Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on 6 July 1907 in the Casa Azul, the cobalt-blue house in Coyoacán on the southern edge of Mexico City — though she would later claim 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution, to bind her birth to the new Mexico. At six she contracted polio, leaving her right leg withered. At eighteen, on 17 September 1925, the wooden bus she was riding home from school collided with a tram; an iron handrail pierced her pelvis and exited through her vagina, her spine and pelvis fractured in three places, her right leg in eleven, her right foot crushed. She would have some thirty operations across the next twenty-nine years and never fully walk again. Bedridden in a body cast, with a mirror fixed above her and brushes in her hand, she began to paint herself. In 1929, at twenty-two, she married the muralist Diego Rivera — twenty years older, twice her size, already Mexico's most famous painter; the marriage was tempestuous, full of mutual affairs (her with Trotsky, among others), divorce and remarriage. Across her short life she completed about 143 paintings — some 55 of them self-portraits — fusing Mexican retablo and votive painting traditions with European surrealism into a visual language entirely her own: Tehuana dresses, marigolds and milagros, hummingbirds and monkeys, exploded bodies and indigenous earth. André Breton called her work 'a ribbon around a bomb.' In April 1953 her first solo exhibition in Mexico opened in Mexico City; too ill to walk, she had her bed carried in by ambulance and held court from it. She died at the Casa Azul on 13 July 1954, eight days after her forty-seventh birthday. The last entry in her diary read: 'I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return. Viva la vida.'

Frida Kahlo is an Epoch+ Episode

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