PL Lee
24 posts


frida kahlo made 143 paintings between thirty operations. her spine fractured in three places. her right leg in eleven. her right foot shattered. doctors put her in a full-body cast for three months. she lived another 29 years and never stopped painting.
july 6 1907. coyoacán mexico. she had polio. one leg never grew right.
september 17 1925. she was 18, riding home on a wooden bus that collided with a streetcar in mexico city. a steel handrail caught her body. her spine fractured in three places. her right leg in eleven. her right foot shattered. doctors fitted her into a full-body plaster cast for three months.
she was in and out of body casts for the next two years. her father bought her oil paints and rigged a mirror above her bed so she could see her own face while lying down. that is where she taught herself to paint. of the 143 paintings she would make in her lifetime, 55 were self-portraits. "i am the subject i know best," she wrote.
1929. she married diego rivera, the most famous muralist in mexico. he was 42 and twice married. he slept with her sister cristina in 1934. they divorced in 1939 and remarried in 1940. frida had her own affairs. one of them was leon trotsky.
1937. trotsky and his wife took shelter in her family home for two years while stalin's agents searched for them across continents. he left her house in 1939.
april 13 1953. her only major mexican solo show opened in mexico city. her doctors forbade her to attend. she had her four-poster bed transported to the gallery and greeted every guest from it in her embroidered tehuana dress, surrounded by her own paintings.
1953. she underwent leg surgery below the knee. she wrote in her diary: "feet, what do i need them for if i have wings to fly."
july 13 1954. she died at 47. the last entry in her diary read: "i hope the exit is joyful and i hope never to return."
in 2021 her self-portrait diego y yo sold at sotheby's for 34.9 million dollars. it set the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a latin american artist.
she is on the mexican 500 peso note. her face is on murals from los angeles to istanbul. every one of those paintings was made from a body that was breaking apart while she made them.

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