Passion, politics and painting: Seven facts uncovering the real Frida Kahlo

7 March 2023

Becoming Frida Kahlo is a new three-part BBC Arts series that charts the passionate and brilliant Mexican artist's extraordinary life. Here are seven surprising things we learned from this striking documentary exploring the politics, power, sex and identity at the heart of Kahlo's story.

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 but she claimed her date of birth to be in 1910, in order to align it with the start of the Mexican Revolution.

1910 was the beginning of a turbulent decade in Mexico, during which different factions fought for supremacy. Power changed hands many times and the old colonial order was overturned.

For Frida, this act made a statement about her devotion to Mexican culture.

The following decade, the 1920s, saw an extraordinary flourishing of art. Mexico City became a thriving hub for artists and intellectuals from all over the world, and Frida was at the heart of it.

Following Frida's polio diagnosis at the age of six, a shortened right leg meant she walked with a limp and this led to her being bullied at school.

Looking back at her childhood, she said: "At first, I assumed that the children’s taunts wouldn’t affect me, but later, they really did. And each time, worse."

However, the insults failed to crush her spirit.

Cristina Kahlo, Frida's great-niece, tells the programme: "In Mexico we say 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'."

As Frida grew up, she began to embrace the fact that she was a bit different. She developed her own sense of style, often wearing clothes seen traditionally as male.

In 1925, Frida was travelling home from Mexico City on a rickety bus with her boyfriend Alejandro Gomez Arias, when a tram ploughed into them.

Looking back in later years, Alejandro said: "Naturally, the first thing that I did was to look for Frida. I picked her up, and then I noticed with horror, Frida had a piece of iron in her body."

A metal handrail had pierced her body, and doctors feared she would die during emergency surgery.

During her long recovery, Frida spent many hours alone. In those moments, she entertained herself by painting. Her mother made an easel adapted for her to paint in bed.

She began by painting portraits of her sisters and friends, and gradually her confidence increased and her art began to demonstrate real ambition.

By the 1920s, Mexican art was flourishing and Diego Rivera was one of the most celebrated artists in the world.

Famed for his mural paintings, many of his artworks represented his strong Communist beliefs.

Frida first encountered Diego while at school, when she heard him deliver a lecture about Russia. Their first actual meeting came after Frida's accident, when she approached him while he was painting a mural.

According to art historian Gannit Ankara, Frida was not at all intimidated by the famous artist.

"She ordered him to come down from the scaffold, then said, 'Listen, Diego, I need to make a living. Please look at these and tell me if I am good enough.'

"She didn’t have many, but she’d painted a few portraits, some of them quite good."

According to Frida, "He told me that I should try to paint whatever I wanted, without being influenced by anyone else.

"That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint what I believe in."

Diego Rivera was 21 years older than Frida, who became his third wife in 1929.

They were a strikingly different couple - when they married, Frida's parents called them ‘the elephant’ and ‘the dove’.

It was a stormy marriage, with both having numerous affairs. Frida had affairs with men and women.

They divorced in 1939 but a year later they remarried, remaining together until Frida's death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Frida Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera tells the programme: "I really believe her, when Frida said that she loved him more than her own life.

"She must have hated him a lot of the time, but that doesn't mean she didn't love him.”

Art historian Luis-Martín Lozano says: "You can't have Frida Kahlo if you don't understand Diego comes first.

"Art itself is not enough. At the end, where is this woman without the person she loves?”

Leon Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, second only to Vladimir Lenin in the early stages of Soviet communist rule.

Trotsky lost out to Joseph Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death, and was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He would live in exile for the rest of his life, and in 1936 he moved to Mexico.

By that time, Frida's husband Diego, himself an ardent Communist, had been having an affair with her sister for several years.

Art historian Luis-Martín Lozano says: "Trotsky is somebody she admired because he was a survivor. He was a revolutionary.

"So, because she's attracted to his level of intelligence, why not become closer to Trotsky?"

Frida even created a painting called Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky. However, the affair did not last long.

In 1940 a Soviet NKVD assassin, acting on Stalin's orders, killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. An estimated 300,000 people passed by his casket in the city in the days after his death.

In 2010, the Bank of Mexico added the images of Frida and Diego on either side of its 500 peso banknote.

The main image on Frida's side is a 1940 self-portrait. The design also incorporates her 1949 painting, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl.

Frida's paintings did not sell for huge amounts of money during her lifetime, but since her death her artistic reputation has soared.

In 2021, one of her final self-portraits, Diego y Yo, sold at Sotheby's auction house in New York for a record $34.9m. It was the highest price paid at auction for a work by a Latin American artist. The painting had previously been auctioned, in 1990, for $1.4m.

Biographer Martha Zamora tells the programme: "I love to see Frida claiming $34m for a small painting, because I know what it means for many others."