Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, also known as Frida Kahlo, is widely hailed as one of the most remarkable painters of all time. She became an icon, an inspiration to most artists and also to those who have disabilities. Today, nearly 50 years after her death, the Mexican artist’s iconic images are displayed in museums, calendars, greeting cards, posters, pins, and even paper dolls. Frida hand-crafted her own image. One on par with Cleopatra as well as other iconic, famous artists in history. We know many interesting facts about Frida. She produced about 200 paintings and most of these artworks feature still life, and portraits of herself, her family, and friends. She also kept an illustrated journal and did dozens of drawings that are fascinating and enchanting. With techniques learned from both her husband and her father, Frida created mesmerizing, sensual, and stunningly original paintings that expressed elements of surrealism, fantasy, and folklore into powerful narratives. In stark contrast to the 20th-century’s leaning toward abstract art, Frida Kahlo’s work was staunchly figurative. Despite occasionally being commissioned for portraits, she sold relatively few paintings while she was alive. Today, however, her works fetch astronomical prices at auction. In 2000, a self-portrait painted in 1929 sold for more than $5 million. Frida was born in Mexico on July 6th, 1907, and passed away at the age of 47 on July 13th, 1954. She was born in Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico. She was raised by her parents Guillermo Kahlo, who was a photographer, and Matilde Calderón y González. Her father, Guillermo, moved to Mexico from Germany after he sufferedfrom epilepsy caused by an accident which eventually ended his university studies. Frida described her childhood as a “very very sad” memory. Both her parents were often ill and their marriage was devoid of love. Her relationship with her mother was somehow extreme and quite interesting. Her mother she described as "affectionate, active and intelligent, but also calculating, brutal and fanatically religious.” Her father had a photography business which suffered during the Mexican Revolution because the recently overthrown government had commissioned works from him, and the long civil war limited the number of private clients. When Frida was six years old, she had polio, which eventually made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than her left leg. Poliomyelitis, more commonly known as polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Around 70% of cases are asymptomatic while mild symptoms may surface too. Symptoms include sore throat and fever. More severe symptoms develop such as headache, neck stiffness, and paresthesia for major polio cases. This often happens due to poor handwashing and hygiene. It can also happen from eating or drinking contaminated food or water. Having polio forced Frida to be isolated from the people dear to her for months and this became a reason for her to be bullied. Polio made her secluded but also made her Guillermo's favorite child due to their shared experience of living with a disability. Frida showed how grateful and happy she was in her works. Her father became her source of inspiration, courage, and strength. She adored and admired her father. She once painted a portrait of him on which she inscribed, “character, generous, intelligent and fine.” For Frida, her father was "marvelous ... he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also a painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems."Guillermo taught Frida about photography, history, literature, nature, and philosophy. He also motivated Frida to play sports to regain her strength, despite the fact that most physical exercises were seen as unsuitable for girls. His father taught her photography, and she began helping to retouch, develop, and colorizing photographs. Polio was no reason for her to stop her progress and not pursue an education. Frida was a fighter and she pushed forward in her life. Becoming an inspiration to many current artists. Even though it was late compared to her peers, Frida came back to school to continue with her education. Along with her younger sister, she attended the local kindergarten and primary school in Coyoacán and was homeschooled for the fifth and sixth grades. Frida was then enrolled in a German school due to their father's wishes, unlike her siblings who continued their studies in local schools. Due to disobedience, she was soon expelled from this German school and was sent to a vocational teachers' school. She stayed here for quite a short amount of time since she was abused by her teacher. One day when she was 18, Frida along with her boyfriend, Arias, were on their way home from school when an accident happened which caused her dream of becoming a physician to fall to pieces. While the two were riding the bus, the driver attempted to pass an incoming electric streetcar. The streetcar crashed into the side of the wooden bus and several passengers were killed in this accident. While Arias only suffered minor injuries, Frida was not so lucky. She was severely impaled with an iron handrail that went through her pelvis. She later described the injury as "the way a sword pierces a bul.l" It was terribly painful, according to Frida. Arias and other passengers tried to remove the handrail. Her pelvic bone had been fractured, her abdomen and uterus had been punctured by the handrail, her spine was broken in three places, her right leg was broken in eleven places, her right foot was crushed and dislocated, her collar bone was broken, and her shoulder was dislocated. She spent a month in the hospital and recovered at home for two months. It was an excruciating ordeal which changed her life forever. About a year after her accident, Kahlo was introduced to Diego Rivera, who later became her husband. She first met Diego when he was painting a mural at her school. Their relationship became deeper when Frida asked him to judge whether her paintings showed enough talent for her to pursue a career as an artist. Frida and Diego were married in a simple civil ceremony at the town hall of Coyoacán on August 21, 1929. Soon after the marriage, in late 1929, the couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos where they were paid to paint murals for the Palace of Cortés. After completing their work in Cuernavaca, they moved to San Francisco, California in the United States, where they painted murals for the Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. A few years later, Frida and Diego returned to Mexico and then traveled to New York City during the fall for the opening of Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Rivera was later commissioned in Detroit to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. By this time, Frida had become bolder and braver in her interactions with the press and media. Journalists were impressed with her fluency in English and stated on her arrival to the city that she was a better artist than her husband. Frida had a hard time in Detroit although she had enjoyed visiting San Francisco and New York. She was exposed to many