Frida Kahlo

At the age of six, she was affected by polio. In 1925, she met with an accident that resulted in a severe spinal injury, broke her ribs, pelvis, dislocated her shoulder and right foot and also damaged her uterus and abdomen.

In 1929, she married Diego Rivera, a Mexican painter. However, the marriage was not a fulfilling one. She, being a bisexual, had affairs with both women and men. They eventually divorced 1939.

All her life, she suffered from health problems and underwent several operations as a result of the deadly accident she met in 1925.

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoac�n, Mexico to Guillermo Kahlo, a photographer and Matilde Calder�n y Gonz�lez.

In 1922, she started attending ‘Escuela Nacional Preparatoria’, one of Mexico’s leading schools. She grew up at the time of the Mexican Revolution and witnessed many incidents of violence and armed struggle.

In 1924, she learned photography skills from her father and was taught how to use the camera and develop photographs. This experience would later help in her future endeavours.

Before the bus accident of 1925, she worked as an apprentice under Fernando Fernandez, a commercial paint maker. He taught her the basics of drawing and copy printing.

On September 17, 1925, she suffered serious injuries as a result of an accident - the bus she was travelling in collided with a trolley car. She suffered severe and multiple injuries.

In 1930, she moved to San Francisco with her husband Diego, where he had been offered a project to paint murals. She met many prominent personalities from the field of art and painted ‘Frieda and Diego Rivera’, a portrait.

In 1931, she displayed her work to the public for the first time at the ‘Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists’. Here, she displayed ‘Frieda and Diego Rivera’, a portrait of her and Diego Rivera.

In May 1931, she returned alone to Mexico and her husband joined her in June. In November that year, she travelled to New York with her husband via sea to attend his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1937, four of her paintings were showcased at the Galeria de Arte, National Autonomous University of Mexico. This was the first public exhibition of her art work in Mexico.

In 1938, she met French poet and surrealist Andre Breton, who had a look at her unfinished painting ‘What the Water Gave Me’ He labelled it as a surreal work and offered to display her art in Paris.

Her self-portrait 'Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird’ is one of her seminal works. In this painting she depicted herself as a victim, wearing a necklace of thorns. This has been showcased in over 25 museums in the United States and also in countries like Australia, Canada, France, and Spain.

Her painting, ‘The Broken Column’, painted right after she underwent spine surgery, is one of her most important works and was a metaphorical depiction of the suffering. This painting is symbolic of her physical and psychological struggles.