Who Was Frida Kahlo? Fifty-Five Self-Portraits and a Body That Kept Failing

Born in Coyoacan in 1907 to a German-born photographer father and a Mexican mother, she later claimed 1910 as her birth year so that her life would begin with the Mexican Revolution. Polio at six left her right leg thin and shorter. She was a strong student intending to study medicine when, in September 1925, the bus she was travelling in was struck by a tram; the injuries were catastrophic and the recovery involved months flat on her back in a plaster corset, during which her parents rigged a mirror above the bed and gave her paints, which is how she started. She married Diego Rivera in 1929, divorced him in 1939 and remarried him the following year, in a relationship marked by his repeated infidelity, including with her younger sister, and by hers, with both men and women. She joined the Communist Party, hosted Trotsky in her house during his Mexican exile, taught art, and died in 1954 at forty-seven, a few days after appearing at a political demonstration in a wheelchair.

The work is specific rather than symbolic in the usual sense: she painted her own experiences with a directness that had very few precedents:

• •The Broken Column, in which her torso is split open to reveal a shattered classical pillar where her spine should be, her body held together by a surgical corset and pierced with nails
• •Henry Ford Hospital, painted after a miscarriage in Detroit in 1932, showing her haemorrhaging on a hospital bed with six objects floating on red ribbons, including a foetus and a pelvis
• •The Two Fridas, made around the divorce, showing two versions of herself side by side with exposed hearts connected by an artery that one of them is cutting
• •A Few Small Nips, based on a newspaper report of a murder, with the killer's reported excuse as its title
• •The many self-portraits with a monkey, a parrot, a deer or a hummingbird, and with the joined eyebrow and faint moustache she deliberately emphasised rather than removed
• •Viva la Vida, a painting of cut watermelons finished days before her death, with the title inscribed on the fruit

Andre Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement, met her in Mexico in 1938, declared her work surrealist and arranged an exhibition in Paris. She disliked the label and said so repeatedly, in the line usually quoted as her having never painted dreams but her own reality. The distinction is worth taking seriously. Surrealism proceeded from the unconscious, from automatic methods and from deliberate irrationality; her strange images are descriptions of things that actually happened to her body, rendered with the flat clarity and small scale of Mexican devotional painting. Her direct model was the retablo, the votive picture painted on tin to thank a saint for surviving a disaster, which conventionally shows the accident in the lower part of the panel and the divine figure above; she collected them, painted on metal in the same format, and used the same unemotional depiction of catastrophe. What reads as surreal is closer to religious folk art with the saint removed.

Her clothing was a deliberate statement rather than a personal eccentricity. She dressed in the Tehuana costume of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a region known for a matrilineal society and strong independent women, with long embroidered skirts and elaborate headdresses, which aligned her with indigenous Mexican identity at a moment when the post-revolutionary state was building a national culture out of exactly that material. The movement, known as Mexicanidad, rejected European models in favour of indigenous and popular sources, and her work belongs to it as much as her husband's murals do, at a completely different scale. The long skirts also concealed her damaged leg, which was amputated below the knee in 1953. The wardrobe was sealed in a bathroom of her house at Rivera's instruction after her death and not opened until 2004, when it produced a collection of clothing, corsets and prosthetics that has since toured as an exhibition in its own right.

She had one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, which she attended in a four-poster bed carried into the gallery by ambulance. For twenty years after her death she was known chiefly as Rivera's wife. The revival began in the 1970s, driven by feminist art historians looking for women who had made work about female experience directly, and accelerated with Hayden Herrera's 1983 biography and the 2002 film. The result is a level of commercial circulation that sits awkwardly with the work, since a communist who painted her own miscarriage now appears on tote bags, and since the image most reproduced is the face rather than the paintings. Her house in Coyoacan, the Casa Azul, is a museum and one of the most visited in Mexico, and her work has repeatedly set records for a Latin American artist at auction, which is a strange outcome for a painter who priced her pictures modestly and gave a good number of them away.

Left disabled by polio and then by a tram accident at eighteen that broke her spine and pelvis, she began painting while immobilised and produced around 143 works, 55 of them self-portraits, describing her injuries, miscarriages and marriage with the flat clarity of the Mexican votive paintings she collected. She rejected the surrealist label on the grounds that she painted her own reality, dressed in Tehuana costume as a deliberate alignment with indigenous Mexican identity, sold little in her lifetime, and was rediscovered in the 1970s.