Artists

Frida Kahlo

Also Known As Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon

Citation Formats

General Reference

Arts and Music Atlas. "Frida Kahlo." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-arts.interactiveatlas.org/artists/frida-kahlo.

APA Style

Arts and Music Atlas. (n.d.). Frida Kahlo. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-arts.interactiveatlas.org/artists/frida-kahlo

BibTeX

@misc{artsandmusicatlas-frida-kahlo,
  author = {Arts and Music Atlas},
  title = {Frida Kahlo},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-arts.interactiveatlas.org/artists/frida-kahlo},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for vivid, often self-referential works that drew on her own physical suffering, her Mexican heritage, and folk art traditions. Many of her paintings, including a long series of self-portraits, are read as unflinching explorations of identity, pain and the body, and she remains one of the most widely recognized painters of the twentieth century.

Facts

Birth Year

1907 1

Death Year

1954 1

Nationality

Mexican 1

Birth Date

1907-07-06 2

Death Date

1954-07-13 2

Birthplace

Coyoacan, Mexico 2

Death Place

Mexico City, Mexico 2

Active From Year

1925 2

Dated from her recovery-period start in painting after a near-fatal 1925 bus accident to her death.

Active To Year

1954 2

Training

Largely self-taught; she began painting seriously during her recovery from a near-fatal bus accident in 1925, and studied briefly afterward with the commercial printmaker Fernando Fernandez. 2

Cross-Tradition Connections

In Movement

Surrealism

Why this is disputed. Andre Breton and other Surrealists claimed Kahlo as one of their own after seeing her work in the 1930s, but Kahlo herself rejected the label, saying she painted her own reality rather than dreams. Her connection to Surrealism is carried here as a live art historical dispute, not a settled classification.

Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)