Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo's revealing, often pain-filled self-portraits have provoked intense curiosity about who she really was. To understand this richly complicated woman requires a willingness to read between the lines, because the story of Frida Kahlo is like Frida herself--magnetic, profound, and occasionally shocking.

Frida Kahlo's life and art have made her a twentieth-century heroine. Struck by polio at age six and nearly killed in a bus accident at eighteen, she grew up to marry the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera and to become Mexico's best-known woman painter. This brief biography of Kahlo (1907-54), first published in 1991 in the Barnard Biography Series, is now available only from the University of New Mexico Press.