best biography frida kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Painter Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was married to Diego Rivera and is still admired as a feminist icon.

(1907-1954)

Who Was Frida Kahlo?

Artist Frida Kahlo was considered one of Mexico's greatest artists who began painting mostly self-portraits after she was severely injured in a bus accident. Kahlo later became politically active and married fellow communist artist Diego Rivera in 1929. She exhibited her paintings in Paris and Mexico before her death in 1954.

Family, Education and Early Life

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico.

Kahlo's father, Wilhelm (also called Guillermo), was a German photographer who had immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. She had two older sisters, Matilde and Adriana, and her younger sister, Cristina, was born the year after Kahlo.

Around the age of six, Kahlo contracted polio, which caused her to be bedridden for nine months. While she recovered from the illness, she limped when she walked because the disease had damaged her right leg and foot. Her father encouraged her to play soccer, go swimming, and even wrestle — highly unusual moves for a girl at the time — to help aid in her recovery.

In 1922, Kahlo enrolled at the renowned National Preparatory School. She was one of the few female students to attend the school, and she became known for her jovial spirit and her love of colorful, traditional clothes and jewelry.

While at school, Kahlo hung out with a group of politically and intellectually like-minded students. Becoming more politically active, Kahlo joined the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party.

Frida Kahlo's Accident

After staying at the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks, Kahlo returned home to recuperate further. She began painting during her recovery and finished her first self-portrait the following year, which she gave to Gómez Arias.

Frida Kahlo's Marriage to Diego Rivera

In 1929, Kahlo and famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera married. Kahlo and Rivera first met in 1922 when he went to work on a project at her high school. Kahlo often watched as Rivera created a mural called The Creation in the school’s lecture hall. According to some reports, she told a friend that she would someday have Rivera’s baby.

Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. He encouraged her artwork, and the two began a relationship. During their early years together, Kahlo often followed Rivera based on where the commissions that Rivera received were. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. They then went to New York City for Rivera’s show at the Museum of Modern Art and later moved to Detroit for Rivera’s commission with the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Kahlo and Rivera’s time in New York City in 1933 was surrounded by controversy. Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller , Rivera created a mural entitled Man at the Crossroads in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller halted the work on the project after Rivera included a portrait of communist leader Vladimir Lenin in the mural, which was later painted over. Months after this incident, the couple returned to Mexico and went to live in San Angel, Mexico.

Never a traditional union, Kahlo and Rivera kept separate, but adjoining homes and studios in San Angel. She was saddened by his many infidelities, including an affair with her sister Cristina. In response to this familial betrayal, Kahlo cut off most of her trademark long dark hair. Desperately wanting to have a child, she again experienced heartbreak when she miscarried in 1934.

Kahlo and Rivera went through periods of separation, but they joined together to help exiled Soviet communist Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia in 1937. The Trotskys came to stay with them at the Blue House (Kahlo's childhood home) for a time in 1937 as Trotsky had received asylum in Mexico. Once a rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin , Trotsky feared that he would be assassinated by his old nemesis. Kahlo and Trotsky reportedly had a brief affair during this time.

Kahlo divorced Rivera in 1939. They did not stay divorced for long, remarrying in 1940. The couple continued to lead largely separate lives, both becoming involved with other people over the years .

Artistic Career

While she never considered herself a surrealist, Kahlo befriended one of the primary figures in that artistic and literary movement, Andre Breton, in 1938. That same year, she had a major exhibition at a New York City gallery, selling about half of the 25 paintings shown there. Kahlo also received two commissions, including one from famed magazine editor Clare Boothe Luce, as a result of the show.

In 1939, Kahlo went to live in Paris for a time. There she exhibited some of her paintings and developed friendships with such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso .

Kahlo received a commission from the Mexican government for five portraits of important Mexican women in 1941, but she was unable to finish the project. She lost her beloved father that year and continued to suffer from chronic health problems. Despite her personal challenges, her work continued to grow in popularity and was included in numerous group shows around this time.

In 1953, Kahlo received her first solo exhibition in Mexico. While bedridden at the time, Kahlo did not miss out on the exhibition’s opening. Arriving by ambulance, Kahlo spent the evening talking and celebrating with the event’s attendees from the comfort of a four-poster bed set up in the gallery just for her.

After Kahlo’s death, the feminist movement of the 1970s led to renewed interest in her life and work, as Kahlo was viewed by many as an icon of female creativity.

Frida Kahlo's Most Famous Paintings

Many of Kahlo’s works were self-portraits. A few of her most notable paintings include:

'Frieda and Diego Rivera' (1931)

Kahlo showed this painting at the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, the city where she was living with Rivera at the time. In the work, painted two years after the couple married, Kahlo lightly holds Rivera’s hand as he grasps a palette and paintbrushes with the other — a stiffly formal pose hinting at the couple’s future tumultuous relationship. The work now lives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932)

In 1932, Kahlo incorporated graphic and surrealistic elements in her work. In this painting, a naked Kahlo appears on a hospital bed with several items — a fetus, a snail, a flower, a pelvis and others — floating around her and connected to her by red, veinlike strings. As with her earlier self-portraits, the work was deeply personal, telling the story of her second miscarriage.

'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale' (1939)

Kahlo was asked to paint a portrait of Luce and Kahlo's mutual friend, actress Dorothy Hale, who had committed suicide earlier that year by jumping from a high-rise building. The painting was intended as a gift for Hale's grieving mother. Rather than a traditional portrait, however, Kahlo painted the story of Hale's tragic leap. While the work has been heralded by critics, its patron was horrified at the finished painting.

'The Two Fridas' (1939)

One of Kahlo’s most famous works, the painting shows two versions of the artist sitting side by side, with both of their hearts exposed. One Frida is dressed nearly all in white and has a damaged heart and spots of blood on her clothing. The other wears bold colored clothing and has an intact heart. These figures are believed to represent “unloved” and “loved” versions of Kahlo.

'The Broken Column' (1944)

Kahlo shared her physical challenges through her art again with this painting, which depicted a nearly nude Kahlo split down the middle, revealing her spine as a shattered decorative column. She also wears a surgical brace and her skin is studded with tacks or nails. Around this time, Kahlo had several surgeries and wore special corsets to try to fix her back. She would continue to seek a variety of treatments for her chronic physical pain with little success.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S FRIDA KAHLO FACT CARD

Frida Kahlo’s Death

About a week after her 47th birthday, Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, at her beloved Blue House. There has been some speculation regarding the nature of her death. It was reported to be caused by a pulmonary embolism, but there have also been stories about a possible suicide.

Kahlo’s health issues became nearly all-consuming in 1950. After being diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot, Kahlo spent nine months in the hospital and had several operations during this time. She continued to paint and support political causes despite having limited mobility. In 1953, part of Kahlo’s right leg was amputated to stop the spread of gangrene.

Deeply depressed, Kahlo was hospitalized again in April 1954 because of poor health, or, as some reports indicated, a suicide attempt. She returned to the hospital two months later with bronchial pneumonia. No matter her physical condition, Kahlo did not let that stand in the way of her political activism. Her final public appearance was a demonstration against the U.S.-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2nd.

Movie on Frida Kahlo

Kahlo’s life was the subject of a 2002 film entitled Frida , starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as Rivera. Directed by Julie Taymor, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

Frida Kahlo Museum

The family home where Kahlo was born and grew up, later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul, was opened as a museum in 1958. Located in Coyoacán, Mexico City, the Museo Frida Kahlo houses artifacts from the artist along with important works including Viva la Vida (1954), Frida and Caesarean (1931) and Portrait of my father Wilhelm Kahlo (1952).

Book on Frida Kahlo

Hayden Herrera’s 1983 book on Kahlo, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo , helped to stir up interest in the artist. The biographical work covers Kahlo’s childhood, accident, artistic career, marriage to Diego Rivera, association with the communist party and love affairs.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Frida Kahlo
• Birth Year: 1907
• Birth date: July 6, 1907
• Birth City: Mexico City
• Birth Country: Mexico
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Painter Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was married to Diego Rivera and is still admired as a feminist icon.
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• National Preparatory School
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Frida Kahlo met Diego Rivera when he was commissioned to paint a mural at her high school.
• Kahlo dealt with chronic pain most of her life due to a bus accident.
• Death Year: 1954
• Death date: July 13, 1954
• Death City: Mexico City
• Death Country: Mexico

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Frida Kahlo Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/frida-kahlo
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: November 19, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
• My painting carries with it the message of pain.
• I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
• I think that, little by little, I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.
• The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
• I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.
• I love you more than my own skin.
• I am not sick, I am broken, but I am happy as long as I can paint.
• Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
• I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed with this decent and good feeling.
• There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.
• I hope the end is joyful, and I hope never to return.

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Famous Painters

11 Notable Artists from the Harlem Renaissance

Fernando Botero

Gustav Klimt

The Surreal Romance of Salvador and Gala Dalí

Salvador Dalí

Margaret Keane

Andy Warhol

• Arts & Photography
• History & Criticism

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: $19.95 $19.95 FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 23 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Buy used: $11.61

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and Amazon Prime.

If you're a seller, Fulfillment by Amazon can help you grow your business. Learn more about the program.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo Paperback – October 1, 2002

Purchase options and add-ons.

"Through her art, Herrera writes, Kahlo made of herself both performer and icon. Through this long overdue biography, Kahlo has also, finally, been made fully human." —  San Francisco Chronicle

Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.

Here is the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman -- with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.

• Print length 528 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Perennial
• Publication date October 1, 2002
• Dimensions 6.12 x 1.4 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0060085894
• ISBN-13 978-0060085896
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you

Editorial Reviews

"A haunting, highly vivid biography." — Ms . magazine

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Hayden Herrera is an art historian. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Mary Frank; and Matisse: A Portrait. She is working on a critical biography of Arshile Gorky. She lives in New York City.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (October 1, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060085894
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060085896
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.43 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.12 x 1.4 x 9.25 inches
• #55 in Artist & Architect Biographies
• #80 in Arts & Photography Criticism
• #154 in Art History (Books)

About the author

Hayden herrera.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Frida Kahlo, in her own words: A new documentary draws from diaries, letters

Mandalit del Barco

A new documentary about Frida Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art. Leo Matiz/Fundación Leo Matiz hide caption

A new documentary about Frida Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art.

"I paint myself because that's who I know the best," the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo once wrote in her illustrated diary. So it's fitting that a new documentary about Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art.

In the 70 years since Kahlo's death there have been countless efforts to revisit her complicated life, politics and artwork. Most famous is probably the 2002 fictional film starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor that depicted Kahlo's tempestuous relationship with painter Diego Rivera. Many of these treatments have relied on actors, interviews with academics, art historians and contemporary artists. Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez wanted a fresh take.

"Instead of having that historical distance of other people explaining [to] us what she meant with her art," Gutiérrez says, "I really wanted to give that gift to viewers of just hearing from her own words. We wanted to have the most intimate entry way into her heart and into her mind."

In Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from letters and diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles. Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C. hide caption

In Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from letters and diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

In Gutiérrez's documentary Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from handwritten letters and illustrated diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Gutiérrez says she wanted to get inside Kahlo's head. "What was she thinking? what was she feeling? I felt that as a Latina, somebody that grew up in Latin America, there was this connection I have with the world that created Frida."

Gutiérrez was born in Peru and saw her first Frida Kahlo painting, as a college student in Massachusetts. It was an image of Kahlo standing with one foot in Mexico, another in the U.S. "Her impressions of the United States and yearning [for] home for Mexico, that painting really reflected my own experience," says Gutiérrez. "And then I became obsessed, like millions of people around the world."

As an editor, Gutiérrez has worked on documentaries on other what she calls "badass women", including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg , singer Chavela Vargas and chef Julia Child . But Frida is her first film as director.

The Picture Show

Frida kahlo's private stash of pictures.

She enlisted the help of Hayden Herrera, who wrote the definitive Frida Kahlo biography in 1983 . Gutiérrez' team combed through Herrera's closets and attic, looking through her archives.

"We had a good time," Herrera says. "I basically gave them all my research material."

That included transcripts of interviews with people who knew Kahlo. One of the film's archivists, Gabriel Rivera, also scoured university libraries, museums and private collections finding photos and handwritten messages.

"These letters often have little doodles on them," Rivera says. "She would, like, do kind of lipstick kisses on these letters."

The film includes the words written by or about Kahlo's contemporaries, including Diego Rivera, who she married twice, her friends such as surrealist André Breton and her lovers such as Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.

Some of Kahlo's paintings are slightly animated in the new film. Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C. hide caption

Some of Kahlo's paintings are slightly animated in the new film.

Gabriel Rivera says they tried to follow any lead, including a tip about some footage of Kahlo dancing in the streets of New York City with a rose stem gripped in her mouth. He discovered through writings that the film canister had been left on an airplane in the late 1960s, which Rivera said is "just devastating." They tried to find lost luggage and are still hoping it shows up one day.

But there is plenty of material they did find.

In Mexico, another archivist, Adrián Gutiérrez, was able to collect some rarely seen photos and footage of Kahlo and Rivera together, and of Rivera kissing another woman. There's footage of the Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata and of Red Cross workers in Mexico City bandaging trolley accident victims like Kahlo, who was famously injured as a teen. She painted about that and other pain she suffered.

For the documentary, composer Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser created a soundtrack of electronic music with folkloric guitar and the ethereal voice of his wife, Alexa Ramírez.

Hear Mandalit del Barco's 1991 radio documentary about Frida Kahlo

"The idea was that Frida herself was so ahead of her time, with her thoughts, her ideas. She was a very modern person," says Stumpfhauser. "So we thought, well, let's let's do something modern, but of course, with a with a Mexican flair."

Gutiérrez also made the decision to slightly animate some of Kahlo's paintings. Frida's open heart beats and bleeds, tears roll down her face, and when she cuts her hair in desperation over her divorce, her scissors move and pieces of her hair fall to the floor.

Latin America

As mexico capitalizes on her image, has frida kahlo become over-commercialized.

The Salma Hayek film also animated some of Kahlo's work. But Herrera says doing so in a documentary was gutsy.

"When I saw the first animation, I thought, Oh my God," says Herrera. "But then I found it really seductive and really added so much to the understanding of her paintings. I found them very astute and actually quite witty. And they brought you closer to Frida."

Art Where You're At

5 lesser-known, late-in-life works by frida kahlo now on view in dallas.

Herrera says its remarkable that Frida mania is still very much alive.

"I think she would have been pleased that we're still talking about her, and I think she would have liked this film," she says. "Although seeing your own paintings animated might not be easy, but she might have given one of her big guffaws and laughed and thought it was amusing."

Herrera says this latest documentary is her favorite telling of Frida Kahlo, and is itself a work of art.

Detroit's 'Frida' Aims To Build Latino Audiences For Opera

Music Interviews

The villalobos brothers match music with frida kahlo.

• frida kahlo

ARTS & CULTURE

Frida kahlo.

The Mexican artist’s myriad faces, stranger-than-fiction biography and powerful paintings come to vivid life in a new film

Phyllis Tuchman

Frida Kahlo, who painted mostly small, intensely personal works for herself, family and friends, would likely have been amazed and amused to see what a vast audience her paintings now reach. Today, nearly 50 years after her death, the Mexican artist’s iconic images adorn calendars, greeting cards, posters, pins, even paper dolls. Several years ago the French couturier Jean Paul Gaultier created a collection inspired by Kahlo, and last year a self-portrait she painted in 1933 appeared on a 34-cent U.S. postage stamp. This month, the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as her husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera, opens nationwide. Directed by Julie Taymor, the creative wizard behind Broadway’s long-running hit The Lion King , the film is based on Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography, Frida. Artfully composed, Taymor’s graphic portrayal remains, for the most part, faithful to the facts of the painter’s life. Although some changes were made because of budget constraints, the movie “is true in spirit,” says Herrera, who was first drawn to Kahlo because of “that thing in her work that commands you—that urgency, that need to communicate.”

Focusing on Kahlo’s creativity and tumultuous love affair with Rivera, the film looks beyond the icon to the human being. “I was completely compelled by her story,” says Taymor. “I knew it superficially; and I admired her paintings but didn’t know them well. When she painted, it was for herself. She transcended her pain. Her paintings are her diary. When you’re doing a movie, you want a story like that.” In the film, the Mexican born and raised Hayek, 36, who was one of the film’s producers, strikes poses from the paintings, which then metamorphose into action-filled scenes. “Once I had the concept of having the paintings come alive,” says Taymor, “I wanted to do it.”

Kahlo, who died July 13, 1954, at the age of 47, reportedly of a pulmonary embolism (though some suspected suicide), has long been recognized as an important artist. In 2001-2002, a major traveling exhibition showcased her work alongside that of Georgia O’Keeffe and Canada’s Emily Carr. Earlier this year several of her paintings were included in a landmark Surrealism show in London and New York. Currently, works by both Kahlo and Rivera are on view through January 5, 2003, at the SeattleArt Museum. As Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and one of the organizers of a 1993 exhibition of Kahlo’s work, points out, “Kahlo made personal women’s experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers—men and women—be moved by them.”

