Pain and Passion

Frida Kahlo was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico.

Her real name was Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderón.

She used to tell people that she was born in 1910, the same year as the Mexican Revolution.

At the age of six, Frida contracted polio, which left her with a limp.

In 1922, at the age of 15, she entered the National Preparatory School, the most renowned school in Mexico, and was one of only a handful of girls there.

It was here that Frida met Diego Rivera, who would eventually become her husband.

In 1925, Frida was involved in a near fatal car accident.

She was impaled through the hip and pelvis, broke several other bones and had to spend a month recovering in a hospital.

This injury would cause her pain and suffering for the rest of her life.

She began painting while on bed rest and completed her first self-portrait a year later.

Frida begins painting self-portraits on a regular basis.

“I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.”

Kahlo joins the Mexican Communist Party and meets Diego Rivera again.

Kahlo and Rivera fall in love and he includes her in his mural Ballad of the Revolution inside the Ministry of Education.

Kahlo and Rivera get married on 21 August 1929 and live in Mexico City with other communists.

Kahlo gets pregnant, but cannot carry the baby due to her many injuries, which will be a constant theme in her life.

Frida and Diego move to San Francisco after he is expelled from the Communist Party in 1930.

In 1932, the couple move to Detroit, where Rivera is commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint a mural.

While in Detroit, Frida loses another child at Henry Ford Hospital, as well as her mother in Mexico.

She paints Miscarriage in Detroit and My Birth, two graphic paintings.

After a brief stint in New York, they move back to Mexico.

Over the next few years, both Rivera and Kahlo have extra-marital affairs.

He with her younger sister, Cristina.

She with Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary.

The Kahlo-Riveras divorce in 1939 and remarry less than year later.

After her father died in 1941, Diego and Frida return to her hometown and live in her childhood home, the Blue House.

She begins teaching, but has to quit after her numerous operations leave her weak.

She ends up in a wheelchair after having 7 operations on her spine.

In 1952, Kahlo’s face appears in Rivera’s The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace.

Kahlo finally has her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the National Institute of Fine Arts.

She attends the event lying in a bed.

After her first solo exhibition in 1953, Frida has her leg amputated below the knee due to gangrene.

In 1954, Frida catches pneumonia, but takes part in a rally against the U.S. intervention in Guatemala.

She died on 13 July 1954 in her home.

Kettenmann, Andrea. Kahlo. Los Angeles, Ca: TASCHEN, 2009. Print.

Matheson, Whitney. Frida Kahlo: A Timeline of Her Life. 10 November 2009.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2002-10-21-frida-timeline_x.htm

Stechler, Amy. The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. 10 November 2009.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/fridakahlo/life/index.html

http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=19