Mexican painter known for her raw self-portraits. She suffered polio as a child and a terrible bus accident, and began painting during her convalescence. She married Diego Rivera, a fellow artist who painted vast murals exploring Mexican history and was considered bolder and more accomplished during their lifetimes. The couple had affairs. Leon Trotsky lived with Kahlo and Rivera in Mexico during his exile from the Soviet Union.
Kahlo's mother was partly of indigenous descent. Kahlo wore a tehuana, a traditional Zapotec dress, as well as huipiles (embroidered tunics) and long skirts. In a period of cultural nationalism she sought to emphasise her Mexican heritage and distinguish herself from her male peers. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was an important photographer in Mexico who documented the country's churches and civic monuments and took theatrical portraits of figures such as President Porfirio Díaz. He encouraged his daughter to express herself. In the mid-1920s he took a family portrait in which Frida, in her teens, wore a three-piece suit and had slicked-back hair.
In 1932 she painted "Henry Ford Hospital", depicting her delivering a dead fetus—a work that, according to Gannit Ankori of Brandeis University, "invented a visual vocabulary to express things never shown before—trauma, miscarriage, chronic pain, betrayal." In "The Wounded Deer" (1946) she appears as neither male nor female, but half-animal, half-human.
When Kahlo died in 1954 she was little known outside modern-art circles and her reputation was overshadowed by Rivera's. In the 1970s art historians started to pay more attention to women artists, and feminist and Chicana activists adopted Kahlo as a symbol of female strength and Mexican pride. In 1990 "Diego and I" became the first Latin American artwork to break $1m at auction. Her work now rivals that of Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois in the prices it fetches. Her painting "The Dream (The Bed)" (1940) was expected to sell for as much as $60m at Sotheby's in November 2025—which would make it the most expensive picture by a woman ever sold at auction.
Three museums in Mexico City are dedicated to Kahlo. Museo Frida Kahlo is in Casa Azul, where Kahlo grew up and later lived with Rivera. Museo Casa Kahlo opened recently in Casa Roja, one of her family's houses, with the aim of showing Kahlo as a daughter, sister and aunt.
sunset, n.: Pronounced atmospheric scattering of shorter wavelengths, resulting in selective transmission below 650 nanometers with progressively reducing solar elevation.