Thinkers Timeline

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter whose intensely personal and politically engaged work has made her one of the most widely recognised artists of the twentieth century. She was born in Coyoacan, then a village outside Mexico City, in the Blue House her parents had built and where she would live most of her life. Her father was a German-born photographer of Hungarian Jewish background; her mother was a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indigenous descent. Kahlo later changed her date of birth to 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, to align her life with the revolutionary era. She contracted polio at six, which left her right leg permanently weakened. At eighteen she was in a streetcar accident that broke her spine, pelvis, collarbone, and right leg; a metal rod pierced her body. She spent months in bed recovering and began painting seriously during this period, using a mirror mounted above her bed to paint self-portraits. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera, twenty years her senior; their tempestuous relationship, including divorce and remarriage, lasted until her death. She painted more than 140 works, about a third of them self-portraits. She had a single solo exhibition in Mexico during her lifetime, in 1953, when she was carried to the gallery in her hospital bed. She died in 1954 at forty-seven, with her diary reading: I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.