FRIDA KAHLO - THE COLOURS

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Kahlo was involved in a bus accident, which so seriously injured her that she had to undergo more than 30 medical operations in her lifetime.

Regardless of the degree to which she was suffering, Frida Kahlo always enjoyed the spectacle of herself. She was a playful exhibitionist, a fervid and erotic provocateur dispatching updates from the land of female suffering. It was part of what made her difficult: She forced people to look at her, to share her feelings, when they would prefer to look away.

She was born in a tidy suburb of Mexico City. Until the day Frida was hit by a streetcar—literally, at the age of 18—nothing in her upper-middle-class background would disclose her future: that she would one day become Mexico’s most celebrated painter, a sexy international art megastar and pop icon who would produce unnerving masterpieces that would hang in the world’s major museums. Or that she would “enjoy” a passionate, tumultuous marriage to Mexico’s most famous muralist and womanizer, Diego Rivera and famous Soviet anarchist Leo Trotsky.

“I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work,” Diego once wrote to Picasso. “Acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.”

When Frida died in 1954 at the age of 47, she was known primarily as Diego Rivera’s exotic little wife. The rise of feminism in the late 1970s brought with it the question, “Hey, where are all the women artists? Where are all the women of colour?” and the answer was the rediscovery of Frida Kahlo.

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