Frida Kahlo (1907 to 1954) was the Mexican painter who made her own face her subject. The fact that surprises people most is how she attended the only solo exhibition she ever had in Mexico: lying in a bed that had been set up for her inside the gallery, after arriving by ambulance.
She had been told not to come, in the same year her right leg was amputated.
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The bed seems easy to explain. Most tellings begin with a bus accident in Mexico City in 1925, when she was 18, and let it account for everything that came after.
But her troubles did not begin there. Polio at six, in 1913, had already left her right leg shorter. Even her birth year was something she changed: she told people it was 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution broke out, and she was born in 1907.
The rest of the story sits in places most tellings never visit: a road in 1925, a gallery in Paris, a locked bathroom in Coyoacán.
What You'll Discover
What she did to her birthday.
What covered her on the road.
The tiny portrait Paris bought.
Who put her on show.
What stayed locked in the bathroom.