Frida Kahlo is considered one of the greatest Mexican artists and is known for self-portraits.
She was born in 1907 and died of health complications at the age of 47 in 1954.
When she was six years old, she contracted polio, which caused her right leg to become thinner and shorter than her left.
Later in life, she became known for her beautiful long skirts, which she had started wearing to hide her leg.
She started enjoying art quite early in her life and formed strong political views after 1922 when she took admission to National Preparatory School.
At this school, she made friends with politically and intellectually like-minded students.
She later joined the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party.
In 1925, she met with an accident when the bus she was travelling in collided with a car.
A steel handrail went into her hip and came out the other side, causing several serious injuries, including fractures in her spine and pelvis.
She was bedridden for a few weeks and began painting—it was in this period that she started working on her first self-portrait.
In 1929, she married an artist Diego Rivera; their marriage wasn’t particularly happy, and they divorced in 1939 but remarried in 1940.
During her life, she created 143 paintings, including 55 self-portraits—on her love for self-portraits, she once said, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
She was also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain, e.g., she often painted autobiographical themes of pain, disability, injury, and fragility.
One of her most famous paintings, The Broken Column, depicts her shattered spine, like a building with cracks.
In the later part of her life, she suffered from chronic health problems and was hospitalised in April and May of 1954; she died on 13th July, the same year.
By this time, she had become a feminist icon (who had braved several tragedies), and the feminist movement of the 1970s renewed interest in her life and work.