Kahlo produced only about 200 paintings—primarily still lifes and portraits of herself, family and friends. She also kept an illustrated journal and did dozens of drawings. With techniques learned from both her husband and her father, a professional architectural photographer, she created haunting, sensual and stunningly original paintings that fused elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore into powerful narratives. In contrast to the 20th-century trend toward abstract art, her work was uncompromisingly figurative. Although she received occasional commissions for portraits, she sold relatively few paintings during her lifetime. Today her works fetch astronomical prices at auction. In 2000, a 1929 self-portrait sold for more than $5 million.

Biographies of the artist, which have been translated into many languages, read like the fantastical novels of Gabriel García Márquez as they trace the story of two painters who could not live with or without each other. (Taymor says she views her film version of Kahlo’s life as a “great, great love story.”) Married twice, divorced once and separated countless times, Kahlo and Rivera had numerous affairs, hobnobbed with Communists, capitalists and literati and managed to create some of the most compelling visual images of the 20th century. Filled with such luminaries as writer André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, playwright Clare Boothe Luce and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Kahlo’s life played out on a phantasmagorical canvas.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón July 6, 1907, and lived in a house (the Casa Azul, or Blue House, now the Museo Frida Kahlo) built by her father in Coyoacán, then a quiet suburb of Mexico City. The third of her parents’ four daughters, Frida was her father’s favorite—the most intelligent, he thought, and the most like himself. She was a dutiful child but had a fiery temperament. (Shortly before Kahlo and Rivera were wed in 1929, Kahlo’s father warned his future son-in-law, who at age 42 had already had two wives and many mistresses, that Frida, then 21, was “a devil.” Rivera replied: “I know it.”)

A German Jew with deep-set eyes and a bushy mustache, Guillermo Kahlo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19. After his first wife died in childbirth, he married Matilde Calderón, a Catholic whose ancestry included Indians as well as a Spanish general. Frida portrayed her hybrid ethnicity in a 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (opposite).

Kahlo adored her father. On a portrait she painted of him in 1951, she inscribed the words, “character generous, intelligent and fine.” Her feelings about her mother were more conflicted. On the one hand, the artist considered her “very nice, active, intelligent.” But she also saw her as fanatically religious, calculating and sometimes even cruel. “She did not know how to read or write,” recalled the artist. “She only knew how to count money.”

A chubby child with a winning smile and sparkling eyes, Kahlo was stricken with polio at the age of 6. After her recovery, her right leg remained thinner than her left and her right foot was stunted. Despite her disabilities or, perhaps, to compensate for them, Kahlo became a tomboy. She played soccer, boxed, wrestled and swam competitively. “My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles,” the artist later recalled. (As an adult, she collected dolls.)

Her father taught her photography, including how to retouch and color prints, and one of his friends gave her drawing lessons. In 1922, the 15-year-old Kahlo entered the elite, predominantly male NationalPreparatory School, which was located near the Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City.

As it happened, Rivera was working in the school’s auditorium on his first mural. In his autobiography— My Art, My Life —the artist recalled that he was painting one night high on a scaffold when “all of a sudden the door flew open, and a girl who seemed to be no more than ten or twelve was propelled inside. . . . She had,” he continued, “unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes.” Kahlo, who was actually 16, apparently played pranks on the artist. She stole his lunch and soaped the steps by the stage where he was working.

Kahlo planned to become a doctor and took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Her knowledge of these disciplines would later add realistic touches to her portraits. She also had a passion for philosophy, which she liked to flaunt. According to biographer Herrera, she would cry out to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, “lend me your Spengler. I don’t have anything to read on the bus.” Her bawdy sense of humor and passion for fun were well known among her circle of friends, many of whom would become leaders of the Mexican left.

Then, on September 17, 1925, the bus on which she and her boyfriend were riding home from school was rammed by a trolley car. A metal handrail broke off and pierced her pelvis. Several people died at the site, and doctors at the hospital where the 18-year-old Kahlo was taken did not think she would survive. Her spine was fractured in three places, her pelvis was crushed and her right leg and foot were severely broken. The first of many operations she would endure over the years brought only temporary relief from pain. “In this hospital,” Kahlo told Gómez Arias, “death dances around my bed at night.” She spent a month in the hospital and was later fitted with a plaster corset, variations of which she would be compelled to wear throughout her life.

Confined to bed for three months, she was unable to return to school. “Without giving it any particular thought,” she recalled, “I started painting.” Kahlo’s mother ordered a portable easel and attached a mirror to the underside of her bed’s canopy so that the nascent artist could be her own model.

Though she knew the works of the old masters only from reproductions, Kahlo had an uncanny ability to incorporate elements of their styles in her work. In a painting she gave to Gómez Arias, for instance, she portrayed herself with a swan neck and tapered fingers, referring to it as “Your Botticeli.”

During her months in bed, she pondered her changed circumstances. To Gómez Arias, she wrote, “Life will reveal [its secrets] to you soon. I already know it all. . . . I was a child who went about in a world of colors. . . . My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants.”

As she grew stronger, Kahlo began to participate in the politics of the day, which focused on achieving autonomy for the government-run university and a more democratic national government. She joined the Communist party in part because of her friendship with the young Italian photographer Tina Modotti, who had come to Mexico in 1923 with her then companion, photographer Edward Weston. It was most likely at a soiree given by Modotti in late 1928 that Kahlo re-met Rivera.

They were an unlikely pair. The most celebrated artist in Mexico and a dedicated Communist, the charismatic Rivera was more than six feet tall and tipped the scales at 300 pounds. Kahlo, 21 years his junior, weighed 98 pounds and was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He was ungainly and a bit misshapen; she was heart-stoppingly alluring. According to Herrera, Kahlo “started with dramatic material: nearly beautiful, she had slight flaws that increased her magnetism.” Rivera described her “fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face,” and compared her thick eyebrows, which met above her nose, to “the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.”

Rivera courted Kahlo under the watchful eyes of her parents. Sundays he visited the Casa Azul, ostensibly to critique her paintings. “It was obvious to me,” he later wrote, “that this girl was an authentic artist.” Their friends had reservations about the relationship. One Kahlo pal called Rivera “a pot-bellied, filthy old man.” But Lupe Marín, Rivera’s second wife, marveled at how Kahlo, “this so-called youngster,” drank tequila “like a real mariachi.”

The couple married on August 21, 1929. Kahlo later said her parents described the union as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.” Kahlo’s 1931 Colonial-style portrait, based on a wedding photograph, captures the contrast. The newlyweds spent almost a year in Cuernavaca while Rivera executed murals commissioned by the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Kahlo was a devoted wife, bringing Rivera lunch every day, bathing him, cooking for him. Years later Kahlo would paint a naked Rivera resting on her lap as if he were a baby.

With the help of Albert Bender, an American art collector, Rivera obtained a visa to the United States, which previously had been denied him. Since Kahlo had resigned from the Communist party when Rivera, under siege from the Stalinists, was expelled, she was able to accompany him. Like other left-wing Mexican intellectuals, she was now dressing in flamboyant native Mexican costume—embroidered tops and colorful, floor-length skirts, a style associated with the matriarchal society of the region of Tehuantepec. Rivera’s new wife was “a little doll alongside Diego,” Edward Weston wrote in his journal in 1930. “People stop in their tracks to look in wonder.”

The Riveras arrived in the United States in November 1930, settling in San Francisco while Rivera worked on murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and Kahlo painted portraits of friends. After a brief stay in New York City for a show of Rivera’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, the couple moved on to Detroit, where Rivera filled the Institute of Arts’ garden court with compelling industrial scenes, and then back to New York City, where he worked on a mural for Rockefeller Center. They stayed in the United States for three years. Diego felt he was living in the future; Frida grew homesick. “I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste,” she observed. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.”

In Manhattan, however, Kahlo was exhilarated by the opportunity to see the works of the old masters firsthand. She also enjoyed going to the movies, especially those starring the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy. And at openings and dinners, she and Rivera met the rich and the renowned.

But for Kahlo, despair and pain were never far away. Before leaving Mexico, she had suffered the first in a series of miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. Due to her trolley-car injuries, she seemed unable to bring a child to term, and every time she lost a baby, she was thrown into a deep depression. Moreover, her polio-afflicted and badly injured right leg and foot often troubled her. While in Michigan, a miscarriage cut another pregnancy short. Then her mother died. Up to that time she had persevered. “I am more or less happy,” she had written to her doctor, “because I have Diego and my mother and my father whom I love so much. I think that is enough. . . . ” Now her world was starting to fall apart.

Kahlo had arrived in America an amateur artist. She had never attended art school, had no studio and had not yet focused on any particular subject matter. “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,” she would say years later. Her biographers report that despite her injuries she regularly visited the scaffolding on which Rivera worked in order to bring him lunch and, they speculate, to ward off alluring models. As she watched him paint, she learned the fundamentals of her craft. His imagery recurs in her pictures along with his palette—the sunbaked colors of pre- Columbian art. And from him—though his large-scale wall murals depict historical themes, and her small-scale works relate her autobiography—she learned how to tell a story in paint.

Works from her American period reveal her growing narrative skill. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline betweenMexico and the United States, Kahlo’s homesickness finds expression in an image of herself standing between a pre-Columbian ruin and native flowers on one side and Ford Motor Company smokestacks and looming skyscrapers on the other. In HenryFordHospital, done soon after her miscarriage in Detroit, Kahlo’s signature style starts to emerge. Her desolation and pain are graphically conveyed in this powerful depiction of herself, nude and weeping, on a bloodstained bed. As she would do time and again, she exorcises a devastating experience through the act of painting.

When they returned to Mexico toward the end of 1933, both Kahlo and Rivera were depressed. His RockefellerCenter mural had created a controversy when the owners of the project objected to the heroic portrait of Lenin he had included in it. When Rivera refused to paint out the portrait, the owners had the mural destroyed. (Rivera later re-created a copy for the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.) To a friend Kahlo wrote, Diego “thinks that everything that is happening to him is my fault, because I made him come [back] to Mexico. . . . ” Kahlo herself became physically ill, as she was prone to do in times of stress. Whenever Rivera, a notorious philanderer, became involved with other women, Kahlo succumbed to chronic pain, illness or depression. When he returned home from his wanderings, she would usually recover.

Seeking a fresh start, the Riveras moved into a new home in the upscale San Angel district of Mexico City. The house, now the Diego Rivera Studio museum, featured his-and-her, brightly colored (his was pink, hers, blue) Le Corbusier-like buildings connected by a narrow bridge. Though the plans included a studio for Kahlo, she did little painting, as she was hospitalized three times in 1934. When Rivera began an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, Kahlo moved into an apartment. A few months later, however, after a brief dalliance with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Kahlo reconciled with Rivera and returned to San Angel.

In late 1936, Rivera, whose leftist sympathies were more pronounced than ever, interceded with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to have the exiled Leon Trotsky admitted to Mexico. In January 1937, the Russian revolutionary took up a two-year residency with his wife and bodyguards at the Casa Azul, Kahlo’s childhood home, available because Kahlo’s father had moved in with one of her sisters. In a matter of months, Trotsky and Kahlo became lovers. “El viejo” (“the old man”), as she called him, would slip her notes in books. She painted a mesmerizing fulllength portrait of herself (far right), in bourgeois finery, as a gift for the Russian exile. But this liaison, like most of her others, was short lived.

The French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, also spent time with the Riveras in San Angel. (Breton would later offer to hold an exhibition of Kahlo’s work in Paris.) Arriving in Mexico in the spring of 1938, they stayed for several months and joined the Riveras and the Trotskys on sight-seeing jaunts. The three couples even considered publishing a book of their conversations. This time, it was Frida and Jacqueline who bonded.

Although Kahlo would claim her art expressed her solitude, she was unusually productive during the time spent with the Trotskys and the Bretons. Her imagery became more varied and her technical skills improved. In the summer of 1938, the actor and art collector Edward G. Robinson visited the Riveras in San Angel and paid $200 each for four of Kahlo’s pictures, among the first she sold. Of Robinson’s purchase she later wrote, “For me it was such a surprise that I marveled and said: ‘This way I am going to be able to be free, I’ll be able to travel and do what I want without asking Diego for money.’”

Shortly after, Kahlo went to New York City for her first one-person show, held at the Julien Levy Gallery, one of the first venues in America to promote Surrealist art. In a brochure for the exhibition, Breton praised Kahlo’s “mixture of candour and insolence.” On the guest list for the opening were artist Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom Kahlo later wrote a fan letter, art historian Meyer Schapiro and Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce, who commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of a friend who had committed suicide. Upset by the graphic nature of Kahlo’s completed painting, however, Luce wanted to destroy it but in the end was persuaded not to. The show was a critical success. Time magazine noted that “the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s . . . wife, Frida Kahlo. . . . Frida’s pictures, mostly painted in oil on copper, had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition, the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.” A little later, Kahlo’s hand, bedecked with rings, appeared on the cover of Vogue .

Heady with success, Kahlo sailed to France, only to discover that Breton had done nothing about the promised show. A disappointed Kahlo wrote to her latest lover, portrait photographer Nickolas Muray: “It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people—good for nothing—are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.” Marcel Duchamp— “The only one,” as Kahlo put it, “who has his feet on the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the Surrealists”—saved the day. He got Kahlo her show. The Louvre purchased a self-portrait, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist. At the exhibition, according to Rivera, artist Wassily Kandinsky kissed Kahlo’s cheeks “while tears of sheer emotion ran down his face.” Also an admirer, Pablo Picasso gave Kahlo a pair of earrings shaped like hands, which she donned for a later self-portrait. “Neither Derain, nor I, nor you,” Picasso wrote to Rivera, “are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.”

Returning to Mexico after six months abroad, Kahlo found Rivera entangled with yet another woman and moved out of their San Angel house and into the Casa Azul. By the end of 1939 the couple had agreed to divorce.

Intent on achieving financial independence, Kahlo painted more intensely than ever before. “To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult,” she would tell the group of students—known as Los Fridos—to whom she gave instruction in the mid-1940s. “It is necessary . . . to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting.” It was during this period that Kahlo created some of her most enduring and distinctive work. In self-portraits, she pictured herself in native Mexican dress with her hair atop her head in traditional braids. Surrounded by pet monkeys, cats and parrots amid exotic vegetation reminiscent of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, she often wore the large pre-Columbian necklaces given to her by Rivera.

In one of only two large canvases ever painted by Kahlo, The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait done at the time of her divorce, one Frida wears a European outfit torn open to reveal a “broken” heart; the other is clad in native Mexican costume. Set against a stormy sky, the “twin sisters,” joined together by a single artery running from one heart to the other, hold hands. Kahlo later wrote that the painting was inspired by her memory of an imaginary childhood friend, but the fact that Rivera himself had been born a twin may also have been a factor in its composition. In another work from this period, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo, in a man’s suit, holds a pair of scissors she has used to sever the locks that surround the chair on which she sits. More than once when she discovered Rivera with other women, she had cut off the long hair that he adored.

Despite the divorce, Kahlo and Rivera remained connected. When Kahlo’s health deteriorated, Rivera sought medical advice from a mutual friend, San Francisco doctor Leo Eloesser, who felt her problem was “a crisis of nerves.” Eloesser suggested she resolve her relationship with Rivera. “Diego loves you very much,” he wrote, “and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves—1) Painting 2) Women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous.” Kahlo apparently recognized the truth of this observation and resigned herself to the situation. In December 1940, the couple remarried in San Francisco.

The reconciliation, however, saw no diminution in tumult. Kahlo continued to fight with her philandering husband and sought out affairs of her own with various men and women, including several of his lovers. Still, Kahlo never tired of setting a beautiful table, cooking elaborate meals (her stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera filled a cookbook with Kahlo’s recipes) and arranging flowers in her home from her beloved garden. And there were always festive occasions to celebrate. At these meals, recalled Guadalupe, “Frida’s laughter was loud enough to rise above the din of yelling and revolutionary songs.”

During the last decade of her life, Kahlo endured painful operations on her back, her foot and her leg. (In 1953, her right leg had to be amputated below the knee.) She drank heavily—sometimes downing two bottles of cognac a day—and she became addicted to painkillers. As drugs took control of her hands, the surface of her paintings became rough, her brushwork agitated.

In the spring of 1953, Kahlo finally had a one-person show in Mexico City. Her work had previously been seen there only in group shows. Organized by her friend, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, the exhibition was held at Alvarez Bravo’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. Though still bedridden following the surgery on her leg, Kahlo did not want to miss the opening night. Arriving by ambulance, she was carried to a canopied bed, which had been transported from her home. The headboard was decorated with pictures of family and friends; papier-mâché skeletons hung from the canopy. Surrounded by admirers, the elaborately costumed Kahlo held court and joined in singing her favorite Mexican ballads.

