Frida Kahlo before Fridamania swept the world, 1944

At 22 she married artist Diego Rivera — he was 42, and her parents described the wedding as the union of an elephant and a dove.

Rivera and Kahlo had affair upon affair, including Rivera seeing Frida’s younger sister, Cristina, and Frida having a brief liaison with Leon Trotsky. In 1939, the couple divorced. A year later they remarried.

During her lifetime, Kahlo was initially known simply as Rivera’s partner — an exotic eccentric. Her own work, while selling in her final decade, was often overshadowed by her Bohemian reputation, and her dressing in traditional Mexican costume. She was not able to make a sustainable living from her art until late in her life.

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How did she become an artist? On September 17, 1925, Frida Kahlo was the victim of a bus accident in which a steel rod pierced her pelvis, so that from then on she had to spend her everyday life lying down and in a full-body cast or steel corset. To pass the time, she began painting in bed.