Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón in her parents' house in Coyoacán, which at the time was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was a German who was born in 1871 in Pforzheim, Germany as Carl Wilhelm Kahlo to Lutheran parents whose antecedents, craftsmen, soldiers, gingerbread bakers and sluice keepers, have been traced back to the 16th century. His father was the jeweler and goldsmith Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and his wife Henriette née Kaufmann, both of whom were ethnic Germans and Lutherans (although some sources incorrectly claim that her father was Jewish). Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19 where he then changed his German forename for its Spanish equivalent, Guillermo. Her mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was of primarily indigenous descent mixed with Spanish and was a very devout Catholic who frowned upon the wild games that Frida and her younger sister and best friend, Cristina, played. Frida was the product of an unhappy marriage; her father had hastily married her mother after his first wife died in childbirth. For most of her life, Kahlo was closer to her father than to her mother. The young Frida suffered a bout of polio at age six, which left her right leg looking much thinner than the other (a deformity that Kahlo hid by long skirts). Still, with the feisty and brash personality that she kept throughout her life, and with her father's encouragement to participate in boxing and other "manly" sports, she overcame her disability. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of the top schools in Mexico, where she was one of only 35 girls. Kahlo joined a gang at the school and fell passionately in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias; her first real love affair, but certainly not her last. Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution took place. It was a moment that changed Kahlo's life. Kahlo was heavily influenced by the Mexican revolution, which began in 1910 when she was just three. In her writings she recalled that her mother would usher her and her sisters inside as gunfire could be heard in her hometown. Men would leap over the walls into her backyard, and some days her mother would prepare a meal for the starving revolutionaries. In fact, Kahlo went as far as to claim that she was born in 1910 so that people would associate her directly with the revolution. In 1925, a trolley car collided with a bus in which Kahlo was riding with her boyfriend; she suffered a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, 11 fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. Also, an iron handrail had impaled her abdomen, piercing through her uterus. Because of the injuries to her pelvis and uterus, she was unable to carry a child to full-term without serious risks, a fact that she never could fully come to terms with. She survived her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, but she would have relapses of extreme pain which would plague her for life, often leaving her hospitalized and/or in bed for months at a time, agonized and miserable. Frida would undergo as many as thirty-five operations in her life as a result of the accident, mainly on her back and her right leg/foot. Much of her artwork was based on her troubled life, and especially on her injuries from the accident.
After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to a full-time painting career. Drawing on her personal experiences (her troubled marriage, her painful miscarriages, her numerous operations), her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits, often incorporating symbolic portrayal of her physical and psychological wounds. She was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which surfaced in her paintings' bright colors, dramatic symbolism, and unapologetic rendering of often harsh and gory content. Although Kahlo's work is sometimes classified as surrealist, and she did exhibit several times with European surrealists, she never considered herself a surrealist. "I paint my own reality," she once said. Her preoccupation with female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th century.
Her paintings attracted the attention of fellow artist Diego Rivera, whom she later married. They were often referred to as "The Elephant and the Dove" due to their difference in size (Frida's mother, who did not like Diego, came up with this description of them). When they first married, he was 42, 6 ft 1 in. tall, and 300 pounds; she was 22, 5 ft 3 in. and 98 pounds. Their marriage was a loving but stormy one, largely due to Diego's weakness for extramarital flings. Their notoriously fiery temperaments also played a part in the storminess, and both had numerous extramarital affairs (Frida was outraged when she found that Diego had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina Kahlo). The couple divorced, but remarried in 1940. The second remarriage was as turbulent as the first. Frida did not hide from Diego the fact that she was bisexual; Diego tolerated her relationships with women, (among them actress Josephine Baker) because it turned him on, better than her relationships with men, which made him fiercely jealous. Active Communist sympathizers, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Leon Trotsky as he sought political asylum from Joseph Stalin..s regime in The Soviet Union. Initially, Trotsky lived with Rivera and then at Frida's home where he and Frida allegedly had an affair. Trotsky and his wife then moved to another house in Coyoacán where Trotsky was later assassinated. Sometime after Trotsky's death, Frida denounced her former friend and praised the Soviet Union under Stalin. She spoke favorably of Mao, calling China "the new socialist hope". Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, supposedly of a pulmonary embolism. She had been ill throughout the previous year and had had a leg amputated owing to gangrene. However, an autopsy was never performed and many are convinced she committed suicide. A few days before her death she had written in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful; and I hope never to return." The pre-Columbian urn holding her ashes is on display in her former blue home La Casa Azul in Coyoacán, today a museum housing a number of her works of art. Despite her life of suffering and pain, Frida Kahlo was a vibrant, extroverted character whose everyday speech was filled with profanities. She had been a tomboy in her youth and carried her fervor throughout her life. She was a heavy smoker, drank liquor (especially tequila) in excess, was openly bisexual, sang off-color songs, and told equally ribald jokes to the guests of the wild parties that she hosted.