Kahlo remained a dedicated leftist. Even as her strength ebbed, she painted portraits of Marx and of Stalin and attended demonstrations. Eight days before she died, Kahlo, in a wheelchair and accompanied by Rivera, joined a crowd of 10,000 in Mexico City protesting the overthrow, by the CIA, of the Guatemalan president.

Although much of Kahlo’s life was dominated by her debilitated physical state and emotional turmoil, Taymor’s film focuses on the artist’s inventiveness, delight in beautiful things and playful but caustic sense of humor. Kahlo, too, preferred to emphasize her love of life and a good time. Just days before her death, she incorporated the words Viva La Vida (Long Live Life) into a still life of watermelons. Though some have wondered whether the artist may have intentionally taken her own life, others dismiss the notion. Certainly, she enjoyed life fully and passionately. “It is not worthwhile,” she once said, “to leave this world without having had a little fun in life.”

Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.

Articles and Features

Female Iconoclasts: Frida Kahlo

By Shira Wolfe

“I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”  Frida Kahlo

Who is Frida Kahlo?

Our “Female Iconoclasts” series highlights some of the most boundary-breaking works of our time, crafted by women who defied conventions in contemporary art and society in order to pursue their passion and contribute their unique vision to the world. This week, we focus on Frida Kahlo, one of the greatest artistic icons ever to have lived, whose life has become just as iconic as her body of work. Her art was deeply personal and political, reflecting her own turbulent personal life, her physical ailments, her relationship with the great muralist Diego Rivera , and the Mexico she so loved and fought for. Since the 1970s she has grown into a feminist icon and the past decade has seen her persona and art become co-opted by pop culture.

During her lifetime she was called a ‘surrealist’ by André Breton, and a ‘realist’ by her husband Diego Rivera. Kahlo, however, eschewed labels; in fact, one of the most famous quotes by the artist reads: “I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.” 

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born as Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón on 6 July 1907 in the Casa Azul, her family home in the Mexico City municipality Coyoacán.

The Family of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo’s father, Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, was a photographer of German-Jewish descent who had immigrated to Mexico. Her mother was the Mexican Matilde Calderón. Frida had three sisters, Matilde, Adriana, and Cristina.

The Early Life of Frida Kahlo

Frida’s early life was marked by severe health issues. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, causing her right leg to remain slightly shorter than the left one. At 18, she suffered a tragic accident that would haunt her for the rest of her life: a streetcar crashed into the bus she was travelling in, and she was terribly injured: she was impaled by the metal bannister, fractured many bones, suffered severe damage to her spinal cord, and dislocated her shoulder and foot. During the hard recuperation period, she lay practically immobilized in her bed and took up painting. Her mother had an easel built that allowed her to paint while lying in bed and mounted a mirror above her bed so she could paint herself. 

For Frida, painting became a mode of survival and self-expression, which helped her to cope with her tortuous chronic pain, prolonged periods of bed rest and physical fragility that frustrated the enigmatic woman with such a lust for life. Throughout her life, Frida underwent several intense operations in order to attempt to improve the quality of her life following the accident. These operations were followed by long convalescences and had serious consequences, including having to wear corsets to correct her posture and suffering three miscarriages.

The Relationship with Diego Rivera

The other event that shook Frida’s life to the core was her meeting and forming a relationship with renowned artist Diego Rivera. Diego was a huge supporter of her art and started frequenting the Casa Azul. The couple married in 1929, when Rivera was 43 years old, and Frida just 22. Their marriage was described by Frida’s mother as “the wedding between an elephant and a dove.” The love between Frida and Diego was strong and passionate, yet their relationship was also volatile and tumultuous, with many affairs on both sides shaking things up. On an artistic level, they supported each other unconditionally and each considered the other to be the greatest living Mexican painter. They also shared a passion for politics and the revolutionary ideals of the time. Both were affiliated with the Communist Party of Mexico, and they even took in the Russian dissident Leon Trotsky for two years, between 1937 and 1939, who was being persecuted by Stalin. The couple resided in different intervals at the Casa Azul, at Diego’s studio in San Ángel, in Cuernavaca, and in various cities in the United States. Frida and Diego spent three years in the United States from 1930 to 1933, living in New York, Detroit and San Francisco.

Following deep emotional crises as a result of Diego’s many infidelities, Frida divorced him in 1939, only to remarry him one year later with a mutual agreement that they would lead autonomous sex lives.

How Frida Kahlo Died

Toward the end of her life, Frida’s health deteriorated and she was confined to the Hospital Inglés from 1950 to 1951. Her right leg was amputated in 1953, due to a threat of gangrene, and Frida died at the Casa Azul on 13 July 1954. The National Institute of Fine Arts was just in the process of preparing a retrospective exhibition as a national tribute to her. Following her wishes, the Casa Azul was turned into a museum several years after her death, and it remains one of the most important spaces in Mexico, filled with her being and her objects.     

“ I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration .” Frida Kahlo

Themes, styles and approach

Frida Kahlo found a way to express herself and survive the difficult episodes in her life through art. She was determined to paint her own reality, and two-thirds of her paintings are self-portraits, revealing her keen interest in exploring her own being and identity in depth. She once said: “I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration.” Her self-portraits are beautiful and honest, showing images of herself with her signature moustache and unibrow, and in moments of suffering and pain, as such boldly defying conventional beauty norms.

At the same time, Frida was interested in reclaiming the roots of Mexican folk art and culture through her daily life and her art. She dressed in indigenous Mexican attire and avidly collected Mexican folk art. All these influences were reflected in her painting. Although the Surrealists tried to claim her as one of their own and Frida was interested in their work, she preferred to avoid any labels when it came to her art. For her, the surrealist images in her paintings were actually her reality. She never painted her dreams, but painted what was happening to her and passing through her mind at that very moment.  

The Most Famous Art by Frida Kahlo

The two fridas.

Frida painted The Two Fridas in 1939, the year she divorced Diego Rivera. The painting shows two Frida Kahlos sitting side by side. Both their hearts are revealed, and they are distinguished from one another through their clothing. The one on the left wears a traditional Tehuana costume and her heart is torn open; the one on the right wears a more modern outfit. The main artery leading from the torn open heart of the traditional Frida connects to the modern Frida’s heart, wraps around her arm, and is cut off with a pair of scissors by the traditional Frida. The modern Frida holds a pendant with a portrait of a young Diego Rivera. This powerful painting shows two sides of Frida Kahlo, suffering from heartache while also remembering the good aspects of her love for Diego.

Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana)

Frida started painting Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana) in 1940 when the couple were still divorced, and finished it in 1943, at which point they had reconciled. The painting shows Frida wearing a traditional Tehuana costume, with the face of Diego as a third eye in her forehead. The painting shows how she cannot stop thinking about him, despite his betrayals and their separation. 

The Broken Column

The Broken Column is a painting from 1944. It depicts Frida after spinal surgery, bound and constrained by a cage-like body brace. She is missing flesh, and a broken column is exposed where her spine should be. Metal nails pierce Frida’s face, breasts, arms, torso and upper thigh, and tears are streaming down her face. This is one of her most brutally revealing self-portraits where she deals with her physical suffering. 

The Wounded Deer

The Wounded Deer is a 1946 painting, which Frida painted following another spinal operation in New York that same year. We see Frida as a young deer in the forest, fatally wounded by several arrows. She had hoped that the New York surgery would free her from her severe physical pain, but it failed, and this painting expresses her disappointment following the procedure. 

Where to Find Frida Kahlo’s Work

During her lifetime, Frida held several exhibitions internationally: at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, at the Renou et Colle Gallery in Paris, and at the Lola Álvarez Bravo Gallery in Mexico. She also participated in the Group Surrealist Show at the Mexican Art Gallery. In 1939, The Louvre acquired her painting The Frame (1938). Today, Frida Kahlo’s paintings can be found in numerous private collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. A current exhibition at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, brought together an impressive selection of works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and several other Mexican contemporaries of theirs. But by far the most moving experience is to experience the full essence of Frida Kahlo in her Casa Azul in Mexico City, which is still left almost exactly in the same condition as when Frida herself lived there. Several of her and Diego Rivera’s paintings are on display there, as well as the Mexican folk art that they collected, and the many objects that were important to Frida.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frida Kahlo was born in Casa Azul, her family home in the Mexico City Coyoacán.

Frida Kahlo died at an age of 47.

Relevant  sources to learn more

The excellent exhibition “Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: A Love Revolution” is on show at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen, the Netherlands through 26 September 2021

Discover the art of María Izquierdo, a contemporary of Kahlo and Rivera who was far less known but also made an important contribution to Mexican art

Read more about Art Movements and Styles Throughout History here

You may also like: The Fantastic Women of Surrealism

Frida Kahlo

Mexican Painter

Summary of Frida Kahlo

Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological overflow. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists (including Albrecht Dürer , Francisco Goya , and Edvard Munch ), but had not yet been significantly dissected by a woman. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. By literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help explain human behaviors on the outside. She gathered together motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn created a new and articulate means to discuss the most complex aspects of female identity. As not only a 'great artist' but also a figure worthy of our devotion, Kahlo's iconic face provides everlasting trauma support and she has influence that cannot be underestimated.

Accomplishments

• Kahlo made it legitimate for women to outwardly display their pains and frustrations and to thus make steps towards understanding them. It became crucial for women artists to have a female role model and this is the gift of Frida Kahlo.
• As an important question for many Surrealists , Kahlo too considers: What is Woman? Following repeated miscarriages, she asks: to what extent does motherhood or its absence impact on female identity? She irreversibly alters the meaning of maternal subjectivity. It becomes clear through umbilical symbolism (often shown by ribbons) that Kahlo is connected to all that surrounds her, and that she is a 'mother' without children.
• Finding herself often alone, she worked obsessively with self-portraiture. Her reflection fueled an unflinching interest in identity. She was particularly interested in her mixed German-Mexican ancestry, as well as in her divided roles as artist, lover, and wife.
• Kahlo uses religious symbolism throughout her oeuvre . She appears as the Madonna holding her 'animal babies', and becomes the Virgin Mary as she cradles her husband and famous national painter Diego Rivera . She identifies with Saint Sebastian, and even fittingly appears as the martyred Christ. She positions herself as a prophet when she takes to the head of the table in her Last Supper -style painting, and her depiction of the accident which left her impaled on a metal bar (and covered in gold dust when lying injured) recalls the crucifixion and suggests her own holiness.
• Women prior to Kahlo who had attempted to communicate the wildest and deepest of emotions were often labeled hysterical or condemned insane - while men were aligned with the 'melancholy' character type. By remaining artistically active under the weight of sadness, Kahlo revealed that women too can be melancholy rather than depressed, and that these terms should not be thought of as gendered.

The Life of Frida Kahlo

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone... because I am the subject I know best." From battles with her mind and her body, Kahlo lived through her art.

Important Art by Frida Kahlo

Frieda and Diego Rivera

It is as if in this painting Kahlo tries on the role of wife to see how it fits. She does not focus on her identity as a painter, but instead adopts a passive and supportive role, holding the hand of her talented and acclaimed husband. It was indeed the case that during the majority of her painting career, Kahlo was viewed only in Rivera's shadow and it was not until later in life that she gained international recognition. This early double-portrait was painted primarily to mark the celebration of Kahlo's marriage to Rivera. Whilst Rivera holds a palette and paint brushes, symbolic of his artistic mastery, Kahlo limits her role to his wife by presenting herself slight in frame and without her artistic accoutrements. Kahlo furthermore dresses in costume typical of the Mexican woman, or "La Mexicana," wearing a traditional red shawl known as the rebozo and jade Aztec beads. The positioning of the figures echoes that of traditional marital portraiture where the wife is placed on her husband's left to indicate her lesser moral status as a woman. In a drawing made the following year called Frida and the Miscarriage , the artist does hold her own palette, as though the experience of losing a fetus and not being able to create a baby shifts her determination wholly to the creation of art.

Oil on canvas - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Henry Ford Hospital

Many of Kahlo's paintings from the early 1930s, especially in size, format, architectural setting and spatial arrangement, relate to religious ex-voto paintings of which she and Rivera possessed a large collection ranging in date over several centuries. Ex-votos are made as a gesture of gratitude for salvation, a granted prayer or disaster averted and left in churches or at shrines. Ex-votos are generally painted on small-scale metal panels and depict the incident along with the Virgin or saint to whom they are offered. Henry Ford Hospital , is a good example where the artist uses the ex-voto format but subverts it by placing herself centre stage, rather than recording the miraculous deeds of saints. Kahlo instead paints her own story, as though she becomes saintly and the work is made not as thanks to the lord but in defiance, questioning why he brings her pain. In this painting, Kahlo lies on a bed, bleeding after a miscarriage. From the exposed naked body six vein-like ribbons flow outwards, attached to symbols. One of these six objects is a fetus, suggesting that the ribbons could be a metaphor for umbilical cords. The other five objects that surround Frida are things that she remembers, or things that she had seen in the hospital. For example, the snail makes reference to the time it took for the miscarriage to be over, whilst the flower was an actual physical object given to her by Diego. The artist demonstrates her need to be attached to all that surrounds her: to the mundane and metaphorical as much as the physical and actual. Perhaps it is through this reaching out of connectivity that the artist tries to be 'maternal', even though she is not able to have her own child.

Oil on canvas - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a haunting painting in which both the birth giver and the birthed child seem dead. The head of the woman giving birth is shrouded in white cloth while the baby emerging from the womb appears lifeless. At the time that Kahlo painted this work, her mother had just died so it seems reasonable to assume that the shrouded funerary figure is her mother while the baby is Kahlo herself (the title supports this reading). However, Kahlo had also just lost her own child and has said that she is the covered mother figure. The Virgin of Sorrows , who hangs above the bed suggests that this is an image that overflows with maternal pain and suffering. Also though, and revealingly, Kahlo wrote in her diary, next to several small drawings of herself, 'the one who gave birth to herself ... who wrote the most wonderful poem of her life.' Similar to the drawing, Frida and the Miscarriage , My Birth represents Kahlo mourning for the loss of a child, but also finding the strength to make powerful art because of such trauma. The painting is made in a retablo (or votive) style (a small traditional Mexican painting derived from Catholic Church art) in which thanks would typically be given to the Madonna beneath the image. Kahlo instead leaves this section blank, as though she finds herself unable to give thanks either for her own birth, or for the fact that she is now unable to give birth. The painting seems to bring the message that it is important to acknowledge that birth and death live very closely together. Many believe that My Birth was heavily inspired by an Aztec sculpture that Kahlo had at home representing Tiazolteotl, the Goddess of fertility and midwives.

Oil and tempera on zinc - Private Collection

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)

This dream-like family tree was painted on zinc rather than canvas, a choice that further highlights the artist's fascination with and collection of 18 th -century and 19 th -century Mexican retablos. Kahlo completed this work to accentuate both her European Jewish heritage and her Mexican background. Her paternal side, German Jewish, occupies the right side of the composition symbolized by the sea (acknowledging her father's voyage to get to Mexico), while her maternal side of Mexican descent is represented on the left by a map faintly outlining the topography of Mexico. While Kahlo's paintings are assertively autobiographical, she often used them to communicate transgressive or political messages: this painting was completed shortly after Adolf Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws banning interracial marriage. Here, Kahlo simultaneously affirms her mixed heritage to confront Nazi ideology, using a format - the genealogical chart - employed by the Nazi party to determine racial purity. Beyond politics, the red ribbon used to link the family members echoes the umbilical cord that connects baby Kahlo to her mother - a motif that recurs throughout Kahlo's oeuvre .

Oil and tempera on zinc - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fulang-Chang and I

This painting debuted at Kahlo's exhibition in Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1938, and was one of the works that most fascinated André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. The canvas in the New York show is a self-portrait of the artist and her spider monkey, Fulang-Chang, a symbol employed as a surrogate for the children that she and Rivera could not have. The arrangement of figures in the portrait signals the artist's interest in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child. After the New York exhibition, a second frame containing a mirror was added. The later inclusion of the mirror is a gesture inviting the viewer into the work: it was through looking at herself intensely in a mirror in her months spent at home after her bus accident that Kahlo first began painting portraits and delving deeper into her psyche. The inclusion of the mirror, considered from this perspective, is a remarkably intimate vision into both the artist's aesthetic process and into her personal introspection. In many of Kahlo's self-portraits, she is accompanied by monkeys, dogs, and parrots, all of which she kept as pets. Since the Middle Ages, small spider monkeys, like those kept by Kahlo, have been said to symbolize the devil, heresy, and paganism, finally coming to represent the fall of man, vice, and the embodiment of lust. These monkeys were depicted in the past as a cautionary symbol against the dangers of excessive love and the base instincts of man. Kahlo again depicts herself with her monkey in both 1939 and 1940. In a later version in 1945, Kahlo paints her monkey and also her dog, Xolotl. This little dog that often accompanies the artist, is named after a mythological Aztec god, known to represent lightning and death, and also to be the twin of Quetzalcoatl, both of who had visited the underworld. All of these pictures, including Fulang-Chang and I include 'umbilical' ribbons that wrap between Kahlo's and the animal's necks. Kahlo is the Madonna and her pets become the holy (yet darkly symbolic) infant for which she longs.

