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In the Art Gallery
Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo

The Frame, circa 1937–1938
Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de creation industrielle; © 2007 Banco de México, Trustee of the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust.

The Broken Column ( La columna rota ) , 1944
Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City ; © 2007 Banco de México, Trustee of the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust

Self-Portrait with Necklace (Autorretrato con collar ), 1933
The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art: Courtesy The Vergel Foundation; Muros; Costco / Comercial Mexicana ; © 2007 Banco de México, Trustee of the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust

Photographer unknown, Frida on a boat, Xochimilco, Mexico City, n.d.; Vicente Wolf Photography Collection

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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) celebrates the birthday of Frida Kahlo with an exhibit of her work organized by Kahlo biographer and art historian Hayden Herrera June 14-Sept. 28, 2008.

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, then a small town outside Mexico City. She began painting at 19, while recuperating from a near-fatal bus accident. Between 1926 and 1954, when she died at the age of 47, she painted some 66 self-portraits and 80 some paintings of other subjects.

“I paint my own reality,” she said. “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.”

Kahlo's accident left her in extreme pain, and many of her portraits depict symbolic and physical wounds. The Broken Column (shown at left) was painted after she underwent spinal surgery.

SFMOMA's press release observes that Kahlo was sustained by her insistence on being "strong and joyful in the face of pain." After her right leg was amputated at the knee in 1953, "She drew a picture of her severed limb in her journal and wrote, 'Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?' "

VerbSap thanks SFMOMA for permission to display images from the exhibition.