Most likely there would have been recognizable images of her husband, Diego Rivera, and of other art-world notables.

But most of all, this opening dramatized Frida Kahlo’s central subject-the artist herself.Īlthough the scene would surely have appealed to her, we do not know how Kahlo would have chosen to paint it. It testifies, in fact, to many of the qualities that marked Kahlo as person and painter: her gallantry and indomitable “alegria” in the face of physical suffering her insistence on surprise and specificity her peculiar use of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity. The occasion encapsulates as much as it culminates this extraordinary woman’s career. One by one, 200 friends and admirers greeted the painter, then formed a circle around the bed and sang Mexican ballads with her until well past midnight. Dressed in her favorite Mexican costume, she reclined on her four-poster bed, which she had bedecked with photographs of her political heroes, Malenkov and Stalin.

But an ambulance drew up to Mexico City’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, and she was carried to the opening on a hospital trolley. By that time, her health had so deteriorated that no one expected her to attend. IN APRIL 1953, LESS THAN a year before her death at the age of 44, Frida Kahlo had her first major exhibition of paintings in her native country of Mexico.

Frida by Hayden Herrera