In two parts, oil on composition board (1937) with painted mirror frame (added after 1939) - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

What the Water Gave Me

In this painting most of Kahlo's body is obscured from view. We are unusually confronted with the foot and plug end of the bath, and with focus placed on the artist's feet. Furthermore, Kahlo adopts a birds-eye view and looks down on the water from above. Within the water, Kahlo paints an alternative self-portrait, one in which the more traditional facial portrait has been replaced by an array of symbols and recurring motifs. The artist includes portraits of her parents, a traditional Tehuana dress, a perforated shell, a dead humming bird, two female lovers, a skeleton, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship set sail, and a woman drowning. This painting was featured in Breton's 1938 book on Surrealism and Painting and Hayden Herrera, in her biography of Kahlo, mentions that the artist herself considered this work to have a special importance. Recalling the tapestry style painting of Northern Renaissance masters, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the figures and objects floating in the water of Kahlo's painting create an at once fantastic and real landscape of memory. Kahlo discussed What the Water Gave Me with the Manhattan gallery owner Julien Levy, and suggested that it was a sad piece that mourned the loss of her childhood. Perhaps the strangled figure at the centre is representative of the inner emotional torments experienced by Kahlo herself. It is clear from the conversation that the artist had with Levy, that Kahlo was aware of the philosophical implications of her work. In an interview with Herrera, Levy recalls, in 'a long philosophical discourse, Kahlo talked about the perspective of herself that is shown in this painting'. He further relays that 'her idea was about the image of yourself that you have because you do not see your head. The head is something that is looking, but is not seen. It is what one carries around to look at life with.' The artist's head in What the Water Gave Me is thus appropriately replaced by the interior thoughts that occupy her mind. As well as an inclusion of death by strangulation in the centre of the water, there is also a labia-like flower and a cluster of pubic hair painted between Kahlo's legs. The work is quite sexual while also showing preoccupation with destruction and death. The motif of the bathtub in art is one that has been popular since Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793), and was later taken up many different personalities such as Francesca Woodman and Tracey Emin.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

The Two Fridas

This double self-portrait is one of Kahlo's most recognized compositions, and is symbolic of the artist's emotional pain experienced during her divorce from Rivera. On the left, the artist is shown in modern European attire, wearing the costume from her marriage to Rivera. Throughout their marriage, given Rivera's strong nationalism, Kahlo became increasingly interested in indigenism and began to explore traditional Mexican costume, which she wears in the portrait on the right. It is the Mexican Kahlo that holds a locket with an image of Rivera. The stormy sky in the background, and the artist's bleeding heart - a fundamental symbol of Catholicism and also symbolic of Aztec ritual sacrifice - accentuate Kahlo's personal tribulation and physical pain. Symbolic elements frequently possess multiple layers of meaning in Kahlo's pictures; the recurrent theme of blood represents both metaphysical and physical suffering, gesturing also to the artist's ambivalent attitude toward accepted notions of womanhood and fertility. Although both women have their hearts exposed, the woman in the white European outfit also seems to have had her heart dissected and the artery that runs from this heart is cut and bleeding. The artery that runs from the heart of her Tehuana-costumed self remains intact because it is connected to the miniature photograph of Diego as a child. Whereas Kahlo's heart in the Mexican dress remains sustained, the European Kahlo, disconnected from her beloved Diego, bleeds profusely onto her dress. As well as being one of the artist's most famous works, this is also her largest canvas.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

This self-portrait shows Kahlo as an androgynous figure. Scholars have seen this gesture as a confrontational response to Rivera's demand for a divorce, revealing the artist's injured sense of female pride and her self-punishment for the failures of her marriage. Her masculine attire also reminds the viewer of early family photographs in which Kahlo chose to wear a suit. The cropped hair also presents a nuanced expression of the artist's identity. She holds one cut braid in her left hand while many strands of hair lie scattered on the floor. The act of cutting a braid symbolizes a rejection of girlhood and innocence, but equally can be seen as the severance of a connective cord (maybe umbilical) that binds two people or two ways of life. Either way, braids were a central element in Kahlo's identity as the traditional La Mexicana , and in the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects some aspect of her former identity. The hair strewn about the floor echoes an earlier self-portrait painted as the Mexican folkloric figure La Llorona , here ridding herself of these female attributes. Kahlo clutches a pair of scissors, as the discarded strands of hair become animated around her feet; the tresses appear to have a life of their own as they curl across the floor and around the legs of her chair. Above her sorrowful scene, Kahlo inscribed the lyrics and music of a song that declares cruelly, "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are hairless, I don't love you anymore," confirming Kahlo's own denunciation and rejection of her female roles. In likely homage to Kahlo's painting, Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus photographed Wedding Portraits in 1997. On the occasion of her marriage, Brotherus cuts her hair, the remains of which her new husband holds in his hands. The act of cutting one's hair symbolic of a moment of change happens in the work of other female artists too, including that of Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

The frontal position and outward stare of Kahlo in this self-portrait directly confronts and engages the viewer. The artist wears Christ's unraveled crown of thorns as a necklace that digs into her neck, signifying her self-representation as a Christian martyr and the enduring pain experienced following her failed marriage. A dead hummingbird, a symbol in Mexican folkloric tradition of luck charms for falling in love, hangs in the center of her necklace. A black cat - symbolic of bad luck and death - crouches behind her left shoulder, and a spider monkey gifted from Rivera, symbolic of evil, is included to her right. Kahlo frequently employed flora and fauna in the background of her bust-length portraits to create a tight, claustrophobic space, using the symbolic element of nature to simultaneously compare and contrast the link between female fertility with the barren and deathly imagery of the foreground. Typically a symbol of good fortune, the meaning of a 'dead' hummingbird is to be reversed. Kahlo, who craves flight, is perturbed and disturbed by the fact that the butterflies in her hair are too delicate to travel far and that the dead bird around her neck, has become an anchor, preyed upon by the nearby cat. In failing to directly translate complex inner feelings it as though the painting illustrates the artist's frustrations.

Oil on canvas on masonite - Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The Broken Column

The Broken Column is a particularly pertinent example of the combination of Kahlo's emotional and physical pain. The artist's biographer, Hayden Herrera, writes of this painting, 'A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her in two. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida's feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart'. A broken ionic column replaces the artist's crumbling spine and sharp metal nails pierce her body. The hard coldness of this inserted column recalls the steel rod that pierced the artist's abdomen and uterus during her streetcar accident. More generally, the architectural feature now in ruins, has associations of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female body. Beyond its physical dimensions, the cloth wrapped around Kahlo's pelvis, recalls Christ's loincloth. Indeed, Kahlo again displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; through identification with Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of spiritual suffering. Tears dot the artist's face as they do many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico; her eyes stare out beyond the painting as though renouncing the flesh and summoning the spirit. It is as a result of depictions like this one that Kahlo is now considered a Magic Realist. Her eyes are never-changing, realistic, while the rest of the painting is highly fantastical. The painting is not overly concerned with the workings of the subconscious or with irrational juxtapositions that feature more typically in Surrealist works. The Magic Realism movement was extremely popular in Latin America (especially with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez), and Kahlo has been retrospectively included in it by art historians. The notion of being wounded in the way that we see illustrated in The Broken Column , is referred to in Spanish as chingada . This word embodies numerous interrelated meanings and concepts, which include to be wounded, broken, torn open or deceived. The word derives from the verb for penetration and implies domination of the female by the male. It refers to the status of victimhood. The painting also likely inspired a performance and sculptural piece made by Rebecca Horn in 1970 called Unicorn . In the piece Horn walks naked through an arable field with her body strapped in a fabric corset that appears almost identical to that worn by Kahlo in The Broken Column . In the piece by the German performance artist, however, the erect, sky-reaching pillar is fixed to her head rather than inserted into her chest. The performance has an air of mythology and religiosity similar to that of Kahlo's painting, but the column is whole and strong again, perhaps paying homage to Kahlo's fortitude and artistic triumph.

Oil on masonite - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

The Wounded Deer

The 1946 painting, The Wounded Deer , further extends both the notion of chingada and the Saint Sebastian motif already explored in The Broken Column . As a hybrid between a deer and a woman, the innocent Kahlo is wounded and bleeding, preyed upon and hunted down in a clearing in the forest. Staring directly at the viewer, the artist confirms that she is alive, and yet the arrows will slowly kill her. The artist wears a pearl earring, as though highlighting the tension that she feels between her social existence and the desire to exist more freely alongside nature. Kahlo does not portray herself as a delicate and gentle fawn; she is instead a full-bodied stag with large antlers and drooping testicles. Not only does this suggest, like her suited appearance in early family photographs, that Kahlo is interested in combining the sexes to create an androgyne, but also shows that she attempted to align herself with the other great artists of the past, most of whom had been men. The branch beneath the stag's feet is reminiscent of the palm branches that onlookers laid under the feet of Jesus as he arrived in Jerusalem. Kahlo continued to identify with the religious figure of Saint Sebastian from this point until her death. In 1953, she completed a drawing of herself in which eleven arrows pierce her skin. Similarly, the artist Louise Bourgeois, also interested in the visualization of pain, used Saint Sebastian as a recurring symbol in her art. She first depicted the motif in 1947 as an abstracted series of forms, barely distinguishable as a human figure; drawn using watercolor and pencil on pink paper, but then later made obvious pink fabric sculptures of the saint, stuck with arrows, she like Kahlo feeling under attack and afraid.

Oil on masonite - Private Collection

Weeping Coconuts (Cocos gimientes)

This still life is exemplary of Kahlo's late work. More frequently associated with her psychological portraiture, Kahlo in fact painted still lifes throughout her career. She depicted fresh fruit and vegetable produce and objects native to Mexico, painting many small-scale still lifes, especially as she grew progressively ill. The anthropomorphism of the fruit in this composition is symbolic of Kahlo's projection of pain into all things as her health deteriorated at the end of her life. In contrast with the tradition of the cornucopia signifying plentiful and fruitful life, here the coconuts are literally weeping, alluding to the dualism of life and death. A small Mexican flag bearing the affectionate and personal inscription "Painted with all the love. Frida Kahlo" is stuck into a prickly pear, signaling Kahlo's use of the fruit as an emblem of personal expression, and communicating her deep respect for all of nature's gifts. During this period, the artist was heavily reliant on drugs and alcohol to alleviate her pain, so albeit beautiful, her still lifes became progressively less detailed between 1951 and 1953.

Oil on board - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacan, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was German, and had moved to Mexico at a young age where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking over the photography business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry, and raised Frida and her three sisters in a strict and religious household (Frida also had two half sisters from her father's first marriage who were raised in a convent). La Casa Azul was not only Kahlo's childhood home, but also the place that she returned to live and work from 1939 until her death. It later opened as the Frida Kahlo Museum.

Aside from her mother's rigidity, religious fanaticism, and tendency toward outbursts, several other events in Kahlo's childhood affected her deeply. At age six, Kahlo contracted polio; a long recovery isolated her from other children and permanently damaged one of her legs, causing her to walk with a limp after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very close, and particularly so after the experience of being an invalid, enrolled his daughter at the German College in Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer. All of Kahlo's sisters instead attended a convent school so it seems that there was a thirst for expansive learning noted in Frida that resulted in her father making different decisions especially for her. Kahlo was grateful for this and despite a strained relationship with her mother, always credited her father with great tenderness and insight. Still, she was interested in both strands of her roots, and her mixed European and Mexican heritage provided life-long fascination in her approach towards both life and art.

Kahlo had a horrible experience at the German School where she was sexually abused and thus forced to leave. Luckily at the time, the Mexican Revolution and the Minister of Education had changed the education policy, and from 1922 girls were admitted to the National Preparatory School. Kahlo was one of the first 35 girls admitted and she began to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. She excelled academically, became very interested in Mexican culture, and also became active politically.

Early Training

When Kahlo was 15, Diego Rivera (already a renowned artist) was painting the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater of her Preparatory School. Upon seeing him work, Kahlo experienced a moment of infatuation and fascination that she would go on to fully explore later in life. Meanwhile she enjoyed helping her father in his photography studio and received drawing instruction from her father's friend, Fernando Fernandez - for whom she was an apprentice engraver. At this time Kahlo also befriended a dissident group of students known as the "Cachuchas", who confirmed the young artist's rebellious spirit and further encouraged her interest in literature and politics. In 1923 Kahlo fell in love with a fellow member of the group, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and the two remained romantically involved until 1928. Sadly, in 1925 together with Alejandro (who survived unharmed) on their way home from school, Kahlo was involved in a near-fatal bus accident.

Kahlo suffered multiple fractures throughout her body, including a crushed pelvis, and a metal rod impaled her womb. She spent one month in the hospital immobile, and bound in a plaster corset, and following this period, many more months bedridden at home. During her long recovery she began to experiment in small-scale autobiographical portraiture, henceforth abandoning her medical pursuits due to practical circumstances and turning her focus to art.

During the months of convalescence at home Kahlo's parents made her a special easel, gave her a set of paints, and placed a mirror above her head so that she could see her own reflection and make self-portraits. Kahlo spent hours confronting existential questions raised by her trauma including a feeling of dissociation from her identity, a growing interiority, and a general closeness to death. She drew upon the acute pictorial realism known from her father's photographic portraits (which she greatly admired) and approached her own early portraits (mostly of herself, her sisters, and her school friends) with the same psychological intensity. At the time, Kahlo seriously considered becoming a medical illustrator during this period as she saw this as a way to marry her interests in science and art.

By 1927, Kahlo was well enough to leave her bedroom and thus re-kindled her relationship with the Cachuchas group, which was by this point all the more political. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and began to familiarize herself with the artistic and political circles in Mexico City. She became close friends with the photojournalist Tina Modotti and Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It was in June 1928, at one of Modotti's many parties, that Kahlo was personally introduced to Diego Rivera who was already one of Mexico's most famous artists and a highly influential member of the PCM. Soon after, Kahlo boldly asked him to decide, upon looking at one of her portraits, if her work was worthy of pursuing a career as an artist. He was utterly impressed by the honesty and originality of her painting and assured her of her talents. Despite the fact that Rivera had already been married twice, and was known to have an insatiable fondness for women, the two quickly began a romantic relationship and were married in 1929. According to Kahlo's mother, who outwardly expressed her dissatisfaction with the match, the couple were 'the elephant and the dove'. Her father however, unconditionally supported his daughter and was happy to know that Rivera had the financial means to help with Kahlo's medical bills. The new couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos where Kahlo devoted herself entirely to painting.

Mature Period

By the early 1930s, Kahlo's painting had evolved to include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity, a facet of her artwork that had stemmed from her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and from her interest in preserving the revival of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe. Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her German roots is evidenced in her name change from Frieda to Frida, and furthermore in her decision to wear traditional Tehuana costume (the dress from earlier matriarchal times). At the time, two failed pregnancies augmented Kahlo's simultaneously harsh and beautiful representation of the specifically female experience through symbolism and autobiography.

During the first few years of the 1930s Kahlo and Rivera lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York whilst Rivera was creating various murals. Kahlo also completed some seminal works including Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States (1932) with the latter expressing her observations of rivalry taking place between nature and industry in the two lands. It was during this time that Kahlo met and became friends with Imogen Cunningham , Ansel Adams , and Edward Weston . She also met Dr. Leo Eloesser while in San Francisco, the surgeon who would become her closest medical advisor until her death.

Soon after the unveiling of a large and controversial mural that Rivera had made for the Rockefeller Centre in New York (1933), the couple returned to Mexico as Kahlo was feeling particularly homesick. They moved into a new house in the wealthy neighborhood of San Angel. The house was made up of two separate parts joined by a bridge. This set up was appropriate as their relationship was undergoing immense strain. Kahlo had numerous health issues while Rivera, although he had been previously unfaithful, at this time had an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina which understandably hurt Kahlo more than her husband's other infidelities. Kahlo too started to have her own extramarital affairs at this point. Not long after returning to Mexico from the States, she met the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was on holiday in Mexico. The two began an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted 10 years, and it is Muray who is credited as the man who captured Kahlo most colorfully on camera.

While briefly separated from Diego following the affair with her sister and living in her own flat away from San Angel, Kahlo also had a short affair with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi . The two highly politically and socially conscious artists remained friends until Kahlo's death.

In 1936, Kahlo joined the Fourth International (a Communist organization) and often used La Casa Azul as a meeting point for international intellectuals, artists, and activists. She also offered the house where the exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, could take up residence once they were granted asylum in Mexico. In 1937, as well as helping Trotsky, Kahlo and the political icon embarked on a short love affair. Trotsky and his wife remained in La Casa Azul until mid-1939.

