Frida Kahlo

            Frida Kahlo was a very talented artist which painted mainly self-portraits of herself. Many people have defined Frida's mania for self-portraits as a sort of therapy to survive (bus accident, abortions, surgery operations and "weird" medical treatments of her age). She painted herself because she was often alone. In these paintings, she painted herself performing different tasks which people thought were very disturbing. She lived from July 6, 1907 to July 13, 1954 and she was originally from Mexico. Her life was to be a long series of physical traumas, and the first of these came early in her childhood. At the age of six, she was stricken with polio which left her with a limp. During her childhood, she was a fearless tomboy, which made Frida her father's favorite. He had advanced ideas about her education, and in 1922 she entered the Preparatoria (National Preparatory School), the most prestigious educational institution in Mexico, which had only just begun to admit girls. .
             It was there that she met her husband-to-be, Diego Rivera, who had recently returned home from France. He had been paid to paint a mural there. Kahlo was attracted to him, and not knowing how to deal with the emotions she felt, she expressed them by teasing him and by trying to spark the jealousy of the painter's wife at that time, Lupe Marin.
             In 1925, Kahlo suffered a serious accident which changed her life forever. She was traveling in a bus which collided with a tramcar, and suffered serious injuries to her right leg and pelvis. After getting in the accident, Frida was unable to have children. This took a while for Frida to comprehend. It also meant that she faced a life-long battle against pain. In 1926, during her recovery, she painted her first self-portrait, the beginning of a long chain in which she expressed the emotional stages and reactions of the events going on in her life. In 1928, she met Rivera again through her friendship she had with the photographer Tina Modotti.