Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter. Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico City, on July 6, 1907, she was educated at the national preparatory school, where she pursued studies intended to lead to a medical career. A bus accident in 1925 left her with severe injuries that required prolonged hospitalization and periodic operations and recuperations throughout the rest of her life. She began to paint during one of her early periods of recuperation, and the accident and its aftermath provided a powerful fund of images and subject matter for her work. Kahlo married the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, and her difficult and intense relationship with him was another recurrent theme in her art. The Riveras' leftist political convictions led to their virtual exile in the United States in the early 1930s. They returned to Mexico late in 1933.
Kahlo retained a strong attachment to her family home in Coyoacán, where she assembled a notable collection of folk art. She taught at the Mexican Education Ministry's La Esmeralda school of the arts in Mexico City in the early 1940s and established a loyal following there. In the United States, in 1938, she had met André Breton, who, with Marcel Duchamp, helped arrange for major exhibitions of her work in Paris and the United States. She did not have a major exhibition in Mexico until 1953. After her death, in Coyoacán, on July 13, 1954, Rivera donated her house to the Mexican people as a museum (known as the Museo Frida Kahlo). Kahlo's work was designated national patrimony in 1985.
Many of Kahlo's paintings are self-portraits. Rooted in vibrant Mexican folk art, they are invested with surrealistic imagery constituting a personal symbolism rather than an abstract surrealist statement. Autobiography is explicit in paintings such as Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and The Broken Column (1944), yet even in What the Water Gave Me (1938), perhaps her most abstract painting and one that particularly fascinated Breton, the fantastic elements are drawn directly from her personal experience.