It’s an overused term, but Frida Kahlo “has become an icon”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Her likeness is now inescapable and her story, too, is familiar: born in Mexico City in 1907, she took up painting as a teenager, while recovering from a traffic accident that would lead to her losing a leg below the knee.She had a short but difficult life, compounded by health problems and her tumultuous marriage to the philandering muralist Diego Rivera. She died in relative obscurity in 1954, aged 47; but her works have since become “objects of mass worship and private devotion”.
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