Meet Frida Kahlo: One Exhibition at Home, and She Came in a Bed

The crash

She was eighteen and a preparatory student intending to study medicine when the bus she was riding was struck by a streetcar. The injuries required something like thirty operations over the rest of her life.

She began painting in a body cast, with a mirror mounted above the bed. Roughly a third of her output is self-portraits, and her own explanation was flat: she painted herself because she was so often alone, and because she was the subject she knew best.

Not a surrealist

The Paris surrealists claimed her and she refused the label — she said she had never painted dreams, she painted her own reality. It reads as a small distinction and it is not: the work is documentary, of a body and a marriage, not of the unconscious.

She joined the Mexican Communist Party young, and Trotsky lived in her family's Blue House for two years after fleeing Stalin. She wore Tehuana dress deliberately — a statement about indigenous Mexico, and a way of covering the leg polio had withered.

Married twice, to the same man

She married Diego Rivera at twenty-two; her mother called it the marriage of an elephant and a dove. They divorced and remarried a year later.

Her first solo show was in New York in 1938 and more than half of it sold. Her only solo exhibition in Mexico came in 1953, a year before her death — by then she could not stand, so a four-poster bed was carried into the gallery and she received the room from it.

Fame she never saw

Her right leg was amputated below the knee that same year. She died at forty-seven; the recorded cause was pulmonary embolism, and suicide has never been ruled out. Her last painting was of watermelons, inscribed Viva la Vida.

In her lifetime she was known largely as Rivera's wife. The global fame is almost entirely posthumous and mostly dates from the 1980s onward.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when your circumstances have narrowed and the work has to happen inside them anyway. She made a body of art from a bed, and she is unsentimental about how little the world noticed at the time.