Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo (born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico — died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán) was a Mexican painter best known for her uncompromising, brilliantly colored self-portraits dealing with identity, the human body and death. In 1925, at eighteen, the bus she was riding home from school collided with a trolley: multiple fractures of the spine, right leg, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, a dislocated shoulder, a crushed foot, and an abdomen punctured by an iron handrail. She taught herself to paint while bedridden, using a mirror fixed above her bed, and underwent more than thirty medical procedures in the following decades. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera — they divorced in 1939 and remarried in 1940 — and the couple hosted Leon Trotsky at her family home, the Casa Azul, from 1937. Breton promoted her work as self-taught surrealism; her first solo exhibition came at New York's Julien Levy Gallery in November 1938, and in 1939 the French state bought The Frame, making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist in its collection. Her most famous works — The Two Fridas (1939), Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), The Broken Column (1944) and Viva la Vida (1954, painted days before her death at 47) — are now divided among Mexico's museums and MoMA. The Casa Azul opened as a museum in July 1958; her reputation, dismissed in her lifetime as secondary to Rivera's, grew into what critics call 'Fridamania'. In November 2025 her painting El Sueño (The Dream) sold for $54.7 million — the highest auction price ever paid for a work by a woman.