During a visit to Mexico City in 1938, the founder of Surrealism , André Breton , was enchanted with Kahlo's painting, and wrote to his friend and art dealer, Julien Levy , who quickly invited Kahlo to hold her first solo show at his gallery in New York. This time round, Kahlo traveled to the States without Rivera and upon arrival caused a huge media sensation. People were attracted to her colorful and exotic (but actually traditional) Mexican costumes and her exhibition was a success. Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the notable guests to attend Kahlo's opening. Kahlo enjoyed some months socializing in New York and then sailed to Paris in early 1939 to exhibit with the Surrealists there. That exhibition was not as successful and she became quickly tired of the over-intellectualism of the Surrealist group. Kahlo returned to New York hoping to continue her love affair with Muray, but he broke off the relationship as he had recently met somebody else. Thus Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City and upon her return Rivera requested a divorce.

Later Years and Death

Following her divorce, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul. She moved away from her smaller paintings and began to work on much larger canvases. In 1940 Kahlo and Rivera remarried and their relationship became less turbulent as Kahlo's health deteriorated. Between the years of 1940-1956, the suffering artist often had to wear supportive back corsets to help her spinal problems, she also had an infectious skin condition, along with syphilis. When her father died in 1941, this exacerbated both her depression and her health. She again was often housebound and found simple pleasure in surrounding herself by animals and in tending to the garden at La Casa Azul.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1940s, Kahlo's work grew in notoriety and acclaim from international collectors, and was included in several group shows both in the United States and in Mexico. In 1943, her work was included in Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York. In this same year, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at a painting school in Mexico City (the school known as La Esmeralda ), and acquired some highly devoted students with whom she undertook some mural commissions. She struggled to continue making a living from her art, never accommodating to clients' wishes if she did not like them, but luckily received a national prize for her painting Moses (1945) and then The Two Fridas painting was bought by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. Meanwhile, the artist grew progressively ill. She had a complicated operation to try and straighten her spine, but it failed and from 1950 onwards, she was often confined to a wheelchair.

She continued to paint relatively prolifically in her final years while also maintaining her political activism, and protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, her first and only solo show in Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed following on the back of a truck. The bed was then placed in the center of the gallery so that she could lie there for the duration of the opening. Kahlo died in 1954 at La Casa Azul. While the official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism, questions have been raised about suicide - either deliberate of accidental. She was 47 years old.

The Legacy of Frida Kahlo

As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with Primitivism , Indigenism , Magic Realism , and Surrealism . Posthumously, Kahlo's artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon. The artist's celebrity status for mass audiences has at times resulted in the compartmentalization of the artist's work as representative of interwar Latin American artwork at large, distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's deeply personal subject matter. Recent exhibitions, such as Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago have attempted to reframe Kahlo's cultural significance by underscoring her lasting impact on the politics of the body and Kahlo's challenge to mainstream aesthetics of representation. Dreamers Awake (2017) held at The White Cube Gallery in London further illustrated the huge influence that Frida Kahlo and a handful of other early female Surrealists have had on the development and progression of female art.

The legacy of Kahlo cannot be underestimated or exaggerated. Not only is it likely that every female artist making art since the 1950s will quote her as an influence, but it is not only artists and those who are interested in art that she inspires. Her art also supports people who suffer as result of accident, as result of miscarriage, and as result of failed marriage. Through imagery, Kahlo articulated experiences so complex, making them more manageable and giving viewers hope that they can endure, recover, and start again.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Frida Kahlo

• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo: Her Photos By Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
• Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up Our Pick By Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa
• Frida Kahlo at Home Our Pick By Suzanne Barbezat
• Frida Kahlo: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series) By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo I Paint My Reality By Christina Burrus
• Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life By Cateherine Reef
• The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait Our Pick By Carlos Fuentes
• Frida by Frida By Frida Kahlo and Raquel Tibol
• Frida Kahlo: The Paintings Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo By Emma Dexter, Tanya Barson
• Frida Kahlo Retrospective By Peter von Becker, Ingried Brugger, Salamon Grimberg, Cristina Kahlo, Arnaldo Kraus, Helga Prignitz-Poda, Francisco Reyes Palma, Florian Steininger, Jeanette Zqingenberger
• Frida Kahlo Masterpieces of Art By Julian Beecroft
• Kahlo (Basic Art Series 2.0) Our Pick By Andrea Kettenmann
• Frida Kahlo's Gadren Our Pick By Adriana Zavala
• The Museum of Modern Art: Discussion of Portrait with Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo: The woman behind the legend - TED_Ed
• Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas” - Great Art Explained Our Pick
• Frida Kahlo: Life of an Artist - Art History School Our Pick
• A Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House – La Casa Azul
• La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick The artist's house museum
• Works from La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick By The Google Cultural Institute
• Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern Website of the 2005 Exhibition
• Why Contemporary Art Is Unimaginable Without Frida Kahlo By Priscilla Frank / The Huffington Post / April 29, 2014
• Diary of a Mad Artist By Amy Fine Collins / Vanity Fair / July 2011
• The People's Artist, Herself a Work of Art Our Pick By Holland Cotter / The New York Times / February 29, 2008
• Let Fridamania Commence By Adrian Searle / The Guardian / June 6, 2005
• The Trouble with Frida Kahlo By Stephanie Mencimer / Washington Monthly / June 2002
• Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading Our Pick By Liza Bakewell / Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies / 1993
• Frida Kahlo: Portrait of Chronic Pain By Carol A. Courtney, Michael A. O'Hearn, and Carla C. Franck / Physical Therapy / January 2017
• Medical Imagery in the Art of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By David Lomas, Rosemary Howell / British Medical Journal / December 1989
• Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in “Gringolandia" Our Pick By Rebecca Block and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep / Women’s Art Journal / 1999
• Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A Comparison of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices By Elizabeth Garber / Art Education / March 1992
• NPR: Mexican Artist Used Politics to Rock the Boat Artist Judy Chicago discusses the book she co-authored: "Frida Kahlo: Face to Face"
• Frida Our Pick A 2002 Biographical Film on Frida Kahlo, Starring Salma Hayek
• The Frida Kahlo Corporation A Company with Products Inspired by Frida Kahlo
• How Frida Kahlo Became a Global Brand By Tess Thackara / Artsy.com / Dec 19, 2017 /

Similar Art

Portrait of Lupe Marin (1938)

Egg in the church or The Snake (Date Unknown)

Self-Portrait (c. 1937-38)

Einhorn (Unicorn) (1970-72)

Related artists.

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Katlyn Beaver

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie

Frida Kahlo biography

Considered one of Mexico's greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family's home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister.

Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.

Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of 1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time. Rivera at that time was working on a mural called The Creation on the school campus. Frida often watched it and she told a friend she will marry him someday.

In the same year, Kahlo joined a gang of students who shared similar political and intellectual views. She fell in love with the leader Alejandro Gomez Arias. On a September afternoon when she traveled with Gomez Arias on a bus the tragic accident happened. The bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. A steel handrail impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis are fractured and this accident left her in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically.

She was injured so badly and had to stay in the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks. After that, she returned home for further recovery. She had to wear full-body cast for three months. To kill the time and alleviate the pain, she started painting and finished her first self-portrait the following year. Frida Kahlo once said,

I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best".

Her parents encouraged her to paint and made a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed. They also gave her brushes and boxes of paints.

Frida Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. She asked him to evaluate her work and he encouraged her. The two soon started the romantic relationship. Despite her mother's objection, Frida and Diego Rivera got married in the next year. During their earlier years as a married couple, Frida had to move a lot based on Diego's work. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. Then they moved to New York City for Rivera's artwork show at Museum of Modern Art . They later moved to Detroit while Diego Rivera worked for Detroit Institute of Arts .

In 1932, Kahlo added more realistic and surrealistic components in her painting style. In the painting titled Henry Ford Hospital(1932) , Frida Kahlo lied on a hospital bed naked and was surrounded with a few things floating around, which includes a fetus, a flower, a pelvis, a snail, all connected by veins. This painting was an expression of her feelings about her second miscarriage. It is as personal as her other self-portraits.

In 1933, Kahlo was living in New York City with her husband Diego Rivera. Rivera was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to create a mural named as Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center. Rivera tried to include Vladimir Lenin in the painting, who is a communist leader. Rockefeller stopped his work and that part was painted over. The couple had to move back to Mexico after this incident. They returned and live in San Angel, Mexico.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's marriage is not a usual one. They had been keeping separate homes and studios for all those years. Diego had so many affairs and one of that was with Kahlo's sister Cristina. Frida Kahlo was so sad and she cut off her long hair to show her desperation to the betrayal. She has longed for children but she cannot bear one due to the bus accident. She was heartbroken when she experienced a second miscarriage in 1934. Kahlo and Rivera have been separated a few times but they always went back together. In 1937 they helped Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia. Leon Trotsky is an exiled communist and rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Kahlo and Rivera welcomed the couple together and let them stay at her Blue House. Kahlo also had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky when the couple stayed at her house.

In 1938, Frida Kahlo became a friend of André Breton, who is one of the primary figures of the Surrealism movement. Frida said she never considered herself as a Surrealist "until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one." She also wrote, "Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself". "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself."

In the same year, she had an exhibition at New York City gallery. She sold some of her paintings and got two commissions. One of that is from Clare Boothe Luce to paint her friend Dorothy Hale who committed suicide. She painted The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), which tells the story of Dorothy's tragic leap. The patron Luce was horrified and almost destroyed this painting.

The next year, 1939, Kahlo was invited by André Breton and went to Paris. Her works are exhibited there and she is befriended with artists such as Marc Chagall , Piet Mondrian , and Pablo Picasso . She and Rivera got divorced that year and she painted one of her most famous paintings, The Two Fridas (1939).

But soon Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera remarried in 1940. The second marriage is about the same as the first one. They still keep separate lives and houses. Both of them had infidelities with other people during the marriage. Kahlo received a commission from the Mexican government for five portraits of important Mexican women in 1941, but she was unable to finish the project. She lost her beloved father that year and continued to suffer from chronic health problems. Despite her personal challenges, her work continued to grow in popularity and was included in numerous group shows around this time.

In the year of 1944, Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous portraits, The Broken Column . In this painting, she depicted herself naked and split down the middle. Her spine is shattered like a column. She wears a surgical brace and there are nails all through her body, which is the indication of the consistent pain she went through. In this painting, Frida expressed her physical challenges through her art. During that time, she had a few surgeries and had to wear special corsets to protect her back spine. She seeks lots of medical treatment for her chronic pain but nothing really worked.

Her health condition has been worsening in 1950. That year she was diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot. She became bedridden for the next nine month and had to stay in hospital and had several surgeries. But with great persistence, Frida Kahlo continued to work and paint. In the year of 1953, she had a solo exhibition in Mexican. Although she had limited mobility at that time, she showed up on the exhibition's opening ceremony. She arrived by ambulance, and welcomed the attendees, celebrated the ceremony in a bed the gallery set up for her. A few months later, she had to accept another surgery. Part of her right leg got amputated to stop the gangrene.

With the poor physical condition, she is also deeply depressed. She even had an inclination for suicide. Frida Kahlo has been out and in hospital during that year. But despite her health issues, she has been active with the political movement. She showed up at the demonstration against US-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2. This is her last public appearance. About one week after her 47th birthday, Frida Kahlo passed away at her beloved Bule House. She was publicly reported to die of a pulmonary embolism, but there is speculation which was saying she died of a possible suicide.

Frida Kahlo's fame has been growing after her death. Her Blue House was opened as a museum in the year of 1958. In the 1970s the interest in her work and life is renewed due to the feminist movement since she was viewed as an icon of female creativity. In 1983, Hayden Herrera published his book on her, A Biography of Frida Kahlo , which drew more attention from the public to this great artist. In the year of 2002, a movie named Frida was released, staring alma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. This movie was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

The Two Fridas

Self-portrait with thorn necklace & hummingbird, viva la vida, watermelons, the wounded deer, self portrait with monkeys, without hope, me and my parrots, what the water gave me, frida and diego rivera, the wounded table, diego and i, my dress hangs there, henry ford hospital, self portrait as a tehuana, fulang chang and i.

Defining Frida Kahlo's Place In Art History

Editorial feature.

By Google Arts & Culture

Words by Tere Arcq

Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill (1954) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

Curator Tere Arcq explores Frida's artistic influences   

Frida Kahlo is unquestionably Mexico's best-known modern painter. Much of her fame is doubtlessly due to the way in which the contemporary world has viewed the unique manner in which she built her public persona; but it wasn't always like this. During her lifetime, her work was eclipsed by the monumental figure of her husband, Diego Rivera, who was the country's most acclaimed artist at that period. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of feminist movements, that Kahlo's work was reclaimed. Her artistic legacy takes the form of an exceptional biographical narrative in which, using drama and a rich symbolism, she tells the story of her intimate experiences, her pain, her beliefs, and her passions. This presents a challenge for art historians and curators: her life and works are intimately linked and her artistic contribution risks being overshadowed by her extraordinary life story. Frida's work is a fascinating blend of symbolic and pictorial systems with diverse origins that, reflected on her canvases, take on another guise, re-invigorating the dramatic aspects of her story.

Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) by Frida Kahlo San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

At the side of her father, the German photographer Guillermo Kahlo, Frida learned from a young age to use a camera lens, to observe in detail the faces, gestures, and postures of clients who came to his studio, and to use a paintbrush to retouch pictures. Frida knew—and this was reflected in her paintings as well as in the numerous photographic portraits that she took throughout her life—that through photography, a person's image was immortalized and she would carefully select from all of them the one that best reflected what she wanted to show. From the time of her birth until she married Diego, she lived between Coyoacán, Mexico City, and a few other nearby places. The inspiration for her art came, at first, from what she observed in her immediate surroundings. Certain forms of folk art, such as ex-votos (small paintings painted on metal plates, commissioned by the faithful in gratitude for miracles received and used to adorn the atriums and chapels of churches) appeared in her paintings over the years.

Votive offering dedicated to the Virgin of Talpa (1934) by Unknown Museo Frida Kahlo

Votive offering dedicated to the Virgin of Talpa by Frida Kahlo (From the collection of Museo Frida Kahlo)

The intimate relationships and friendships that Frida maintained throughout her life had a profound effect on her interests. It was while studying at the National Preparatory School (now the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso) that she met her first love, Alejandro Gómez Arias. He was a member of the group called "Los Cachuchas," whose members identified with the Mexican avant-garde movement of "Estridentismo" (Stridentism), founded in 1921. This group, inspired by Dadaism, rejected rules and institutions and advocated total freedom in artistic creation. It emerged in response to the post-revolutionary approach that emphasized art's social function. The admiration of these young people for artists such as Max Jacob, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and Modigliani also had an effect on Frida, and their influence can be seen in her early paintings. In one she even painted a self-portrait in a velvet dress, with a stylized elongated neck in the style of Modigliani.

Portrait of Frida Kahlo on the patio of the Blue House, Coyoacán, Mexico (195-?) by Florence Arquin Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Her relationship with Diego Rivera was perhaps the most significant influence on her life and on her development as an artist. Rivera's interest in the pre-Hispanic past and the reclaiming of Mexico's history and culture transformed Frida's work and her identity. It was at his side that her passion for traditional clothing and jewelry, Mexican cuisine, and the collecting of folk art emerged. She accompanied Rivera on his travels in search of pre-Hispanic pieces to add to his vast collection. In so doing, she discovered ancestral cultures that reconnected her with her own family history. Her mother was originally from Oaxaca and, according to the family photographs in the Blue House, the female line could be traced to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a place in which a matriarchal culture still existed. Frida appropriated this powerful image and painted herself dressed as a Tehuanan woman.

Diego Rivera Watching Frida Kahlo Paint a Self Portrait (ca. 1940) by Bernard Silberstein Cincinnati Art Museum

Diego Rivera watching Frida Kahlo paint "Self-Portrait as Tehuana" (From the collection of Cincinnati Art Museum) 

Rivera's mural commissions in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York opened up a whole new landscape for Frida that saw a transformation in her work. While Diego spent his days on the scaffolding of various buildings, Frida visited museums, often went to plays and films, and made new friendships with collectors, artists, writers, and intellectuals. In New York, the works that she could visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, especially the paintings of El Greco, Henri Rousseau, and Salvador Dalí, made an impression that can be seen in her own paintings. It was in this city that she met the artist Georgia O'Keeffe who, like her, used the traditional genre of still life as a means of representing taboo subjects such as sexuality. Frida saw fruit and flowers as speakers of a provocative language, revealing things that were hidden.

