Pain and Passion

 Frida Kahlo was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico.  Her real name was Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderón.  She used to tell people that she was born in 1910, the same year as the Mexican Revolution.

 At the age of six, Frida contracted polio, which left her with a limp.  In 1922, at the age of 15, she entered the National Preparatory School, the most renowned school in Mexico, and was one of only a handful of girls there.  It was here that Frida met Diego Rivera, who would eventually become her husband.

 In 1925, Frida was involved in a near fatal car accident.  She was impaled through the hip and pelvis, broke several other bones and had to spend a month recovering in a hospital.  This injury would cause her pain and suffering for the rest of her life.

 She began painting while on bed rest and completed her first self- portrait a year later.  Frida begins painting self-portraits on a regular basis.  “I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.”

 Kahlo joins the Mexican Communist Party and meets Diego Rivera again.  Kahlo and Rivera fall in love and he includes her in his mural Ballad of the Revolution inside the Ministry of Education.

 Kahlo and Rivera get married on 21 August 1929 and live in Mexico City with other communists.  Kahlo gets pregnant, but cannot carry the baby due to her many injuries, which will be a constant theme in her life.

 Frida and Diego move to San Francisco after he is expelled from the Communist Party in  In 1932, the couple move to Detroit, where Rivera is commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint a mural.

 While in Detroit, Frida loses another child at Henry Ford Hospital, as well as her mother in Mexico.  She paints Miscarriage in Detroit and My Birth, two graphic paintings.  After a brief stint in New York, they move back to Mexico.

 Over the next few years, both Rivera and Kahlo have extra- marital affairs.  He with her younger sister, Cristina.  She with Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary.  The Kahlo-Riveras divorce in 1939 and remarry less than year later.

 After her father died in 1941, Diego and Frida return to her hometown and live in her childhood home, the Blue House.  She begins teaching, but has to quit after her numerous operations leave her weak.  She ends up in a wheelchair after having 7 operations on her spine.

 In 1952, Kahlo’s face appears in Rivera’s The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace.  Kahlo finally has her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the National Institute of Fine Arts.  She attends the event lying in a bed.

 After her first solo exhibition in 1953, Frida has her leg amputated below the knee due to gangrene.  In 1954, Frida catches pneumonia, but takes part in a rally against the U.S. intervention in Guatemala.  She died on 13 July 1954 in her home.

 Kettenmann, Andrea. Kahlo. Los Angeles, Ca: TASCHEN, Print.  Matheson, Whitney. Frida Kahlo: A Timeline of Her Life. 10 November frida-timeline_x.htm  Stechler, Amy. The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. 10 November html  bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=19