relationship. Both had extra-marital affairs; Kahlo had a relationship with the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, for whom she painted Self-portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky: Between the Curtains (1937; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, DC). The painting, which depicts Kahlo standing between the curtains she made for Trotsky, as if on stage, is laden with cultural and personal imagery. Many of her self-portraits, such as Self-portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on my mind) (1943; Gelman Collection, Mexico City), are based on her feelings about Rivera.

Kahlo and Diego divorced in 1940, but were married again one year later. As her health deteriorated, Kahlo continued to paint - depicting her suffering in sometimes graphic self-portraits. In 1953 Kahlo opened her first major Mexican exhibition on a stretcher; less than a year later she died in her sleep. Two other major exhibitions of her work, in New York and Paris, had been held during her lifetime. Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait was published in 1995.