Still life (1942) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

Still Life by Frida Kahlo (From the collection of Museo Frida Kahlo)

It was also through Rivera that she met André Breton, the father of surrealism and someone who would go on to play a key part in her career. It was thanks to his efforts that she had the opportunity to exhibit her work for the first time in a solo exhibition in New York in 1938, in the Julien Levy Gallery (an important venue for surrealists in America) and, one year later, in the collective exhibition entitled Mexique, shown at the Galerie Renou et Colle in Paris. As a result, Frida found herself suddenly thrown into the surrealist world, meeting artists such as Paul Klee, Picasso, and Joan Miró. While there, she spent several weeks at the house of Marcel Duchamp, an artist whom she admired greatly and who may have inspired the exploration of her alter ego in her most famous painting, The Two Fridas, which she painted for the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1940.

The Two Fridas (1939) by Frida Kahlo Museo de Arte Moderno

The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo (From the collection of Museo de Arte Moderno)

The sources that inspired Frida Kahlo's imagination were manifold and the Blue House was an endless resource for new studies and research. The collections of pre-Hispanic and folk art, exhibition books and catalogs, paintings by other artists she admired, miniature reproductions of paintings, and countless objects hidden away in her wardrobe all found a place in her paintings. In this perpetual reworking of her identity, Kahlo created extraordinary pictures in which she herself became the object and the subject of her art. Her symbolic portraits and self-portraits represented a provocative rupture in the dividing line separating the public from the strictly private sphere. Kahlo surprises the viewer with her visionary power, being the first female artist to rebel against the canons of art in order to explore her psyche, full of symbols and personal stories, which inspired the imaginations of countless artists around the world.

Untitled (Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird) (1940) by Frida Kahlo Harry Ransom Center

Untitled (Self-portait with thorn necklace and hummingbird) by Frida Kahlo (From the collection of Harry Ransom Center) 

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Museo frida kahlo, u.s. history, cincinnati art museum, the two fridas, 1939, museo de arte moderno, frida kahlo at the archives of american art, archives of american art, smithsonian institution, robert s. duncanson, explore your museum at home – bipoc artists in their own words, the cincinnati story, mementos of affection, homage: what was, is, to come, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Encyclopedia of Humanities

The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities

Frida Kahlo

We explain who Frida Kahlo was, and explore her childhood and the development of her works. In addition, we discuss her style and death.

Who was Frida Kahlo?

Frida Kahlo, original name Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, was a Mexican painter born in Coyoacán on July 6, 1907 . She died on July 13, 1954.

As a child, Frida contracted polio and, at the age of 18, she suffered a severe bus accident that nearly took her life . As a result, she had to undergo 32 surgeries over the years. The hardships she faced are vividly reflected in her artwork.

She was the wife of renowned Mexican painter Diego Rivera , who introduced her to the circle of the most prominent artists of the time, and received acclaim from notable art figures such as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso.

Frida Kahlo’s works also convey her political and social commitment. Widespread recognition came posthumously , especially from the 1970s onward, and she is now regarded as one of the major artists in Latin America .

• See also: Eva Perón

Birth and childhood of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico, on July 6, 1907. Her father, German photographer Guillermo Kahlo, was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and her mother, Matilde Calderón, was Mexican of Spanish and indigenous ancestry, born in Mexico City.

As a child, Frida learned to develop, retouch, and color photographs under her father's guidance , which later influenced her passion for painting.

At the age of six, she contracted polio , and her father took care of her during the six months of her recovery. As a consequence of the disease, she was afflicted with a limp throughout her life.

Accident and painting of Frida Kahlo

In 1922, Frida entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, her intention being to study medicine. However, on September 17, 1925, the bus in which she was traveling collided with a streetcar , and Frida was severely injured.

Although she managed to survive, she suffered multiple injuries that would shape her life. Her spine suffered several fractures and, over the years, she underwent over 30 surgeries and had to wear plaster corsets. During the initial months of convalescence, she was bedridden; she abandoned the idea of studying medicine and began painting . In 1926, she painted her first self-portrait.

Frida Kahlo and the Communist Party

Two years after the accident, Frida had recovered sufficiently to reconnect with friends and associate with personalities in the fields of art, thought, and politics. She identified with a cultural movement seeking to recover elements of the Mexican popular tradition , including indigenous influences.

In 1928, her friend Germán del Campo introduced her to Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, who was in exile in Mexico with his partner, Italian photographer Tina Modotti. Frida began attending meetings of the Mexican Communist Party and became romantically involved with Diego Rivera, who had been a member of the party since 1922.

Following a stay in the United States between 1930 and 1933 with Rivera, whom she had married in 1929, she returned to Mexico City. Between 1937 and 1939, she provided refuge to Russian communist exile Leon Trotsky , persecuted by the Stalinist government, who was eventually assassinated in 1940.

Frida maintained her adherence to communism for the rest of her life . Upon her death, her coffin was draped with the flag of the Mexican Communist Party.

Frida Kahlo's marriage to Diego Rivera

Frida met muralist Diego Rivera in 1922 , when he was painting a mural at the National Preparatory School she attended. However, their romantic relationship only began in 1928 when they were introduced by communist activists Julio Antonio Mella and Tina Modotti.

Frida shared her artwork with Rivera, who encouraged her to continue painting. They married in 1929. She was 22 years old and he was 42 . The marriage was tumultuous, marred by extramarital affairs from both parties, most notably Rivera's relationship with Frida's younger sister, which led to their divorce in 1939. However, they remarried at the end of 1940.

Frida's relationship with Rivera influenced not only her artistic style but also the way she dressed. She usually wore colorful garments characteristic of indigenous women in some regions of Mexico, particularly the Tehuana dresses, which pleased her husband. These included necklaces, ornamental combs, or flower headdresses, which became a hallmark of Frida Kahlo's image.

Attempts at motherhood and death

Frida became pregnant with Rivera's child on three occasions but, due to her health problems, she lost each pregnancy . Some of her artwork conveys her thwarted desire for motherhood and the pain from the lost pregnancies.

Throughout her life, Frida continued to suffer from ailments and medical treatments. Her health deteriorated towards 1950, and she eventually died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47 , due to a pulmonary embolism. Some versions suggested it might have been a suicide, but no evidence has ever appeared to support this theory.

She had expressed her wish not to be buried , on the grounds that she had been bedridden for many years. Her body was cremated and her ashes were placed in a pre-Columbian urn at The Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán, where she had lived most of her life and which today houses the Frida Kahlo Museum.

The Blue House

In the famous Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán (Mexico City), on the corner of Londres and Allende streets , Frida Kahlo was born, grew up, and produced much of her great artistic work.

Diego Rivera also lived in this house during the time they were married, and it was frequented by artists and intellectuals . Moreover, the Blue House sheltered communist militant refugees, among them Leon Trotsky and his wife.

Following Frida's death, the Blue House and its gardens became home to the Frida Kahlo Museum , which opened on July 12, 1958. Today, it exhibits paintings and personal objects of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as documents, books, furniture, dresses, and pre-Columbian sculptures that were the environment in which Frida created her works.

The work of Frida Kahlo

Her artistic style.

Frida Kahlo's art largely consisted of paintings that conveyed the suffering and torments she experienced throughout her life. She painted numerous self-portraits in which she crudely expressed her personal experiences and also distanced herself from the artistic stereotypes about femininity, which later influenced her image's revival by feminist movements after her death.

In her nearly 200 works, in addition to self-portraits, she painted still lifes and touched upon social and political themes . Her art often portrayed Mexican folklore since, like many artists and intellectuals following the Mexican Revolution, she was concerned with rescuing aspects of Mexican folk art.

She also incorporated into her art symbolism and images from the recent history of communism , which had made an international impact after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and whose ideology was embraced by Frida.

Frida Kahlo's style is difficult to classify. On one occasion, her work was defined as surrealist , which she rejected claiming that her art dealt with her own real life. She has also been associated with primitivism and expressionism.

Her most renowned works include Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926), Henry Ford Hospital (1932), The Frame (1938), The Two Fridas (1939), The Broken Column (1944), Moses (1945), The Wounded Deer (1946), and Diego and I (1949).

Her color choice

In her works, Frida used bright vibrant colors, which became hallmarks of her style. According to the artist, the colors she used bore specific meanings:

• Good warm light.
• Blood (the red color in her paintings and some of her frames may have symbolized the blood she shed throughout her life: in the accident, surgeries, and miscarriages).
• Madness, fear, illness, mystery.
• Love, purity, electricity, distance, and tenderness.

Exhibition of her artworks

Frida Kahlo's first solo exhibition took place in November 1938 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Her work had been promoted by surrealist writer André Breton , who had traveled to Mexico and had been impressed by her work. In 1939, she exhibited in Paris, and the Louvre Museum acquired her piece "The Frame" ( El marco ). In subsequent years, she exhibited in other cities, especially in the United States.

Frida had only one solo exhibition in her home country . On the opening day, April 13, 1953, her health was so deteriorated that her doctor advised against getting out of bed. Nonetheless, Frida chose to arrive by ambulance and attended the event lying on a hospital bed.

Following her death, and particularly from the 1970s onward, her work acquired widespread recognition, and her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide .

Explore next:

• Che Guevara
• Nelson Mandela
• Thales of Miletus
• Jean Monnet (1888-1979)
• Kahlo 1907-1954. Dolor y pasión . Kettenmann, A. (1999). Taschen.
• "Frida Khalo" en Museo Frida Kahlo .
• "Frida Kahlo. Un ícono del siglo XX" Sadurní, J. M. (2021) en Historia National Geographic .
• "Frida Kahlo" Zelazko, A. (2022) en Encyclopedia Britannica .

Was this information useful to you?

Updates? Omissions? Article suggestions? Send us your comments and suggestions

Thank you for visiting us :)

• Catalog and Account Guide
• Ask a Librarian
• Website Feedback
• Log In / Register
• My Library Dashboard
• My Borrowing
• Checked Out
• Borrowing History
• ILL Requests
• My Collections
• For Later Shelf
• Completed Shelf
• In Progress Shelf
• My Settings

Top Picks: Frida Kahlo

One of the most recognizable artists of all time, Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, feminist, and activist known for her rich and colorful surrealist self-portraits.

Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was one of Mexico’s most well-known photographers and significantly influenced and encouraged Frida’s intellectual curiosity.

Frida experienced health problems nearly her entire life. As a child, she was afflicted with polio, deforming her right foot. Later, while attending school, she was severely injured in a trolley accident. In recovery, Frida began painting despite her physical limitations.

Her paintings often portrayed her physical and emotional pain, stemming from her injuries and her turbulent marriage to famed Mexican painter Diego Rivera.

Frida Kahlo died July 13, 1954, a symbol of feminism and courage in the face of adversity, and her iconic image and cultural impact are undeniable. In celebration of her life, here are a few top picks for Frida Kahlo.

A magnificent selection of photographs and vividly-detailed paintings make Frida Kahlo , a short yet informative work, well worth a look.

A well-researched and fascinating biography of the life of Frida Kahlo, Frida  peels back the layers of the iconic woman we know and reveals her originality and magnetic spirit.

The motion picture Frida depicts Frida Kahlo’s life in Mexico, her fame as an artist, and her tumultuous marriage to Mexican painter and political activist Diego Rivera.

More by Lindsay

Books About the St. Valentine's Day Massacre

• Valentine's Day

Chess: A Game of Skill for All Ages

Books to celebrate the american dream.

• Literary Fiction
• immigration

Discover New Posts

Books to read if you liked remarkably bright creatures.

• friendships
• if you liked

Books for Fans of Carrie

Top picks: nnedi okorafor's 50th birthday.

• Science Fiction

Add a comment to: Top Picks: Frida Kahlo

Powered by BiblioCommons.

BiblioWeb: webapp04 Version 4.18.0 Last updated 2024/03/26 09:55

• Frida Kahlo
• The Two Fridas
• The Broken Column
• Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
• Self-Portrait with Monkey
• Without Hope
• The Wounded Deer
• Frieda and Diego Rivera
• My Grandparents, my parents and me
• Diego and I
• Self Portrait with Cropped Hair
• The Suicide of Dorothy Hale
• A Few Small Nips
• Self-portrait in a Velvet Dress
• Girl with Death Mask
• Fulang-Chang and I
• Self-Portrait as a Tehuana
• Thinking About Death
• Me and My Parrots
• Self Portrait with Loose Hair
• Four Inhabitants of Mexico
• Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill
• Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot
• Full Screen Slider

Frida Kahlo Biography

* As an Amazon Associate, and partner with Google Adsense and Ezoic, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow the turbulent but inspiring life and career of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in this extensive biography which focuses on the hardships that drove her artistic career and the relationships which impacted her development as an artist.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo lived an extraordinary life which remains much celebrated today. Her work ranks amongst the finest of any Mexican artist and the extreme highs and lows of her life are captured in our extensive biography. This famous artist was born on the 6th of July, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico and was one of four sisters. Their family home has been labelled the Blue House or Casa Azul.

Frida had an exciting blend of German, Spanish and indigenous Mexican ancestry, coming directly from her parents. This mixed race background created an open minded individual whoses art style was to follow suit. She had a troubled childhood, blighted by illness. Most significantly, she contracted Polio aged 6 which impacted her growth and also left her bed-ridden for half a year. She pursued multiple sports in order to overcome some of these problems and this helped her to at least boost her confidence and become more extrovert, moving into her teens.

Kahlo joined the male-dominated National Preparatory School in Mexico city in 1922 and set about forging a path that would later lead to international stardom. She was immediately outspoken, and her strong character marked her out from the crowd as someone who would likely do something successful, whichever field that may be in. It was around this time that Frida was involved in a serious traffic accident which left her damaged, physically, for the rest of her life. She suffered multiple injuries and required a long period of rehabilitation before she could live a relatively normal life once more.

This serious setback to Kahlo proved to be the catalyst to her new life, as she took up painting for the first time in order to reduce her frustrations at her predicament. It also kept her occupied whilst bed-bound and helped her to recover more quickly. Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress was her first completed work and set her off on a sequence of artistic introspection which carried on throughout her life. Few artists have held such a dominance in self portraiture as Kahlo, rarely capturing other artistic styles or topics.

Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, was known to Frida from her school days and they were to re-connect later on as she sought advice on her work. This teacher-pupil relationship was to flourish into a romantic connection which later led to marriage . Frida would then travel frequently in order to accompany Rivera on his work-based trips. These took in San Francisco, New York and Detroit. Whilst clearly possessing some considerable natural talent, artist Kahlo would make use of Rivera's own contacts in order to further her career, both through creative ideas and promotional opportunities. Her travels also brought hew new influences in terms of her own personal style and fashion .

Frida Kahlo, in her own words: A new documentary draws from diaries, letters

Updated March 20, 2024 at 9:34 AM ET

"I paint myself because that's who I know the best," the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo once wrote in her illustrated diary. So it's fitting that a new documentary about Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art.

In the 70 years since Kahlo's death there have been countless efforts to revisit her complicated life, politics and artwork. Most famous is probably the 2002 fictional film starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor that depicted Kahlo's tempestuous relationship with painter Diego Rivera. Many of these treatments have relied on actors, interviews with academics, art historians and contemporary artists. Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez wanted a fresh take.

"Instead of having that historical distance of other people explaining [to] us what she meant with her art," Gutiérrez says, "I really wanted to give that gift to viewers of just hearing from her own words. We wanted to have the most intimate entry way into her heart and into her mind."

In Gutiérrez's documentary Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from handwritten letters and illustrated diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Gutiérrez says she wanted to get inside Kahlo's head. "What was she thinking? what was she feeling? I felt that as a Latina, somebody that grew up in Latin America, there was this connection I have with the world that created Frida."

Gutiérrez was born in Peru and saw her first Frida Kahlo painting, as a college student in Massachusetts. It was an image of Kahlo standing with one foot in Mexico, another in the U.S. "Her impressions of the United States and yearning [for] home for Mexico, that painting really reflected my own experience," says Gutiérrez. "And then I became obsessed, like millions of people around the world."

As an editor, Gutiérrez has worked on documentaries on other what she calls "badass women", including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg , singer Chavela Vargas and chef Julia Child . But Frida is her first film as director.

She enlisted the help of Hayden Herrera, who wrote the definitive Frida Kahlo biography in 1983 . Gutiérrez' team combed through Herrera's closets and attic, looking through her archives.

"We had a good time," Herrera says. "I basically gave them all my research material."

That included transcripts of interviews with people who knew Kahlo. One of the film's archivists, Gabriel Rivera, also scoured university libraries, museums and private collections finding photos and handwritten messages.

"These letters often have little doodles on them," Rivera says. "She would, like, do kind of lipstick kisses on these letters."

The film includes the words written by or about Kahlo's contemporaries, including Diego Rivera, who she married twice, her friends such as surrealist André Breton and her lovers such as Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.

Gabriel Rivera says they tried to follow any lead, including a tip about some footage of Kahlo dancing in the streets of New York City with a rose stem gripped in her mouth. He discovered through writings that the film canister had been left on an airplane in the late 1960s, which Rivera said is "just devastating." They tried to find lost luggage and are still hoping it shows up one day.

But there is plenty of material they did find.

