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.

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and editor whose thirty completed feature films include some of the most influential works in the history of cinema. He was born in Tokyo, the youngest of seven children in a family descended from samurai. His older brother Heigo, a narrator for silent films, took him to see European and American movies and introduced him to Western literature; Heigo's suicide in 1933 marked Kurosawa deeply. Kurosawa had initially wanted to be a painter and studied Western art before entering the film industry as an assistant director in 1936. He learned his craft under the veteran director Kajiro Yamamoto and directed his first film in 1943, during the Second World War. After the war he emerged as a major figure in the revival of Japanese cinema. His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, bringing Japanese cinema to wide international attention for the first time. Over the following four decades he directed Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Ikiru, High and Low, Ran, and many other films, adapting Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Japanese sources, and producing original works set in both historical and contemporary Japan. He faced career setbacks in the 1970s, including a suicide attempt in 1971, but continued working into his late eighties. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1990 and died in 1998 at eighty-eight.

Ravi Shankar was an Indian musician. He played the sitar, a long-necked string instrument from northern India. He is the most famous Indian classical musician of the 20th century. He was born in 1920 in the city of Varanasi (also called Banaras), in northern India. He came from a Bengali Brahmin family. His father was a lawyer and scholar who left the family when Ravi was young. His older brother Uday Shankar was a famous dancer who toured the world with an Indian dance company. As a boy, Ravi joined his brother's troupe. He travelled across Europe and America as a young dancer and musician. He met many Western artists in this period. At 18, he made a serious decision. He left his brother's company and went to study music seriously with a great teacher named Allauddin Khan in central India. He spent seven years in Khan's home, training intensively in the strict Indian classical tradition. This kind of long apprenticeship was traditional. The teacher was almost a parent. Ravi later married Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, who was also a brilliant musician. From the 1950s onwards, his career grew rapidly. He performed across India, then in Europe and America. In the 1960s he became famous in the West, partly because of his friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles. He continued performing into his nineties. He had a complex personal life, with several partners and four children, including the musicians Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. He died in San Diego in 2012, aged 92.

Nina Simone was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter. Her real name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She was born in 1933 in the small town of Tryon, North Carolina, in the southern United States. She was the sixth of eight children in a poor Black family. She was a gifted musician from very early childhood. She could play piano by ear before she was three. She started playing in church and quickly showed serious talent. White and Black neighbours raised money to pay for her piano lessons. Her dream was to become the first major Black classical concert pianist in America. She studied for a year at the Juilliard School in New York. She then applied to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She was rejected. She always believed the rejection was because of her race. The disappointment shaped her life. To make money, she began singing and playing in nightclubs. She took the stage name Nina Simone partly so her religious mother would not know what she was doing. Her first album came out in 1958. By the early 1960s she was famous. She mixed jazz, classical, blues, gospel, folk, and African music. As the civil rights movement grew, she became one of its most powerful musical voices. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she grew more bitter and politically angry. She left the United States in the 1970s and lived in many countries. She struggled with mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, throughout her later life. She died in France in 2003.

Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician, bandleader, and political activist. He was born in 1938 in Abeokuta, a city in southwest Nigeria. He died in 1997 in Lagos. He is widely seen as one of the most important African musicians of the twentieth century. Fela came from a famous family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a leading Nigerian feminist and anti-colonial activist. His father was a school principal and a Christian minister. The family was middle class and well educated. As a young man, Fela studied music in London at Trinity College of Music. He returned to Nigeria and toured in the United States in 1969. There he met Black Panther activists, who influenced his political thinking. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he created a new style of music called Afrobeat. Afrobeat blends West African rhythms, especially Yoruba, with American jazz and funk. The songs are often very long, ten or fifteen minutes or more, with heavy horns and a steady, driving groove. Fela used Afrobeat to attack corruption, military rule, and the lasting effects of colonialism. The Nigerian government repeatedly tried to silence him. He was arrested many times. In 1977 soldiers attacked his home and beat him severely. He kept making music until shortly before his death from AIDS-related illness.

Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect. She was one of the most important architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, the highest honour in architecture, in 2004. Her buildings are known for bold curves, dramatic angles, and shapes that look impossible to build. She was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She came from a wealthy and progressive Iraqi family. Her father was a politician and businessman. Her mother was an artist. Iraq in the 1950s was modernising rapidly. Zaha grew up surrounded by modern art and modern architecture. She attended a Catholic school in Baghdad and a boarding school in England. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, before turning to architecture. In 1972 she moved to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, one of the most experimental architecture schools in the world. She graduated in 1977. She worked briefly with her former teachers Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at OMA. In 1980 she founded her own practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London. For her first 15 years, almost none of her designs were built. Her drawings won prizes and inspired other architects, but clients found her buildings too radical to commission. Her breakthrough came with the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, completed in 1993. From then on, her practice grew. By her death she had designed buildings on every inhabited continent. She died suddenly in 2016, aged 65, of a heart attack while being treated for bronchitis in Miami. Her practice continues without her. Her partner Patrik Schumacher has led it since her death. Her best-known buildings include the Aquatics Centre at the 2012 London Olympics and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.