Mexican painter, Communist, and — since the feminist reappraisal of the 1970s and 1980s — the most widely reproduced and most intensely personal artist of twentieth-century Latin America; a figure whose self-portraits, painted over a short career shaped by chronic pain, have become the central images of a twentieth-century art that treats the female body, indigenous identity, and political commitment as continuous rather than separable subjects.
Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico City, in 1907 (she later claimed 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution, as her birth year). Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German-Hungarian photographer; her mother was of indigenous and Spanish descent. At six she contracted polio; at eighteen, in September 1925, the bus she was riding was struck by a streetcar, and the injuries — a fractured spinal column, pelvis, collarbone, ribs, and right leg, and a steel handrail driven through her abdomen — defined the rest of her life. She underwent more than thirty surgeries, wore plaster and steel corsets, and painted largely from bed, using a mirror and an easel her mother had built into the canopy. She married Diego Rivera in 1929 — "two accidents in my life," she later said, "the trolley and Diego" — and the marriage, with its infidelities, separations, and political companionship, is the biographical spine of the later work.
The paintings — roughly 200 in a career cut short by her death at 47 — are overwhelmingly self-portraits: The Two Fridas (1939), Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940), The Broken Column (1944), Henry Ford Hospital (1932), My Birth (1932). They use the conventions of Mexican retablo painting (small devotional panels, ex-votos), pre-Columbian and Catholic religious imagery, and surrealist juxtaposition — though Kahlo rejected the surrealist label: "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." The body — broken, bleeding, opened, giving birth, miscarrying — is the subject, but the treatment is not confessional in the later American sense; it is iconic, formal, and deliberate. The self-portraits are constructed images of a self, not diary entries.
Kahlo was a committed Communist — she and Rivera hosted Trotsky in Coyoacán in 1937, and her last public appearance, eleven days before her death, was at a demonstration against the CIA-backed overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala. Her Mexicanidad — the deliberate adoption of Tehuana dress, indigenous jewelry, and pre-Columbian aesthetic reference — was a political program as well as a personal style: an assertion that Mexican identity was indigenous and mestiza, not European. The international rediscovery, beginning with Hayden Herrera's 1983 biography, has made her the most exhibited Latin American artist of any period and the most recognized woman artist of the twentieth century. The fame has inevitably simplified her; the paintings themselves are not simple.
Kahlo is on the graph because her work — the body as political site, indigenous identity as modernist resource, feminism as something painted rather than argued — places her at the intersection of the feminist, Latin American, and Marxist lines the graph carries. Her absence when Rivera is present would be a conspicuous gap.