In Mexico, another archivist, Adrián Gutiérrez, was able to collect some rarely seen photos and footage of Kahlo and Rivera together, and of Rivera kissing another woman. There's footage of the Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata and of Red Cross workers in Mexico City bandaging trolley accident victims like Kahlo, who was famously injured as a teen. She painted about that and other pain she suffered.

For the documentary, composer Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser created a soundtrack of electronic music with folkloric guitar and the ethereal voice of his wife, Alexa Ramírez.

"The idea was that Frida herself was so ahead of her time, with her thoughts, her ideas. She was a very modern person," says Stumpfhauser. "So we thought, well, let's let's do something modern, but of course, with a with a Mexican flair."

Gutiérrez also made the decision to slightly animate some of Kahlo's paintings. Frida's open heart beats and bleeds, tears roll down her face, and when she cuts her hair in desperation over her divorce, her scissors move and pieces of her hair fall to the floor.

The Salma Hayek film also animated some of Kahlo's work. But Herrera says doing so in a documentary was gutsy.

"When I saw the first animation, I thought, Oh my God," says Herrera. "But then I found it really seductive and really added so much to the understanding of her paintings. I found them very astute and actually quite witty. And they brought you closer to Frida."

Herrera says its remarkable that Frida mania is still very much alive.

"I think she would have been pleased that we're still talking about her, and I think she would have liked this film," she says. "Although seeing your own paintings animated might not be easy, but she might have given one of her big guffaws and laughed and thought it was amusing."

Herrera says this latest documentary is her favorite telling of Frida Kahlo, and is itself a work of art.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Join Discovery, the new community for book lovers

Trust book recommendations from real people, not robots 🤓

Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21

The 30 best biographies of all time.

Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction .

All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels , if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation  😉

Which biography should you read next?

Discover the perfect biography for you. Takes 30 seconds!

1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

This biography of esteemed mathematician John Nash was both a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the basis for the award-winning film of the same name. Nasar thoroughly explores Nash’s prestigious career, from his beginnings at MIT to his work at the RAND Corporation — as well the internal battle he waged against schizophrenia, a disorder that nearly derailed his life.

2. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition by Andrew Hodges

Hodges’ 1983 biography of Alan Turing sheds light on the inner workings of this brilliant mathematician, cryptologist, and computer pioneer. Indeed, despite the title ( a nod to his work during WWII ), a great deal of the “enigmatic” Turing is laid out in this book. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during the war, his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and of course, the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s — when homosexual acts were still a crime punishable by English law.

3. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical, but also a work of creative genius itself. This massive undertaking of over 800 pages details every knowable moment of the youngest Founding Father’s life: from his role in the Revolutionary War and early American government to his sordid (and ultimately career-destroying) affair with Maria Reynolds. He may never have been president, but he was a fascinating and unique figure in American history — plus it’s fun to get the truth behind the songs.

Prefer to read about fascinating First Ladies rather than almost-presidents? Check out this awesome list of books about First Ladies over on The Archive.

4. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

A prolific essayist, short story writer, and novelist, Hurston turned her hand to biographical writing in 1927 with this incredible work, kept under lock and key until it was published 2018. It’s based on Hurston’s interviews with the last remaining survivor of the Middle Passage slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Rendered in searing detail and Lewis’ highly affecting African-American vernacular, this biography of the “last black cargo” will transport you back in time to an era that, chillingly, is not nearly as far away from us as it feels.

5. Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

Though many a biography of him has been attempted, Gilbert’s is the final authority on Winston Churchill — considered by many to be Britain’s greatest prime minister ever. A dexterous balance of in-depth research and intimately drawn details makes this biography a perfect tribute to the mercurial man who led Britain through World War II.

Just what those circumstances are occupies much of Bodanis's book, which pays homage to Einstein and, just as important, to predecessors such as Maxwell, Faraday, and Lavoisier, who are not as well known as Einstein today. Balancing writerly energy and scholarly weight, Bodanis offers a primer in modern physics and cosmology, explaining that the universe today is an expression of mass that will, in some vastly distant future, one day slide back to the energy side of the equation, replacing the \'dominion of matter\' with \'a great stillness\'--a vision that is at once lovely and profoundly frightening.

Without sliding into easy psychobiography, Bodanis explores other circumstances as well; namely, Einstein's background and character, which combined with a sterling intelligence to afford him an idiosyncratic view of the way things work--a view that would change the world. --Gregory McNamee

6. E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

This “biography of the world’s most famous equation” is a one-of-a-kind take on the genre: rather than being the story of Einstein, it really does follow the history of the equation itself. From the origins and development of its individual elements (energy, mass, and light) to their ramifications in the twentieth century, Bodanis turns what could be an extremely dry subject into engaging fare for readers of all stripes.

7. Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

When Enrique was only five years old, his mother left Honduras for the United States, promising a quick return. Eleven years later, Enrique finally decided to take matters into his own hands in order to see her again: he would traverse Central and South America via railway, risking his life atop the “train of death” and at the hands of the immigration authorities, to reunite with his mother. This tale of Enrique’s perilous journey is not for the faint of heart, but it is an account of incredible devotion and sharp commentary on the pain of separation among immigrant families.

8. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

Herrera’s 1983 biography of renowned painter Frida Kahlo, one of the most recognizable names in modern art, has since become the definitive account on her life. And while Kahlo no doubt endured a great deal of suffering (a horrific accident when she was eighteen, a husband who had constant affairs), the focal point of the book is not her pain. Instead, it’s her artistic brilliance and immense resolve to leave her mark on the world — a mark that will not soon be forgotten, in part thanks to Herrera’s dedicated work.

9. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Perhaps the most impressive biographical feat of the twenty-first century, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cells completely changed the trajectory of modern medicine. Rebecca Skloot skillfully commemorates the previously unknown life of a poor black woman whose cancer cells were taken, without her knowledge, for medical testing — and without whom we wouldn’t have many of the critical cures we depend upon today.

10. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992. Five months later, McCandless was found emaciated and deceased in his shelter — but of what cause? Krakauer’s biography of McCandless retraces his steps back to the beginning of the trek, attempting to suss out what the young man was looking for on his journey, and whether he fully understood what dangers lay before him.

11. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families by James Agee

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” From this line derives the central issue of Agee and Evans’ work: who truly deserves our praise and recognition? According to this 1941 biography, it’s the barely-surviving sharecropper families who were severely impacted by the American “Dust Bowl” — hundreds of people entrenched in poverty, whose humanity Evans and Agee desperately implore their audience to see in their book.

12. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Another mysterious explorer takes center stage in this gripping 2009 biography. Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the archaeologist who vanished in the Amazon along with his son in 1925, supposedly in search of an ancient lost city. Parallel to this narrative, Grann describes his own travels in the Amazon 80 years later: discovering firsthand what threats Fawcett may have encountered, and coming to realize what the “Lost City of Z” really was.

13. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Though many of us will be familiar with the name Mao Zedong, this prodigious biography sheds unprecedented light upon the power-hungry “Red Emperor.” Chang and Halliday begin with the shocking statistic that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths during peacetime — more than any other twentieth-century world leader. From there, they unravel Mao’s complex ideologies, motivations, and missions, breaking down his long-propagated “hero” persona and thrusting forth a new, grislier image of one of China’s biggest revolutionaries.

14. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson by Andrew Wilson

Titled after one of her most evocative poems, this shimmering bio of Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on her years of depression and tempestuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes, it chronicles her life before she ever came to Cambridge. Wilson closely examines her early family and relationships, feelings and experiences, with information taken from her meticulous diaries — setting a strong precedent for other Plath biographers to follow.

15. The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes

What if you had twenty-four different people living inside you, and you never knew which one was going to come out? Such was the life of Billy Milligan, the subject of this haunting biography by the author of Flowers for Algernon . Keyes recounts, in a refreshingly straightforward style, the events of Billy’s life and how his psyche came to be “split”... as well as how, with Keyes’ help, he attempted to put the fragments of himself back together.

16. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

This gorgeously constructed biography follows Paul Farmer, a doctor who’s worked for decades to eradicate infectious diseases around the globe, particularly in underprivileged areas. Though Farmer’s humanitarian accomplishments are extraordinary in and of themselves, the true charm of this book comes from Kidder’s personal relationship with him — and the sense of fulfillment the reader sustains from reading about someone genuinely heroic, written by someone else who truly understands and admires what they do.

17. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Here’s another bio that will reshape your views of a famed historical tyrant, though this time in a surprisingly favorable light. Decorated scholar Andrew Roberts delves into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his near-flawless military instincts to his complex and confusing relationship with his wife. But Roberts’ attitude toward his subject is what really makes this work shine: rather than ridiculing him ( as it would undoubtedly be easy to do ), he approaches the “petty tyrant” with a healthy amount of deference.

18. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV by Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson might not seem as intriguing or scandalous as figures like Kennedy, Nixon, or W. Bush. But in this expertly woven biography, Robert Caro lays out the long, winding road of his political career, and it’s full of twists you wouldn’t expect. Johnson himself was a surprisingly cunning figure, gradually maneuvering his way closer and closer to power. Finally, in 1963, he got his greatest wish — but at what cost? Fans of Adam McKay’s Vice , this is the book for you.

19. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Anyone who grew up reading Little House on the Prairie will surely be fascinated by this tell-all biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Caroline Fraser draws upon never-before-published historical resources to create a lush study of the author’s life — not in the gently narrated manner of the Little House series, but in raw and startling truths about her upbringing, marriage, and volatile relationship with her daughter (and alleged ghostwriter) Rose Wilder Lane.

20. Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled just after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot of Prince’s life is actually a largely visual work — Shahidi served as his private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. And whatever they say about pictures being worth a thousand words, Shahidi’s are worth more still: Prince’s incredible vibrance, contagious excitement, and altogether singular personality come through in every shot.

21. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Could there be a more fitting title for a book about the husband-wife team who discovered radioactivity? What you may not know is that these nuclear pioneers also had a fascinating personal history. Marie Sklodowska met Pierre Curie when she came to work in his lab in 1891, and just a few years later they were married. Their passion for each other bled into their passion for their work, and vice-versa — and in almost no time at all, they were on their way to their first of their Nobel Prizes.

22. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

She may not have been assassinated or killed in a mysterious plane crash, but Rosemary Kennedy’s fate is in many ways the worst of “the Kennedy Curse.” As if a botched lobotomy that left her almost completely incapacitated weren’t enough, her parents then hid her away from society, almost never to be seen again. Yet in this new biography, penned by devoted Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of Rosemary’s post-lobotomy life is at last revealed.

23. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

This appropriately lyrical biography of brilliant Jazz Age poet and renowned feminist, Edna St. Vincent Millay, is indeed a perfect balance of savage and beautiful. While Millay’s poetic work was delicate and subtle, the woman herself was feisty and unpredictable, harboring unusual and occasionally destructive habits that Milford fervently explores.

24. Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

Holmes’ famous philosophy of “biography as pursuit” is thoroughly proven here in his first full-length biographical work. Shelley: The Pursuit details an almost feverish tracking of Percy Shelley as a dark and cutting figure in the Romantic period — reforming many previous historical conceptions about him through Holmes’ compelling and resolute writing.

25. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Another Gothic figure has been made newly known through this work, detailing the life of prolific horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Author Ruth Franklin digs deep into the existence of the reclusive and mysterious Jackson, drawing penetrating comparisons between the true events of her life and the dark nature of her fiction.

26. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

Fans of Into the Wild and The Lost City of Z will find their next adventure fix in this 2017 book about Christopher Knight, a man who lived by himself in the Maine woods for almost thirty years. The tale of this so-called “last true hermit” will captivate readers who have always fantasized about escaping society, with vivid descriptions of Knight’s rural setup, his carefully calculated moves and how he managed to survive the deadly cold of the Maine winters.

27. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The man, the myth, the legend: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, is properly immortalized in Isaacson’s masterful biography. It divulges the details of Jobs’ little-known childhood and tracks his fateful path from garage engineer to leader of one of the largest tech companies in the world — not to mention his formative role in other legendary companies like Pixar, and indeed within the Silicon Valley ecosystem as a whole.

28. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was just twenty-six when his US Army bomber crashed and burned in the Pacific, leaving him and two other men afloat on a raft for forty-seven days — only to be captured by the Japanese Navy and tortured as a POW for the next two and a half years. In this gripping biography, Laura Hillenbrand tracks Zamperini’s story from beginning to end… including how he embraced Christian evangelism as a means of recovery, and even came to forgive his tormentors in his later years.

29. Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

Everyone knows of Vladimir Nabokov — but what about his wife, Vera, whom he called “the best-humored woman I have ever known”? According to Schiff, she was a genius in her own right, supporting Vladimir not only as his partner, but also as his all-around editor and translator. And she kept up that trademark humor throughout it all, inspiring her husband’s work and injecting some of her own creative flair into it along the way.

30. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

William Shakespeare is a notoriously slippery historical figure — no one really knows when he was born, what he looked like, or how many plays he wrote. But that didn’t stop Stephen Greenblatt, who in 2004 turned out this magnificently detailed biography of the Bard: a series of imaginative reenactments of his writing process, and insights on how the social and political ideals of the time would have influenced him. Indeed, no one exists in a vacuum, not even Shakespeare — hence the conscious depiction of him in this book as a “will in the world,” rather than an isolated writer shut up in his own musty study.

If you're looking for more inspiring nonfiction, check out this list of 30 engaging self-help books , or this list of the last century's best memoirs !

Continue reading

More posts from across the blog.

40 Haiku Poem Examples Everyone Should Know About

In this post, we’ve put together 40 haiku poem examples everyone should know about

35 Inspirational Books to Change Your Life 🌅

Inspiration comes in many forms, particularly when it comes to books. Fiction can propel us to grow just as the characters did. And non-fiction is not ...

The 12 Best Epic Fantasy Books like Game of Thrones

We get it: it’s been a long time since the last installment of A Song of Ice and Fire was released, and there is a voi...

Heard about Reedsy Discovery?

Trust real people, not robots, to give you book recommendations.

Or sign up with an

Or sign up with your social account

• Submit your book
• Reviewer directory

We made a writing app for you

Yes, you! Write. Format. Export for ebook and print. 100% free, always.

Review: Camille Claudel’s hand, not her trauma, is at the center of a magnificent Getty Museum show

Sculptor Camille Claudel was more than a tragic figure. Her art influenced her titanic mentor, Auguste Rodin. A smart L.A. exhibition explains how

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

A notable similarity marks a subcategory of once woefully under-recognized female artists of the past. Their resolute endurance of trauma is proposed as a primary reason to reassess their work today.

At age 18, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) survived the abusive manipulations of rape by the painter Agostino Tassi, a colleague in her studio. Public humiliation followed the private ordeal when she courageously took his assault to trial.

Frida Kahlo (1907-54) endured decades of grueling pain after a bus she was riding in — also at age 18 — smashed into a trolley and forced a long metal rod to rip through her midsection. The vehicular wreck caused internal injuries that would plague her throughout her life.

Then there is Camille Claudel (1864-1943). Her trauma came later, when mental and emotional deterioration led to her confinement in a psychiatric institution, far from the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin, in which her own brilliant work as a sculptor had blossomed. The cause for the internment was said to be paranoid psychosis. She was 48 and remained hospitalized for 30 years, the remainder of her life.

“Camille Claudel,” a fascinating exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, unwinds the traumatic tale, and in the process refocuses the story in important ways. In the popular telling, Claudel is to France what Gentileschi was to Italy and Kahlo to Mexico: the overlooked artist as victim — a casualty not just once, but twice. The active personal trauma experienced in life was joined by passive negligence after death from the culture at large.

The welcome revival of interest in the paintings and sculptures of Gentileschi, Kahlo and Claudel since the 1970s and ’80s was led by second-wave feminists, and it represented an effort to transform victimhood into survivorship in the cultural sphere. Which sounds good, but has a catch. The narrative focus tends to linger on the artist, not the art.

Biography, framed by dramatic events, often overwhelms the paintings and sculptures, which are admired for the reductive ways in which they illuminate the artist’s tumultuous life. It can lead to travesty, such as a current Gentileschi exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, Italy, reported to feature what some critics have witheringly described as a “rape room” — a darkened chamber with a bloodied bed in the center, surrounded by projections of Gentileschi’s often gory paintings.

Entertainment & Arts

Commentary: The Broad expansion makes the museum more flexible, but at what cost?

The Broad museum in downtown L.A. has been a huge hit. Will a bigger building be worth the $100-million budget?

March 27, 2024

It’s no accident that multiple movies and plays have been produced about Gentileschi, Kahlo and Claudel, with various incidents vividly sensationalized to court pop culture success. A lead actress Oscar nomination, for example, deservedly went to Isabelle Adjani for the 1989 film “Camille Claudel,” and then to Salma Hayek for the 2002 movie “Frida.” The talented actors were given lots of cinematic scenery on which to chew.

In the case of Claudel, a subtle but opportune correction of the narrative arrives in the new museum show.

