An icon to the feminist movement, Mexico’s best know female artist Frida Kahlo led a tempestuous and painful life as both an artist and the wife of famed fellow countryman and mural artist Diego Rivera, whom she married twice.
Born in Mexico City in July 1907, Kahlo’s work revolved mostly around the trials and tribulations she suffered in her own life, being a polio victim as a child and at age 18, breaking her leg and her pelvis in a bus accident, which resulted in her living her life in constant pain, and leaving her partially crippled.
Her artistic career began in the late twenties, marrying Rivera in 1929 and moving with him to the US in the early thirties. Associating with many world renowned painters following exhibitions in New York and later Paris, Frida and Rivera were both known for playing the field with affairs with other people … she was even suspected of being Leon Trotsky’s mistress.
Kahlo divorced Rivera in 1940, but they remarried after a short break apart, leading to her becoming world famous for her colourful and at times grisly art, and also her outlandish public behaviour.
Her vibrant style was influenced by her own country’s Indian heritage in choices of colour, as well as the then booming European schools of art such the Realists, the Symbolists and Surrealism. Many of her works were self-portraits through which came through the relentless pain she suffered, as well as her sexuality.
But her health was failing and she passed away in 1954 at age 47, with her fame being remembered in the 2002 blockbuster movie Frida, with the title role being played by Salma Hayek.
