FRIDA KAHLO · 1907–1954
Born on July 6, 1907, in the Blue House in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón turned pain, love and identity into some of the most powerful images of the twentieth century. She painted what she lived — and in doing so, gave the world permission to be wholly, unapologetically itself.
Painting from bed
At six, polio left her right leg weaker than the left. At eighteen, a bus accident shattered her spine and pelvis and kept her bedridden for months. Her mother fitted a special easel to the bed and hung a mirror above it — and Frida began to paint the subject she knew best: herself. Of her roughly 200 works, 55 are self-portraits.
Mexico, Diego and the world
She married muralist Diego Rivera in 1929 and wore her Tehuana dresses as a statement of Mexican identity. In 1939 her self-portrait The Frame became the first work by a twentieth-century Mexican artist acquired by the Louvre.
Viva la Vida
Days before her death on July 13, 1954, Frida painted ripe watermelons and wrote across one of them: Viva la Vida — long live life. Today the Blue House is the Frida Kahlo Museum, and her flowers, her colors and her courage belong to everyone who still finds themselves in her work.
