Frida Kahlo
To this day, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is by far the best-known female painter in Mexico, if not Latin America. Her pictures were officially declared a "national cultural asset" by the Mexican government.
Her self-portrait "Roots" fetched 5.6 million US$ at auction in May 2006, making it the most expensive picture by a Latin American artist to date.
In her powerful self-portraits and richly symbolic imagery, she combined personal experiences with themes such as identity, pain, love and cultural belonging. Inspired by Mexican folk art, she developed a distinctive visual language that continues to fascinate people around the world to this day. Her works equally represent artistic expressiveness, self-determination and the power to transform personal experience into universal art.
Her husband, the famous Mexican painter, activist and moralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), maintained that he had never influenced Frida artistically but is said to have always fully accepted her individuality and independence. He wrote to a critic: "I do not recommend her to you because I am her husband but because I am a fanatical admirer of her work." After her death, he admitted that she had been the most important thing in his life. Frida Kahlo recorded in her diaries that she could not have endured her agonising existence without Diego's love. The years of their marriage were marked by Kahlo's serious illness and dramatic scenes of jealousy. They divorced and remarried in December 1940. Kahlo, who was 21 years younger, died in 1954, and Rivera only three years later.