Curators Anne-Lise Desmas at the Getty and Emerson Bowyer at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show was seen last fall, make no bones about articulating the sculptor’s very real travails. Outlined in the superb and detailed catalog are the artist’s sometimes difficult personal affair with Rodin, 24 years her senior and a commanding figure in the art life of late 19th century Paris; a rapidly industrializing society in flux, for artists as for others, that nonetheless saw exceptionally high fences erected around a woman’s potential for success as a sculptor; and internal family issues that left Claudel without much immediate personal support when she very much needed it.

“This biographical miasma,” the curators write in the catalog introduction, “has tended to obscure — or even excise — the sculptor’s art and agency.” Those subjects get put in appropriate context by an enlightening exhibition.

Fifty-eight sculptures have been assembled, including works in clay, plaster, marble and bronze. They include the major 1890-99 ensemble “The Age of Maturity,” a large, three-figure allegory of aging that unfolds in multiple bronze sections, in which youth gives way to the inevitability of old age and death. There’s a stunning and compact portrait-bust of Rodin, in which the focused concentration of his life-size head seems to rise up out of a tumult below, represented by his lengthy, swirling, thickly tangled beard. And, for contrast, we get Rodin’s winsome portrait of Claudel, the lowered gaze of her intensely alert but ethereal head emerging from a hefty block of chiseled white marble.

At first, her portrait appears unfinished, but that’s a misperception. Rodin titled his sculpture “Thought.” Perhaps he recognized what emerges from encounters with Claudel’s art. Repeatedly, her figures stoop, crouch, look down or away, resulting in a concentrated bodily sense of intense interiority. Experiential subjectivity forms the essence of her human forms.

In a beautiful installation, many works are smartly shown on a pedestal positioned atop a circular base, which wordlessly leads a viewer all the way around — ideal for an art that needs to be seen in four dimensions of space and time. Revealing labels are sometimes nicely tucked away, as in one on the far side of “The Age of Maturity” informing that the baroque flourish of drapery billowing at the apex is actually a precise facsimile, the original bronze piece currently undergoing conservation back in Paris.

The number of works is relatively modest — understandably so, given the comparative brevity of her career (barely two decades, while Rodin’s was more than twice as long) and her need to devote years as a studio assistant. They range from a remarkably adept terracotta portrait bust of an elderly household member, “Old Helen,” made when Claudel was 21, to a complicated state commission for a mythological subject in bronze, “Wounded Niobid,” dated 1907, near the end of a tough career that had left her nearly destitute.

Claudel was born into a solidly middle-class family in 1864, daughter of a registrar of deeds in a small medieval town 60 miles from Paris. Her mother bore four children, one of whom — Paul — would go on to become a well-known poet and an influential diplomat posted to China, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. With her father regularly being transferred to various provincial towns, Claudel and her siblings settled in Paris with their mother in 1881. There she began her serious study of sculpture, met Rodin during student critiques and within three years was employed in his studio.

Rodin relied on his assistant’s formal skills, especially Claudel’s talents with the difficult task of successfully rendering expressive hands and feet. She’s credited with work on major commissions, including the monumental bronze sculptural group “The Gates of Hell” — the one with the “Thinker” poised on the doorway’s head jamb like an inquisitive crow, puzzling over humanity’s infernal chaos on its way to eternal doom — and, most important, “ The Burghers of Calais .” (Check out the animated hands of those sacrificial citizens!) Perhaps the show’s most riveting small work is a little bronze study of a hand, just 10 inches wide, no doubt informed by Claudel’s careful scrutiny of her own. A curved index finger rises up from the rest like a speaker separating from a crowd and preparing to expound.

The exhibition was inspired by Getty and Art Institute of Chicago acquisitions in recent years. (Only 10 Claudel sculptures are in American museums, according to press materials.) Chicago’s is a plaster portrait bust of Camille’s brother Paul, made when he was a teenager and layered in thin glazes of paint to create an illusion of the patina on an ancient Roman bronze head. The Getty’s is one of the show’s knockouts.

A sculpture as fresh and contemporary as anything you’ll find in a gallery crawl today, the dark bronze “Torso of a Crouching Woman,” about three feet tall, is a headless, armless figure surely inspired by a famous Greek example of Aphrodite emerging from the bath, which the artist would have known from prowls in the Louvre Museum. Feet squarely planted, center of gravity low, Claudel’s version rests firmly on the ground while twisting in space. The movement pulls skin taut over the ribs, spine and musculature of her back, enlivening the subject’s tactile sensuality.

With one notable exception, the sliced off body parts allude to the fragmentary quality of the ancient original, which has lost its head and arms from time’s vicissitudes. The exception is the missing left knee. Gone is most of the leg.

Cut off just above the ankle all the way to mid-thigh, the omission isn’t found in the classical Greek original or its many Roman copies, where the leg is a prominent protrusion. The vivid erasure also seems different from just being overkill in a nod to history by a young sculptor earnestly figuring things out. (Claudel is thought to have made the sculpture when she was about 20.) Instead, the radical cut reads as a determined compositional move. You imagine the jutting knee was there in her clay model, thought better of, then given a chop.

The result further exposes the torso in its most vulnerable feminine places, while accelerating the figure’s spatial turn. Claudel’s visceral cut invigorates the form — a seeming contradiction for a removal to accomplish, but one that is as modern as will be found in any contemporaneous bather painted in oil or drawn in pastel by Edgar Degas .

Review: Ed Ruscha show wowed in New York. Why it’s even better in L.A.

The LACMA show ‘Ed Ruscha / Now Then’ is the first comprehensive retrospective in more than 20 years of a quintessential American artist.

April 7, 2024

It’s also hard to imagine Rodin doing something like that. Claudel surely benefited from her artistic relationship with the revered sculptor. But he benefited from it as well, modeling some of his work on her inventive forms, plus using all those eloquent hands and feet. A good bit of the scholarship around Claudel in the last few decades has been directed at correcting attributions to him for sculptures she made but did not sign.

A modern cliché has it that an artist must suffer to achieve true success in their art, and Claudel, like Gentileschi and Kahlo, surely did. But for female artists throughout history, the marvelous Getty exhibition handily demonstrates that there’s much more to it than only surviving trauma. Everyone needs to labor to get through the day. A powerful artist needs to do more, and Claudel does.

'Camille Claudel'

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood When: Through July 21; closed Mondays Info: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.edu

More to Read

Art about AIDS has often depicted grief. L.A. painter Joey Terrill made it about life

Feb. 14, 2024

Inside the Getty’s rigorous effort to fix a 500-year-old broken masterpiece

Jan. 18, 2024

Editorial: It’s outrageous that a Spanish museum refuses to return Nazi-looted art to the rightful heirs

Jan. 13, 2024

The biggest entertainment stories

Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for criticism (he was a finalist for the prize in 1991, 2001 and 2007). In 2020, he also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Journalism from the Rabkin Foundation.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Broadway makes way for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ with new musical directed by Jon M. Chu

L.A. has hit peak sound bath. Here are 11 to check out right now

April 17, 2024

Travel & Experiences

Classic film lovers: See James Dean’s apartment and more on new TCM tour at Warner Bros.

April 16, 2024

Review: ‘Monsters of the American Cinema’ confronts the horror in grief

Screen Rant

10 best movies that tackle real world history.

Historical events offer rich material for crafting cinematic masterpieces, and these movies excel at capturing these compelling moments from the past.

• Historical films like Schindler's List and Gladiator transport audiences to pivotal moments and shed light on triumphs and struggles of the past.
• Movies like Hidden Figures and Selma explore the contributions and sacrifices of overlooked figures in American history, inspiring and educating viewers.
• From the poignant portrayal of the Holocaust in Schindler's List to the gripping account of the Dunkirk evacuation, historical films offer compelling storytelling.

Historical events always provide rich material for crafting masterful pieces of cinema. As a result, these movies excel at capturing and reimagining some of history's most captivating moments. From the harrowing portrayal of WWII in Schindler's List to the epic tale of revenge and redemption in Gladiator, historical films have the power to transport audiences to different eras and shed light on the triumphs and struggles of those who came before. These cinematic masterpieces not only entertain but also educate, offering unique perspectives on pivotal moments that have shaped the world.

Whether it's the intimate exploration of a king's personal battle with a speech impediment in The King's Speech or the gripping account of survival and heroism displayed in the Christopher Nolan movie Dunkirk , these films bring history to life in a way that is both compelling and thought-provoking. By combining meticulous attention to detail with powerful performances and masterful storytelling, the best historical movies can make a significant impact on the collective consciousness. This serves as a reminder to the enduring significance of the past and its lessons for the present.

10 Frida (2002)

Directed by julie taymor, starring salma hayek.

*Availability in US

Not available

Frida delves into the life of the iconic artist, exploring her relationships, political activism, and the events that shaped her creative expression. Hayek's powerful portrayal brings Kahlo's story to life, showcasing the artist's resilience in the face of physical and emotional challenges. The film's attention to historical details, such as the depiction of Kahlo's involvement with the Communist Party and her tumultuous marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera, provides a comprehensive understanding of the complex social and political climate in which she lived and worked.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the rise of communism, Kahlo's personal struggles are interwoven with a broader historical context. Therefore, Frida offers a nuanced and engaging perspective on one of the most significant periods in Mexican history. The film's ability to balance intimate character moments with the larger historical narrative is a hallmark of its effectiveness in capturing the essence of Kahlo's life and times.

9 Titanic (1997)

Directed by james cameron, starring leonardo dicaprio.

Titanic 's meticulous attention to historical detail is evident in its depiction of the ill-fated ship's maiden voyage, from the opulent first-class accommodations to the cramped quarters of steerage passengers. The film's recreation of the events leading up to and following the ship's collision with an iceberg on April 14, 1912 , is based on extensive research and survivor accounts . This provides a harrowing and emotionally charged portrayal of one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history.

Cameron's decision to frame the narrative around the fictional love story of Jack and Rose allows the audience to experience the tragedy on a personal level. This also highlights the social and economic disparities that existed on board the ship. By interweaving the intimate stories of its characters with the broader historical context, Titanic offers a compelling and accessible way to engage with a significant moment in early 20th-century history , making it a standout example of historical filmmaking.

8 Hidden Figures (2016)

Directed by theodore melfi, starring taraji p. henson, hidden figures.

Set in the early 1960s, Hidden Figures sheds light on the crucial contributions of three African-American women mathematicians at NASA during the height of the Space Race. The film navigates the complex social and political landscape of the era, highlighting the pervasive racism and sexism that Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson faced in their pursuit of professional recognition and equality . By focusing on their individual struggles and triumphs, Hidden Figures illuminates the often-overlooked role of women and people of color in the history of space exploration.

The film's attention to detail in depicting the inner workings of NASA and the technological challenges of the time provides a fascinating glimpse into a pivotal moment in American history. While taking some artistic liberties, Hidden Figures succeeds in bringing attention to the real-life achievements of these remarkable women . This remarkable story inspires a new generation to pursue careers in STEM fields and to challenge societal barriers.

7 Selma (2014)

Directed by ava duvernay, starring david oyelowo.

Selma offers a powerful and intimate portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership during the pivotal Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches in 1965. Davide Oyelowo's commanding performance as King captures the essence of his charisma, determination, and the weight of his responsibilities as a civil rights icon. The film's focus on this specific historical moment allows for a nuanced exploration of the strategic planning , political maneuvering, and personal sacrifices that went into organizing the marches.

DuVernay's direction brings a sense of urgency and immediacy to the events, immersing the audience in the tense and often violent struggle for equality. By highlighting the bravery and resilience of the activists who participated in the marches, Selma serves as a poignant reminder of the sacrifices made to secure voting rights for African Americans and the ongoing fight for social justice. The film's historical significance and its ability to resonate with contemporary issues make it a must-watch for anyone seeking to understand a critical chapter in American history.

6 The Revenant (2015)

Directed by alejandro gonzález iñárritu, starring leonardo dicaprio, the revenant.

The Revenant 's gripping opening sequence depicts the brutal reality of the early American frontier, as Hugh Glass and his son are ambushed by an indigenous tribe. The film's unflinching portrayal of the violence and chaos that ensued during such encounters sets the stage for Glass's harrowing journey of survival and revenge. Iñárritu's use of period-accurate costumes and weapons creates a vivid and immersive experience that transports the viewer into the unforgiving wilderness of the 19th century.

The Revenant 's exploration of Hugh Glass offers a thought-provoking commentary on the clash of cultures and the harsh realities of life on the frontier . While the film takes some artistic liberties with Glass's story, its commitment to capturing the essence of the era and the human struggle for survival in the face of overwhelming adversity makes it a compelling and unforgettable historical epic.

5 Malcom X (1992)

Directed by spike lee, starring denzel washington.

Chronicling the life of one of the most influential and controversial figures in the African American civil rights movement, Malcolm X offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of the man behind the icon. Lee's direction and Washington's powerful performance focuses on the complexities of Malcolm X's character. The film traces his transformation from a small-time hustler to a prominent leader in the Nation of Islam and, ultimately, to a champion of racial equality and human rights.

This Spike Lee and Denzel Washington movie recreates key events such as Malcolm X's pilgrimage to Mecca and his growing disillusionment with the Nation of Islam, provides a comprehensive understanding of the social, political, and spiritual factors that shaped his worldview. By exploring Malcolm X's evolving philosophies and his impact on the civil rights movement, the film offers a thought-provoking and essential perspective on a pivotal chapter in American history .

4 Schindler’s List (1993)

Directed by steven spielberg, starring liam neeson, schindler’s list (1993).

Schindler's List provides a haunting and deeply affecting portrayal of the Holocaust, focusing on the true story of Oskar Schindler. Liam Neeson portrays the German businessman who saved the lives of over a thousand Jewish refugees during World War II. Spielberg's masterful direction brings to life the grim reality of the Nazi-occupied Kraków, Poland , with its bleak, black-and-white cinematography and unflinching depiction of the brutality and dehumanization inflicted upon the Jewish population.

Neeson's powerful performance captures Schindler's gradual transformation from an opportunistic profiteer to a compassionate savior, risking his own life to protect his Jewish workers from the horrors of the concentration camps. The film's emotional impact is heightened by its attention to the individual stories of the refugees, humanizing the victims of the Holocaust and underscoring the immeasurable value of each life saved. Schindler's List serves as a vital reminder of one of the darkest chapters in human history , while also celebrating the courage and resilience of those who fought against oppression in the face of unimaginable adversity.

3 The King’s Speech (2010)

Directed by tom hooper, starring colin firth, the king's speech.

Taking place during the looming shadow of World War II, The King's Speech shows the personal struggles and triumphs of Prince Albert, the future King George VI. Firth's thoughtful portrayal brings to life the prince's debilitating stammer and the profound psychological impact it had on his ability to fulfill his royal duties. The film's exploration of the unconventional friendship between the prince and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, highlights the importance of trust, perseverance, and the power of human connection in overcoming personal challenges.

As the world teeters on the brink of war and the role of the monarchy in rallying the nation becomes increasingly crucial, The King's Speech illuminates the immense pressure faced by Prince Albert as he ascends to the throne. Through its intimate portrayal of a pivotal moment in British history, the film offers a fascinating insight into the human side of royalty. This is the perfect movie to watch in order to grasp historical moments in history, as well as witness the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

2 Gladiator (2000)

Directed by ridley scott, starring russell crowe.

Gladiator 's critical acclaim and numerous accolades cement its status as one of the greatest historical films ever made. The movie's stunning visuals, epic battle sequences, and emotionally charged performances helped it secure an impressive 12 Oscar nominations , ultimately winning five, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe's unforgettable portrayal of Maximus. The film's sweeping success at the 73rd Academy Awards, coupled with its strong box office performance, underscores its ability to captivate audiences and critics alike.

The popularity and influence that Gladiator has had on popular culture further solidifies its position as a cinematic masterpiece that brings the grandeur and brutality of ancient Rome to life. The film's ability to combine gripping storytelling with meticulous attention to historical detail sets it apart as a benchmark for historical epics. This inspires a resurgence of interest in the genre and paves the way for future films to explore the rich and complex world of ancient civilizations.

1 Dunkirk (2017)

Directed by christopher nolan, starring fionn whitehead.

Nolan's masterful direction and Zimmer's pulse-pounding score work in tandem to create a visceral and emotionally charged experience that captures the chaos and desperation of the historic Dunkirk evacuation. The film's non-linear narrative structure and multi-perspective approach to storytelling create wonderful immersion , effectively conveying the scale and intensity of the unfolding crisis.

The impressive ensemble cast delivers powerful performances that humanize the soldiers, civilians, and sailors caught in the midst of the harrowing event. Dunkirk 's success at the box office and its strong showing at the Academy Awards, where it won three technical categories, shows its ability to combine technical brilliance with compelling storytelling. By focusing on the human stories behind one of World War II's most pivotal moments, the film offers a unique and affecting perspective on the bravery and resilience of those who fought to survive against impossible odds .