Frida Kahlo

Kahlo's path to art was shaped by adversity. Polio disabled her as a child, and at 18 a bus accident left her with lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she began painting, using a special easel and a mirror to see herself. She later said, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." Her early work was influenced by European masters and avant-garde movements, but after moving to Cuernavaca with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, she embraced Mexican folk art and the retablo style.

Kahlo's marriage to Rivera in 1929 was central to her life, though they divorced and remarried. Their travels in Mexico and the United States exposed her to new influences. She had her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938, arranged by André Breton, who called her work "a ribbon around a bomb." The show was a success, and a subsequent Paris exhibition led the Louvre to purchase her painting The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist in their collection. Despite health decline in the 1940s, she taught at La Esmeralda and founded the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana.

Kahlo identified as bisexual, and her art has been embraced by the LGBTQ+ community, feminists, and Chicanos. She was a member of the Mexican Communist Party. Her paintings often mixed realism with fantasy, depicting her chronic pain and political convictions. Works like Broken Column and The Two Fridas reflect her physical and emotional struggles. Her last major solo exhibition in Mexico was in 1953, where she arrived by ambulance and was carried to her bed, which had been moved to the gallery. She died in 1954 at age 47. After decades of relative obscurity, her work was rediscovered in the 1970s, and she became an icon for Mexican and Indigenous traditions.