Appearances can be deceiving

MAGDALENA Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on 6 July 1907, in her family home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coyoacán, at that time a village on the fringe of Mexico City.

Frida lived her formative years against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the cultural renaissance which followed.

Frida often gave 1910 as the year of her birth, to position herself as a child of the revolution.

Today, Frida is hailed as a feminist icon and as one of the most significant and sought-after artists of the twentieth century. Less well known however, is that Frida was disabled.

Teenage Frida was bright, outspoken, and mischievous. She was part of a politically minded group of friends called Los Cachuchas, named for the caps they wore.

Her fellow Cachuchas went on to become members of Mexico’s political and intellectual elites.

However Frida, studying with plans to train as a doctor, was gravely injured one day after school when the bus on which she was riding collided with a tram.

Kahlo broke her spinal column, collarbone, ribs, hip and right leg in various places. She was also impaled through her abdomen by an iron handrail that detached from the bus. Frida was not expected to survive her injuries.

When Frida came home to convalesce in her family home in Coyoacán, her mother arranged for a customised easel, and a mirror was installed in the canopy of her four-poster bed.

Frida began to paint. Self-portraiture became a primary focus of her art. It is the genre for which she is best known and celebrated today.

Over the course of twenty years, between her 1925 accident and her death in 1954 at the age of 47, Kahlo’s poetic self-portraiture explored her philosophical ideas, her passion for Mexico, and her personal pain and trauma.

Her bold and unflinching depictions of her disabilities, medical treatments, prostheses and aids, as well as her physical and emotional pain, broke taboos then and now.

Bendigo Art Gallery’s exclusive international exhibition ‘Frida Kahlo: In her own image’ on from 15 March – 13 July 2025, features Kahlo’s personal belongings, clothing, make-up, accessories, and medical items, on loan from the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico for the first time in Australia.

This article has been compiled with the curatorial research of Circe Henestrosa and Gannit Ankori, curators of Frida Kahlo: In her own image.