Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who became one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century. She was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a neighborhood in Mexico City. She died in 1954 at age 47. Kahlo is known for her bold self-portraits, her use of bright Mexican folk colors, and the way she painted her own pain and dreams onto the canvas.

Kahlo's life was shaped by two early disasters. When she was six, she got polio, a disease that left her right leg thinner and weaker than her left. Then, at age 18, she was riding a bus in Mexico City when it crashed into a streetcar. A metal handrail went through her body. Doctors did not think she would live. She spent months in bed wearing a body cast.

While she was recovering, her parents set up a special easel above her bed and put a mirror on the ceiling. Stuck on her back, Kahlo started painting herself. She had planned to be a doctor. Instead, she became an artist.

In 1929, Kahlo married Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican muralist 20 years older than she was. Their marriage was stormy. They divorced in 1939, then married each other again a year later. Both painted, but their styles were very different. Rivera painted huge public murals about workers and history. Kahlo painted small, personal scenes from her own life.

Her paintings often look like dreams. In one, she sits with a pet monkey. In another, her spine is shown as a broken column of stone. Many art critics called her work surrealist, a style that mixes dreams and reality. Kahlo disagreed. "I never painted dreams," she said. "I painted my own reality."

Kahlo also loved Mexico's history and folk traditions. She wore long, colorful skirts from the Tehuana people of southern Mexico. She filled her home with Aztec art, Mexican toys, and stray animals. Her house, called La Casa Azul, or the Blue House, is now a museum that thousands of people visit each year.

For most of her life, Kahlo was less famous than her husband. That changed after her death. Starting in the 1970s, new audiences discovered her work, and her fame kept growing. Today her face appears on posters, T-shirts, and Mexican money. Her painting Diego and I sold in 2021 for almost 35 million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a work by a Latin American artist.