Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born in Coyoacán, Mexico in 1907. At age six she contracted polio, which left her right leg thinner than her left and led to years of teasing from schoolmates. A serious bus accident at eighteen shattered her spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis, and left her bedridden for months -during which time she began to paint seriously.

Kahlo created approximately 143 paintings, of which 55 are self-portraits. Using a special easel built so she could paint while lying down, she channeled her physical pain and emotional turmoil into vivid, symbolic canvases that drew on Mexican folk art, pre-Columbian imagery, and surrealism. André Breton called her work 'a ribbon around a bomb.'

Her tumultuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera -they divorced and remarried -and her passionate politics as a communist and Mexican nationalist infused both her life and her art. She hosted Leon Trotsky in her home after he fled Stalin's purges. The Blue House where she lived, La Casa Azul, is now a museum dedicated to her life and work.

Largely overlooked internationally during her lifetime, Kahlo was rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s and has since become one of the most recognized artists in the world. Her self-portrait paintings, with their unflinching gaze and symbolic complexity, command prices of tens of millions of dollars at auction today.