aspects of American society that she did not like. She regarded these as attributes of a colonialist and she found most Americans "boring." She hated socializing with capitalists such as Henry and Edsel Ford. She wrote a letter to a friend and stated that "although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States", she felt "a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here. It is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger." Frida’s difficult time in Detroit became even worse when shefound out she was pregnant. Her doctor agreed to end the life of her child but the medication prescribed was ineffective. Frida was deeply uncertain about being a mother and she had already undergone an abortion earlier in her marriage. Given that the recent abortion was not a success, she agreed to continue with the pregnancy but had a miscarriage in July. This caused a serious hemorrhage that required her to be admitted to the hospital for a few weeks. The couple returned to Mexico, where they lived in a newly constructed house built with separate individual spaces joined by a bridge. This became a place for artists and political activists to gather and view their artwork. The couple hosted the likes of Leon Trotsky and André Breton, a leading Surrealist who championed and promoted Frida’s work. Breton wrote the introduction to the brochure for her first solo art exhibition, describing her as a self-taught Surrealist. Frida and her husband’s first exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery located in New York. It was a great success and many people applauded the couple’s magnificent artwork. Frida traveled to Paris the following year to show her work. In Paris, she met more Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp, reportedly the only member she respected. The Louvre also acquired one of her works, The Frame (c. 1938). This created a runway for Frida to be recognized as the first 20th-century Mexican artist to be included in the museum’s collection. Surrealism is a movement in visual arts and literature which prospered in Europe between World Wars I and II. It grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I created works of anti-war art that deliberately defied reason. Dadaism aims to revolutionize the human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement's artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. Surrealism started in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Surrealistic art is characterized by dream-like visuals, the use of symbolism, and collage images. Several prominent artists came from this movement, including Magritte, Dali, and Ernst. Frida and Diego’s marriage faced several challenges, including affairs, that resulted in a divorce. The same year, Frida painted some of her most famous works, including The Two Fridas. This hallmark piece was painted on an unusually large canvas showing twin figures holding hands. This artwork represents an opposing side of Frida. The figure to the left, dressed in a European-style wedding dress, is the side that Rivera purportedly rejected. The figure to the right, dressed in Tehuana attire, is the side Rivera loved best. The full heart of the indigenous Kahlo is on display, and from it, an artery leads to a miniature portrait of Rivera that she holds in her left hand. Another artery connects to the heart of the other Kahlo, which is fully exposed and reveals the anatomy within. The end of the artery is cut, and the European Kahlo holds a surgical instrument seemingly to stem the flow of blood that drips onto her white dress. Frida reconciled with Diego in 1940, and they moved to her childhood home, La Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, Mexico. She was appointed as a professor of painting at La Esmeralda in 1943 at the Education Ministry’s School of Fine Arts. With everything she suffered, Frida’s health began to decline and she frequently relied on alcohol and drugs for relief. Despite this, she remained productive during the 1940s and she painted several self-portraits with varying hairstyles, clothing, and iconography. These artworks showed herself with an impassive, steadfast gaze, for which she became a famous and well-known artist of her time. Frida underwent multiple surgeries in the late 1940’s causing a prolonged hospital stay and toward the end of her life, she required assistance with walking. She appears in Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill seated in a wheelchair. Her declining health condition caused her to attend her first solo exhibition in Mexico lying on a bed. She died the following year in La Casa Azul. The official cause of death was documented as a pulmonary embolism. Diego had La Casa Azul redesigned and renovated as a museum dedicated to Frida’s life. The Frida Kahlo Museum opened to the public a year after Rivera’s death. Colored blue, the house was later known to represent her admiration for the indigenous people of Mexico. As Frida's birthplace, childhood residence, and place of death, La Casa Azul played a prominent and very important role in the artist's life. It is now known as the Frida Kahlo Museum, an institution that proudly “preserves the personal objects that reveal the private universe of Latin America's most celebrated woman artist.” To completely tour the museum, it takes at least two hours, as it contains ten rooms. Visitors can take as much time as they want in each of the rooms and admire many forms of artwork. The museum contains a collection of artwork by Frida and Diego along with other artists’ masterpieces, together with the couple's Mexican folk art, pre-Hispanic artifacts, photographs, memorabilia, personal items, and more. The collection is displayed in the rooms of the house, which looks untouched as it was in the 1950’s. It is the most popular museum in Coyoacán and one of the most visited in Mexico City. The museum demonstrates the lifestyle of wealthy Mexican bohemian artists and intellectuals during the first half of the 20th century. Today, the entrance ticket to the Casa Azul allows for free entrance into the nearby Anahuacalli Museum, which was also established by Diego. As per the records and testimonials, the house today looks much as it did in 1951. It is designed with Mexican folk art, Frida’s personal art collections and artworks, a large collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, traditional Mexican cookware, linens, and personal mementos such as photographs, postcards, and letters. Most of the collections displayed here are designed for their preservation. The museum also contains a café and a small gift shop for tourists and visitors. Frida’s diary, covering the years 1944–54, and “The Letters of Frida Kahlo” were both published in 1995. Although Frida had achieved success as an artist in her lifetime, her posthumous reputation steadily grew and reached what some critics called “Fridamania” by the 21st century. She is perhaps one of the most popular artists of the 20th century and many can’t deny that she is really an icon for many artists too. Her life also inspired a lot of writers too. They admire the dramatic parts of her life from her childhood up to her death.