Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico City, to Guillermo Kahlo, a German photographer of Hungarian descent, and Matilde Calderón y González, a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indigenous descent. As a child, she contracted polio around 1913, which left her with a lifelong limp. Kahlo often depicted her mixed European and Indigenous heritage in her art as binary opposites, reflecting her exploration of identity. Initially aspiring to medicine, her life changed dramatically in 1925 when a bus collision with a trolley caused severe injuries, including a broken spine, pelvis, and foot; during over a year of recovery, she began painting, largely self-taught. In 1929, Kahlo married the renowned Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose career overshadowed hers initially; their relationship was tumultuous, marked by infidelity on both sides, yet they remained connected until her death. The couple traveled to the United States in the early 1930s, where Kahlo painted works like Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and My Birth (1932), addressing personal trauma and taboo subjects such as miscarriage and birth. Returning to Mexico, her first solo exhibition in 1938 at New York City's Julien Levy Gallery brought recognition, followed by a show in Paris in 1939, where André Breton labeled her a surrealist—though she emphasized her work as rooted in Mexican reality. Kahlo's health deteriorated due to chronic pain from her injuries and over 30 surgeries, yet she continued painting, often from bed using a special easel. Politically active, she joined the Mexican Communist Party and supported causes like women's rights and Indigenous heritage. In her final years, amid failing health from pulmonary embolism, she held her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in 1953, attending in a hospital bed. She died on July 13, 1954, days after her 47th birthday, in her Blue House (Casa Azul) in Coyoacán.