Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, near Mexico City. She died in the same town in 1954, at the age of 47.
She painted mostly herself, in small self-portraits shaped by a body broken in a bus crash at eighteen, a stormy marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera and a life in left-wing politics.
For years she was known above all as Rivera's wife. Today her face is one of the most recognized in the world.
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The Coyoacán of her childhood was still a village on the edge of Mexico City. The family lived there in a blue house, the Casa Azul, and she would spend most of her life within its walls.
She later claimed to have been born in 1910, three years after the truth. That was the year the Mexican Revolution began, the decade of armed uprisings that shaped modern Mexico.
The first blow came early. At six she caught polio, which left her right leg shorter and thinner than the left, and other children bullied her for it. Her father, Guillermo, a photographer who had emigrated from Germany, pushed her into sports to rebuild the leg. He also taught her to use a camera.
In 1922 she entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, an elite school where only 35 of roughly 2,000 students were girls. She planned to study medicine.
She also joined the Cachuchas, a band of nine rebellious classmates who played pranks, staged plays and argued about philosophy. And at the school she first saw Diego Rivera, a muralist, a painter of huge pictures made directly on public walls, who had come to cover one of its walls.
On the afternoon of September 17, 1925, she boarded a bus home from school with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias. A streetcar was coming toward them from the other direction.
A bus, a handrail and a mirror
The streetcar hit the bus. Gómez Arias climbed out with only minor injuries. When he reached Frida, he saw that something had gone right through her body.
What You'll Discover
What an iron handrail did to her at eighteen.
Why she married the same man twice.
What stands where her spine should be.
What she refused to be called.
Who moved into her house.
Why her death is still questioned.