Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Frida’s self-portraits often carry references to birth, babies and the reproductive organs and reveal a continuing source of pain throughout her life: her inability to bear children.

She terminated her first pregnancy when her health was at great risk. Later, after each of two miscarriages, Frida exposed her emotional pain in small sketches and major paintings.

It was typical of Frida to use these setbacks creatively, and she had started early. When she was first told in hospital that she may never be able to bear children, Frida created a birth certificate for an imaginary son, the son she would never have.

Depressed after her 1932 miscarriage, Frida was encouraged by Diego to find a new way to paint. Working with fine brushes on small sheets of tin or zinc, she was tapping into a folk tradition both she and Diego loved and admired: the retablo.

Popular retablo – or lámina – paintings are part of the ‘ex-voto’ Catholic tradition of small devotional paintings. Dramatic scenes of illness, accident or disaster feature a character saved by divine intervention.

For Frida, this approach allowed her to bring together Mexican traditional arts with a kind of narrative autobiography that, in typical retablo style, focused on her broken body.

In 1952, Frida started painting the still-lifes that many consider to be a kind of indirect self-portraiture, paintings that continued to reflect her internal reality.

Maybe Frida didn’t want to keep painting herself directly as she aged, no longer seeing herself as beautiful.

Or, as she commented to her last lover Josep Bartolí in 1946, the still-lifes may have been a meditation on death: ‘I paint flowers’, she said, ‘so they will not die’.

A week before she died, Frida painted the words ‘Viva La Vida (Long Live Life)’ on a retablo-like scroll at the bottom of a painting of ripe watermelons, full of colour and life.

In 1932, Frida began a project of making a painting for each year of her life.

She started with My Birth – which is often read as depicting not only her real birth, but a fantasy of her giving birth to herself – and went on to include key episodes in paint, though ones always transfigured into deeper and more complex images.

Indeed, her friend the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo once said:

‘Frida is the only person I know who, by their own will, created their own life. She is the only person who gave birth to herself.’

The earliest commentaries on Frida’s art referred her relationship with Diego and her confidently ‘exotic’ style, but most often on her accident and disability – as Bertram Wolfe wrote: ‘an automobile accident made a painter out of her’.

Frida began telling interviewers in the late 1930s: ‘I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other considerations’.

She encouraged such a direct biographical reading of her art as a straightforward and guileless reproduction of her life, thoughts and emotions. While partly true, this view of her as artlessly direct enabled her to construct her persona as ‘Frida’.

Ever the consummate performer, even Frida’s state funeral, attended by admirers from around the world, was a magnificent performance.

Hundreds of mourners filed past her coffin in the Palacio de Bellas Artes to pay their last respects some throwing themselves on top of her, taking jewellery from her body as mementos.

But even the manner of Frida’s death may have been orchestrated.

Though a pulmonary embolism was the official reason given for her death, it has long been thought she may have deliberately overdosed on the painkillers to which she’d been addicted for some time.

If so, Frida may have taken control of her identity to the very end.