Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico’s most famous artists. She was a force of nature, and she knew it.
An extraordinary woman and artist, she was propelled by intelligence and ambition. Kahlo meticulously created her own persona through her painting, red carpet worthy indigenous clothing, and appearance.
She was a brand builder and pioneer of self disclosure, who understood the power of a selfie even before it was part of popular culture. And she didn’t shy away from her statement mustache and unibrow either.
She produced raw, deeply personal self-portraits, basically transforming her own physical pain and heartbreak into striking works of art.
Her poetic portraits spoke to the soul. They were theatrical as well as self revealing.
Frida Kahlo is hard to categorize because her art doesn’t fit neatly into one movement. The Surrealists tried to claim her. But she resisted, saying “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
In fact, Kahlo was a little bit of everything—folk artist, surrealist, modernist, and political painter. But above all, she was a storyteller, turning her life into a visual diary.
Mini Biography of Kahlo
Born in Mexico in 1907, Kahlo survived polio as a child and a near-fatal bus accident as a teen. She was left with lifelong pain and injuries.
Instead of surrendering to suffering, she painted it. She creating bold, surreal images filled with symbolism, Mexican culture, and feminist themes.
Her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera, her political activism, and her rebellious spirit made her an icon. Rivera was a famous Mexican muralist at the time.
Frida Kahlo’s marriage to Rivera was as famous as her art—unconventional, turbulent, passionate, and full of betrayals. They married in 1929, despite a 20 year age gap and Rivera’s reputation as a womanizer.
He encouraged her painting, introduced her to influential artists, and supported her career. But their relationship was anything but stable.
Both had affairs. Kahlo with men and women, Rivera with countless lovers, including Frida’s own sister. They divorced in 1939, only to remarry a year later.
Kahlo was born and died in La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico City.
This vivid, cobalt-blue home became her sanctuary, filled with Mexican folk art, pre-Columbian artifacts, and lush Rousseau-esque gardens. Khalo had a menagerie of pets, including monkeys and exotic birds.
It was here that she painted many of her masterpieces, endured countless surgeries, and hosted artists like Leon Trotsky and André Breton.
After her death in 1954, Rivera turned her house into the Frida Kahlo Museum.
It preserves her art, her personal belongings, and even the bed where she painted while bedridden. It’s one of Mexico’s most visited museums.
>>> Click here to pre-book a ticket
If you’ve been to an exhibition in the states, you may have seen her ecosystem of medical devices: casts, braces, and spine-straightening corsets. They were her second skins.
Today, Kahlo’s work isn’t just admired. It’s basically a state of wild Fridamania. Her face, her art, and her story live on. Her paintings sell for millions and her likeness is everywhere.
Most Famous Frida Kahlo Paintings
Here are the top 10 most famous Frida Kahlo paintings with their locations.
1. The Two Fridas (1939)
📍 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
🔹 Her most famous and deeply personal painting, symbolizing her dual heritage and emotional struggles after her divorce from Diego Rivera.
The Two Fridas is a work painted with the heart exposed. Kahlo painted it shortly after Rivera asked for a divorce. It’s considered “the sacred icon of Mexican art par excellence.”
In a visual metaphor of her existential duality, Kahlo paints herself as two seated twins facing frontally and looking at the view, their hands joined.
Both wear their heart outside their clothing. The two facets of her life and personality are fused.
The Frida on the left wears a traditional wedding dress. She’s losing blood because her husband asked her for a divorce.
The Frida on the right wears a Tehuana dress, the kind Rivera loved. The blood vessel coiled around her arm ends in a miniature portrait of Rivera.
The painting represents the dichotomy and coexistences within her: pleasure and pain, emotional pain and happiness, Diego and no Diego.
2. The Broken Column (1944)
📍 Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
🔹 The ultimate expression of her physical pain, depicting herself with an exposed fractured spine, nails piercing her body, and tears streaming down her face.
This painting is a pictorial testimony of the bus accident Kahlo was in as a teen. Her body was reassembled in a hospital and she spent two months in bed at home.
You can see her corset. It opens in the middle from the neck down, exposing an Ionic column broken at several junctures.
Her body is proliferated with bands, belts, and braces holding it together. While realistic, the column also looks a bit phallic. Loosened hair softens the severity of her face.
Her expression is stony and bit vacant, owing in part to the white tears. In essence, the painting combines horror, beauty, and eroticism in compelling fashion.
3. Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)
📍 Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas
🔹 One of her most widely recognized self-portraits, filled with symbols of pain, resilience, and rebirth.
This painting is a masterpiece with symbolic complexity. It was painted after her divorce from Rivera, who she called the other “accident” in her life.
Kahlo is shown frontally. A thorn necklace runs around her neck, shoulders, and chest. Butterflies sit on a purple headdress.
Hanging in the center is a stuffed hummingbird. The artist’s face is flanked by a menacing black cat looking at the viewer and a spider monkey.
The background is dense foliage, like an odd to the French painter Henri Rousseau. Kahlo appears in deep reflection.
The thorn necklace is a reference to Christ. According to Aztec mythology, the hummingbird is a dead warrior returned to early life.
The cat could be a symbol of bad luck … or perhaps a curse on Rivera? Her pet spider monkey is a symbol of lust. The butterfly and flying flowers are a symbol of a soul surviving death.
What does it all mean? That in the middle of her incredible psychic and physical pain, there is still hope.
