Biography Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907, she was the daughter of a Mexican-Indian mother and a German father. Her life was to be a long series of physical traumas, and the first of these came early. At age 6 she was stricken with polio, which caused her right leg to shrivel.

When she was 18, she was involved in a serious bus accident which left her with damaged very severely. A metal rod had made a very deep abdominal wound, and her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae were fractured. Frida was forced to stay in bed, while Frida was confined to her bed, her mother brought her a small lap easel, and Frida started to paint. She had studied art before, at the National Preparatory School, where she had met Diego Rivera when he was painting the Creation mural, but Frida had never worked on paintings before. Over her bed, Frida had a mirror so she could see herself, and this was the beginning of her focus on self portraits.

Frida was friend of Tina Modotti, who modelled for Diego Rivera, and through her Frida and Diego met again, and fell in love. They married on August 21st, 1929.

In the fall of 1930 Frida traveled with Diego to San Francisco, where Diego worked on murals at the Pacific Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and in the summer of 1931 they went to New York where Diego had a major exhibition of his work. Then, in the spring of 1932, they moved to Detroit, where Diego worked on a series of murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. At this time Frida had become pregnant, however, after the bus accident in 1925 she could not have children, and complications arose. Frida's trauma in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit is illustrated in her paintings.

In 1939 Diego and Frida divorced, and Frida felt very sad and distraught by this. She produced many fine paintings in this period, but being devastated by the divorce, she consumed a lot of liquor, and her health deteriorated rapidly. She had circulatory and other problems associated with the incidents she had had before.

In 1940, Kahlo, threatened by gangrene, had her right leg amputated below the knee. It was a tremendous blow to someone who had invested so much in the elaboration of her own self image. She learned to walk again with an artificial limb, and even (briefly and with the help of pain-killing drugs) danced at celebrations with friends. But the end was close.

In July 1954, she made her last public appearance, when she participated in a Communist demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterwards, she died in her sleep, apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her last diary entry read: "I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to come back" - Frida