Frida Kahlo

What failed

She was reading natural sciences at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, intending to become a physician, when a streetcar hit her bus on 17 September 1925 and an iron handrail went through her pelvis. It displaced three vertebrae, put her in hospital for a month and confined her to bed in a plaster corset for the better part of three months, and it ended the medical career. She began painting in oils during the recovery. For most of the next two decades the painting did not pay: she would not adapt her style to what buyers wanted, she left one Mexican government commission unfinished, and the commissioning body rejected the next one. Her first solo exhibition was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, arranged by André Breton, and she sold half of the twenty-five paintings in it. The Paris show that followed in 1939 opened only after she arrived to find that Breton had booked no gallery and had not got her paintings out of customs. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico came in April 1953, staged by Lola Álvarez Bravo because Álvarez Bravo understood she did not have long to live; her doctors had prescribed bed rest, so she had her own four-poster bed moved from her house to the gallery and arrived in an ambulance. Her right leg was amputated at the knee in August 1953 and she died on 13 July 1954, aged forty-seven, known largely as Diego Rivera's wife.

What happened next

The work stayed relatively unknown for more than twenty years after her death. She gained recognition only in the late 1970s, when feminist scholars began reopening the canon and the Chicano movement took her up as one of its icons. The first two books about her were published in Mexico in 1976 and 1977, and in 1977 The Tree of Hope Stands Firm became the first Kahlo painting sold at auction, at $19,000. The first two retrospectives followed in 1978, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; a joint retrospective with Tina Modotti opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in May 1982, and Hayden Herrera's biography appeared in 1983. By 1984 Mexico had declared her works part of the national cultural heritage and banned their export. In November 2025 her 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) sold at Sotheby's in New York for $54.7 million, the most expensive work by a woman artist at auction, seventy-one years after she died.

The point

The record holds two things the myth keeps only one of. She did sell paintings while she was alive, and the first of them went nine years before the New York show: Dos Mujeres was bought directly from her in 1929. Edward G. Robinson took four in the summer of 1938, half the twenty-five in her first solo exhibition sold that year, and a state prize of 5,000 pesos followed in 1946. She also could not make a living from the work until she was close to forty, was refused by the body that commissioned her, and was known in her own lifetime mainly as the wife of a more famous painter and as an eccentric personality among the international cultural elite. The recognition that made her name arrived between twenty-three and thirty years after her death, through auction rooms, feminist art history and the Chicano movement, none of which she arranged.