4. Henry Ford Hospital (1932)
📍 Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
🔹 One of her most brutally honest paintings, depicting her miscarriage in Detroit, floating in a surreal hospital scene.
In this emotive painting, Kahlo expresses one of the saddest moments of her life, her miscarriage, with heartbreaking valor and aesthetic rigor.
She lies nude on the bed, floating desolately in the air, on a bloodstained sheet. A tear falls from her left eye, nearly covering her cheek.
Vein-like strings emerge from her swollen belly, which represent umbilical cords. Three are attached to objects floating above the bed and three below.
In the center, suspended over her body, is a large fetus. The other five objects include a snail (symbolizing sex), a cast of a pelvic region, a medical machine, a flower, and a pelvic girdle bone.
5. Frida and Diego Rivera (1931)
📍 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco
🔹 A key early painting that portrays her marriage to Diego Rivera. This piece marked her entry into the professional art world.
This painting was based on a photograph her wedding. It reaffirms Khalo’s decision to adopt an ironclad Mexican persona.
It’s a display of conjugal love that reflects her devotion to the only subject she was devoted to, Rivera.
You can see the contrast between the couple. She is very petite and he is large and heavy.
6. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940)
📍 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City
🔹 A defiant statement of self-reinvention, painted after her split from Rivera, showing her in a man’s suit with shorn hair.
This self portrait came shortly after she and Rivera divorced. In it, Kahlo explores gender bending ideas.
She portrays herself defiantly, in a baggy suit like those worn by her husband. Her hair is cropped, shorn in spite.
At the top of the painting, Kahlo inscribes lyrics from a Mexican folk song. They translate to: “Look, if I loved you, it was because of your hair. Now that you are bald, I don’t love you anymore.”
This could be interpreted as a direct message to Rivera, who adored her long hair. By cutting it off, she asserts her independence and emotional detachment.
7. Little Deer (1946)
📍 Private Collection (Not on Public Display)
🔹 A haunting depiction of her suffering, blending surrealism and symbolism in a deeply personal way.
Little Deer is one of Kahlo’s most celebrated visual allegories of herself. It expresses her deep emotional wounds.
She represents herself as a deer wounded by arrows and fleeing through the forest. The deer has the artist’s face and antlers are emerging from her human ears.
The painting may also reflect Kahlo’s intellectual education. The painting is similar to Dido’s lament in Virgil’s Aeneid. The abandoned queen compares herself to a wounded deer, struck by an arrow and left to die.
Just as Dido is betrayed by fate and Aeneas, Kahlo’s deer symbolizes her own suffering, heartbreak, and inescapable pain.
8. The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939)
📍 Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
🔹 One of her darkest works, commissioned as a memorial but ending up as a raw and graphic portrayal of tragedy.
Kahlo’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale is one of her most haunting and controversial works. It depicts the tragic and gruesome real life suicide of American actress Dorothy Hale in explicit detail.
Dorothy Hale was a struggling actress in New York, devastated by the loss of her husband and financial hardship. On October 21, 1938, she jumped from the window of her luxury apartment building in Central Park South.
Hale’s close friend, Clare Boothe Luce (playwright, editor, and later a U.S. ambassador), commissioned Kahlo to paint a memorial portrait of Dorothy. Expecting a dignified tribute, Luce was horrified when she saw the final painting.
Dorothy appears multiple times, frozen mid-fall as she plunges from the window. Her body lies lifeless at the bottom, surrounded by blood.
At the top, a weeping Virgin Mary-like figure seems to observe the scene, adding a surreal touch. A ribbon of text at the bottom, painted in blood-red, narrates Hale’s death, reinforcing the painting’s brutal realism.
Luce was so disturbed that she considered destroying the painting. But instead, she donated it.
9. The Dream (The Bed), 1940
📍 Nesuhi Ertegun Collection in New York City
🔹 A surreal scene of Kahlo sleeping beneath a skeleton-filled canopy, symbolizing the constant presence of death, physical suffering, and resilience.
The Dream is a symbolic self-portrait that shows Kahlo fast asleep on a bed floating in a cloudy sky.
Resting on the canopy is a betraying “Judas” in the form of a skeleton, whose firecrackers could go off at any moment. It’s an allegory of the presence of death.
The plants allude to life and resurrection. The love of Rivera, now dead, will be reborn.
This duality—life and death coexisting—was central to Kahlo’s work and personal philosophy.
10. Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937)
📍 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
🔹 A politically significant painting, celebrating her brief love affair with the exiled Soviet revolutionary.
In 1937, Leon Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico and stayed at Casa Azul for two years. Rivera had just had an affair with Kahlo’s sister Christina. So, for revenge, Kahlo decided to have an affair with Trotsky to give Rivera “a few small nips.”
To leave a record of their romance, Kahlo created this portrait dedicated to Trotsky. She gave it to him on November 7, 1937, his birthday and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
In it, Kahlo is elegantly attired and wears a seductive expression. She’s showcased by two white curtains, intended to showcase her beauty. The dedication reads: “To Trotsky, with all my affection.”
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to Frida Kahlo’s most famous paintings. You may find these other art travel guides useful:
- Best Museums in the US
- Florence art bucket list
- Venice art bucket list
- London art bucket list
- Italy art bucket list
- Best museums in Paris
- Best museums in Rome
- Best museums in Madrid
- Best museums in London
- Best museums in Barcelona
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