now known as Casa Azul in Coyocon, a town of Mexico City. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was German, and had moved to Mexico at a young age where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking over the photography business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, born of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, was Wilhelm's second wife, and raised Frida and her five sisters in a strict and religious household. Aside from her mother's rigidity and tendency toward hysteric outbursts, several events in Kahlo's childhood affected her psyche for the rest of her life. At age six, Kahlo contracted polio and was forced to remain in bed for nine months, walking with a limp after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very close, enrolled his daughter at the German College in Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Kahlo's mixed European and Mexican heritage permanently affected the artist's approach to her life and artwork. Following the Mexican Revolution and Minister of Education Jose Vasconcelos's new education policy, in 1922, Kahlo was one of 35 girls admitted to the National Preparatory School, where she planned to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. The artist befriended a dissident group of students known as the Cachuchas, who confirmed Kahlo's rebellious spirit and her interest in poetry and literature. In 1925, Kahlo was involved in a nearly fatal bus accident, where she suffered multiple fractures throughout her body and a crushed pelvis. She spent nine months in the hospital, immobile and bound in a plaster corset. During her long recovery she began experimenting in small-scale autobiographical portraiture, permanently abandoning her medical pursuits. During her years at the National Preparatory School, Kahlo also took drawing lessons in Fernando Fernandez's studio where she acquired training in draftsmanship. At age 15, Kahlo witnessed Diego Rivera painting the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater of the Preparatory School, a moment of infatuation and fascination for the young artist that she would pursue later in life. But, despite these directions, Kahlo's most influential early experimentation with painting was during the months of convalescence at home after her bus accident. Gifted with a set of paints from her father, Kahlo spent hours studying herself, and more importantly, confronting existential questions raised by her trauma such as dissociation from identity, death, and interiority. The duality of autobiographical content - both the physical experience and interiority of the person - evolved as the central qualities of Kahlo's painting practice. In 1927, slowly recovering, Kahlo was forced to contribute to her family's expenses and her medical bills. In contact with her friends from the Cachuchas group, Kahlo began to familiarize herself with the artistic and Communist circles in Mexico City, including figures such as the militant photo-journalist Tina Modotti and the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. In 1928, having officially joined the Mexican Communist Party, Kahlo sought out Diego Rivera in order to discuss a possible career as an artist. One year later, the two married and moved to Cuernavaca where Kahlo devoted herself to indigenous themes in painting, at times even embodying Mexican folkloric rituals wearing a traditional Tehuana costume for her spouse. By the early 1930, Kahlo's painting evolved to include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity, a facet of her artwork that stemmed from her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and her interest in preserving the revival of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe. Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her Germanic roots is evidenced in her change of name from Frieda to Frida. Concurrently, two failed pregnancies in the early 1930s, in addition to the revival of Mexican folkloric expression such as the ex-voto, contributed to Kahlo's simultaneously harsh and beautiful representation of the female experience through symbolism and autobiography. Throughout the 1930s, life in Mexico was tense for Kahlo: Rivera was an unfaithful husband and the revolutionary climate leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War made for an explosive atmosphere. Kahlo separated from Rivera in 1935, renting a flat in Mexico City, and began a short-lived affair with the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The following year, Kahlo joined the Fourth International and returned to the Casa Azul, which became a meeting point for international intellectuals, artists, and activists and where she ensured the safety of Leon Trotsky and his wife. Several of Kahlo's masterpieces, including The Two Fridas (1939), were painted in the late1930s and early 19s and reflect the difficulty of this period. In a visit to Mexico City in 1938, the founder of Surrealism, Andr Breton, was enchanted with Kahlo's painting, and hosted the artist's first exhibition in Paris in 1939 at Galerie Renou et Colle. The show was enormously successful; however, the Western, romanticized vision of pastoral Mexico by members of the European bourgeois disgusted Kahlo, though she would exhibit with the Surrealists in the Mexico City exhibition Apparition: the Great Sphinx of the Night in January 1940, which was considered the first international exhibition of Surrealism in the Americas. Following Trotsky's assassination, Kahlo joined Rivera in San Francisco in September of 1940. Kahlo had fallen ill, and was treated by her private doctor, Dr. Eloesser. Kahlo remarried Rivera shortly after, and, returned to Mexico City, where the two maintained separate flats. Kahlo continued to dote on her muse, sending him love notes wherever he was working. Throughout the 1940s, the artist's work grew in notoriety and acclaim from international collectors, and was included in several group shows in Mexico. In 1946, Kahlo received a national prize for her painting Moses, and the year after she was offered a teaching position at La Esmeralda. Meanwhile, the artist grew progressively ill from from the long-term effects of her childhood traumas. By June 1946, Kahlo could no longer remain upright and underwent an unsuccessful bone-graft operation on her spine in New York. In 1950, Kahlo was again hospitalized for nine months at the English Hospital in Mexico. Kahlo continued to paint in her final years while also maintaining her political activism, protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, the artist's first solo show in Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance and had her four-poster bed placed at the center of the gallery. Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 at Casa Azul, which is today the Frida Kahlo Museum. A strong individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with primitivism, indigenism, and Surrealism.