Frida Kahlo (Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo

Calderon) was born on July 6, 1907 in what is

now known as Casa Azul in Coyocon, a town of
Mexico City. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was
German, and had moved to Mexico at a young
age where he remained for the rest of his life,
eventually taking over the photography
business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's
mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, born of
mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, was
Wilhelm's second wife, and raised Frida and her
five sisters in a strict and religious household.
Aside from her mother's rigidity and tendency
toward hysteric outbursts, several events in Kahlo's
childhood affected her psyche for the rest of her life.
At age six, Kahlo contracted polio and was forced to
remain in bed for nine months, walking with a limp
after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very
close, enrolled his daughter at the German College in
Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of
European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Kahlo's mixed European and Mexican heritage
permanently affected the artist's approach to her
life and artwork.
Following the Mexican Revolution and Minister of Education Jose
Vasconcelos's new education policy, in 1922, Kahlo was one of 35
girls admitted to the National Preparatory School, where she
planned to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. The
artist befriended a dissident group of students known as the
Cachuchas, who confirmed Kahlo's rebellious spirit and her interest
in poetry and literature.
In 1925, Kahlo was involved in a nearly fatal bus accident, where
she suffered multiple fractures throughout her body and a
crushed pelvis. She spent nine months in the hospital, immobile
and bound in a plaster corset. During her long recovery she
began experimenting in small-scale autobiographical portraiture,
permanently abandoning her medical pursuits.
 During her years at the National Preparatory
School, Kahlo also took drawing lessons in
Fernando Fernandez's studio where she
acquired training in draftsmanship. At age 15,
Kahlo witnessed Diego Rivera painting
the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater
of the Preparatory School, a moment of
infatuation and fascination for the young
artist that she would pursue later in life. But,
despite these directions, Kahlo's most
influential early experimentation with painting
was during the months of convalescence at
home after her bus accident.
Gifted with a set of paints from her
father, Kahlo spent hours studying
herself, and more importantly,
confronting existential questions raised
by her trauma such as dissociation
from identity, death, and interiority. The
duality of autobiographical content -
both the physical experience and
interiority of the person - evolved as
the central qualities of Kahlo's painting
practice.
 In 1927, slowly recovering, Kahlo was forced to
contribute to her family's expenses and her medical
bills. In contact with her friends from the Cachuchas
group, Kahlo began to familiarize herself with the
artistic and Communist circles in Mexico City,
including figures such as the militant photo-journalist
Tina Modotti and the Cuban revolutionary Julio
Antonio Mella.
In 1928, having officially joined the
Mexican Communist Party, Kahlo sought
out Diego Rivera in order to discuss a
possible career as an artist. One year
later, the two married and moved to
Cuernavaca where Kahlo devoted herself
to indigenous themes in painting, at
times even embodying Mexican folkloric
rituals wearing a traditional Tehuana
costume for her spouse.
 By the early 1930, Kahlo's painting evolved to
include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity,
a facet of her artwork that stemmed from her
exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in
Mexico and her interest in preserving the revival
of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe.
Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her
Germanic roots is evidenced in her change of name
from Frieda to Frida.
 Concurrently, two failed
pregnancies in the early
1930s, in addition to the
revival of Mexican
folkloric expression such
as the ex-voto,
contributed to Kahlo's
simultaneously harsh and
beautiful representation
of the female experience
through symbolism and
autobiography.
 Throughout the 1930s, life in Mexico was tense
for Kahlo: Rivera was an unfaithful husband and
the revolutionary climate leading up to the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War made for an
explosive atmosphere. Kahlo separated from
Rivera in 1935, renting a flat in Mexico City, and
began a short-lived affair with the Japanese
sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The following year, Kahlo
joined the Fourth International and returned to
the Casa Azul, which became a meeting point for
international intellectuals, artists, and activists
and where she ensured the safety of Leon
Trotsky and his wife.
 Several of Kahlo's masterpieces, including The Two
Fridas (1939), were painted in the late1930s and early 19s and
reflect the difficulty of this period. In a visit to Mexico City in
1938, the founder of Surrealism, Andr Breton, was enchanted
with Kahlo's painting, and hosted the artist's first exhibition in
Paris in 1939 at Galerie Renou et Colle. The show was
enormously successful; however, the Western, romanticized
vision of pastoral Mexico by members of the European
bourgeois disgusted Kahlo, though she would exhibit with the
Surrealists in the Mexico City exhibition Apparition: the Great
Sphinx of the Night in January 1940, which was considered the
first international exhibition of Surrealism in the Americas.
Following Trotsky's assassination,
Kahlo joined Rivera in San Francisco
in September of 1940. Kahlo had fallen
ill, and was treated by her private
doctor, Dr. Eloesser. Kahlo remarried
Rivera shortly after, and, returned to
Mexico City, where the two
maintained separate flats. Kahlo
continued to dote on her muse,
sending him love notes wherever he
was working.
 Throughout the 1940s, the artist's work grew in notoriety
and acclaim from international collectors, and was included
in several group shows in Mexico. In 1946, Kahlo received a
national prize for her painting Moses, and the year after she
was offered a teaching position at La Esmeralda. Meanwhile,
the artist grew progressively ill from from the long-term
effects of her childhood traumas. By June 1946, Kahlo could
no longer remain upright and underwent an unsuccessful
bone-graft operation on her spine in New York.
In 1950, Kahlo was again hospitalized for nine months at the English
Hospital in Mexico. Kahlo continued to paint in her final years while
also maintaining her political activism, protesting nuclear testing
by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953
at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, the artist's first solo show in
Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance and had her
four-poster bed placed at the center of the gallery. Kahlo died on
July 13, 1954 at Casa Azul, which is today the Frida Kahlo Museum.
 A strong individualist
who was disengaged
from any official
artistic movement,
Kahlo's artwork has
been associated with
primitivism, indigenism,
and Surrealism.