Life of icon Frida Kahlo

One of the Museum of Fine Arts’ newest exhibits is “Frida: The Making of an Icon.” It departs from the path of typical retrospective exhibitions to become the premier major exploration into the artist Frida Kahlo’s meteoric rise from local painter to global icon.

This unique exhibition features a curated selection of over 30 works by the painter herself, including her masterworks, memorabilia, and documents from her personal archive. It also includes 120 works created by artists spanning five generations who were inspired by her practice. To mark the occasion, this article will take a closer look at the life of the woman behind the legacy.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon was born on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood at her family’s home, La Casa Azul. Her parents were Wilhelm “Guillermo” Kahlo, a German-born photographer, and Matilde Calderón y González, a mestiza woman from Oaxaca. The couple had four daughters, and Kahlo was the third. She also had two older half-sisters from her father’s first marriage who lived in a convent.

In 1910, the Mexican Revolution began, and President Porfirio Diaz was overthrown. In her later writings, Kahlo recalled memories of her mother ushering her and her sisters inside their house as gunfire rang through the streets. Sometimes her mother would even prepare meals for hungry revolutionaries who would leap over the walls into their backyard. She later began claiming that she was born this year to bear a direct association with the revolution.

At the age of 6, Kahlo contracted polio, and although she survived, the illness left her permanently changed. Her right leg grew shorter and thinner than the left, resulting in a slight limp. The virus also impacted her socially, forcing her to be isolated from her peers for many months and leading her to start school later. She attended kindergarten and primary school locally in Coyoacán with her younger sister, Cristina, and was homeschooled for the fifth and sixth grades.

Kahlo was admitted to the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in 1922, where she was one of only 35 girls among 2,000 students. In her studies, she focused on natural sciences in the hopes of becoming a physician. It was here that she became deeply immersed in Mexican culture and committed to her passion for social justice issues and political activism. This was largely due to her membership in the group “Los Cachuchas,” a name that references the peaked cloth caps they wore as a form of protest against the rigid dress code of the period.

The group was composed of nine foundational members, including Kahlo and Alejandro Gómez Arias, the leader and Kahlo’s first love. Los Cachuchas devoured books, played pranks and penned verses, content to exist within their own brand of anarchy. Around this time, Kahlo also had her first encounter with her future husband, Diego Rivera, who was commissioned to paint a mural on campus.

One September afternoon in 1925, Kahlo and her boyfriend, Arias, were making their way home and boarded a crowded bus. While attempting to pass an oncoming electric streetcar, the bus collided with it instead. Arias managed to suffer only minor injuries, but several passengers were killed, and Kahlo was impaled by a long iron rod. The rod fractured her pelvic bone, abdomen, and uterus. Her right leg was broken in eleven places, her spine in three. Her right foot was crushed and dislocated, her shoulder was dislocated, and her collarbone was fractured.

Her injuries were so severe that she had to remain in the hospital for several weeks. Once released, she returned home to continue her recovery. For three months, she was confined to her bed in a plaster corset to correct her displaced vertebrae.

The accident shattered more than her body; it killed her dreams of becoming a physician and was the root cause of the pain and illness she suffered throughout the rest of her life.

From the ashes of this tragedy, a new passion of Kahlo’s emerged.

According to Google Arts and Culture, Kahlo explained in her own words, “I was terribly bored there in bed in a plaster cast, so I decided to do something. I stole some oil paints from my father, and my mother had a special easel made for me since I couldn’t sit up. That’s how I began to paint.”

She began to pour her pain onto the canvas. Her parents added a ceiling to her bed and mounted a large mirror on it so she could better paint herself while lying down. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best,” she said, as quoted by The Arts Society.

In 1926, she completed what is commonly acknowledged as her earliest self-portrait, “Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress,” which she gifted to Arias.

By late 1927, Kahlo’s bed rest was over, and she was free to venture out again. Her old school friends were now at university and began introducing her to political activists and artists. That eventually led her to join the Mexican Communist Party, where she met the Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti.

Kahlo reconnected with Rivera at a party Modotti threw in June of 1928. She wanted him to evaluate her work, and he was impressed by her talent. Soon after, their relationship became romantic, and they married the following year, despite her mother’s disapproval.

Not long after their wedding, Rivera was commissioned to paint murals for the Palace of Cortés, and together they moved to Cuernavaca, Morelos. Here, Kahlo’s sense of Mexican identity and history deepened, and she began to clothe herself in the traditional Tehuana dress to emphasize her mestiza heritage and express her feminist and anti-colonialist beliefs. This enhanced connection with her indigenous ancestry is also reflected in her artwork from this period onward.

For several years, the couple traveled between Mexico and the United States, often for Rivera’s mural commissions. However, Kahlo’s heart remained in Mexico, and in 1934, they returned to Mexico City, settling in the San Ángel neighborhood. Their now-famous residence consisted of two separate houses, Rivera’s pink and white home next to Kahlo’s blue home, connected by a bridge.

Their period of calm was brief. Their relationship grew strained while Kahlo’s health problems resurfaced. She underwent an appendectomy, suffered a bout of gangrene that led to the amputation of infected toes, and experienced two abortions.

Though their union was built on romance fueled by a shared artistic spirit, and it afforded Kahlo access to medical treatment she may not otherwise have had, it was famously tumultuous. Rivera was widely known for being incapable of monogamy. His most devastating affair was with Kahlo’s younger sister, Cristina. Kahlo, who was openly bisexual, also had extramarital affairs with both men and women. The couple divorced in 1939 but remarried the following year. Kahlo once said, “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the train, the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”

Kahlo’s health problems continued throughout the 1940s, and the passing of her father in 1941 sent her into a deep depression. By the mid-1940s, her spinal issues worsened to the point that she could no longer continuously sit or stand. She battled various infections, chronic pain, and syphilis. Her health was exacerbated even further by her heavy consumption of alcohol and drugs.

In August of 1953, her right leg was amputated at the knee due to another infection of gangrene. Her declining health and physical agony confined her to La Casa Azul. Her depression worsened, accompanied by thoughts of suicide.

Though she was mostly bedridden in her final days, Kahlo made one last public appearance on July 2, 1954, attending a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. The event appeared to worsen her condition. On July 12, 1954, she developed a high fever and was in severe pain. She died around 6 a.m. the following morning from a pulmonary embolism.

That evening, her body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where it lay beneath a Communist flag, before being brought the next day to the Panteón Civil de Dolores. Friends and family gathered inside for an intimate funeral, while hundreds of admirers stood outside.

The story goes that as Kahlo’s body was being cremated, it suddenly sat upright, and her hair caught fire, encircling her head in a fiery halo. Even in death, Kahlo left the world with an image worthy of an icon.

“Frida: The Making of an Icon” is on display at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts from Jan. 19-May 17, 2026.