Kahlo enjoyed art from an early age, receiving drawing instruction from printmaker Fernando Fernández (who was her father's friend) [7] and filling notebooks with sketches. [8] In 1925, she began to work outside of school to help her family. [9] After briefly working as a stenographer, she became a paid engraving apprentice for Fernández. [10] He was impressed by her talent, [11] although she did not consider art as a career at this time. [8]

Regardless of the many drawings that appear in the diary, it would seem that Kahlo did not necessarily approach the book as a sketchbook. In the essay that accompanies the publication of the diary, Sarah M. Lowe makes the point that none of the drawings resemble an artist working on preparatory sketches or figuring out solutions related to her paintings. The prolific Mexican author Carlos Fuentes distinguishes between Kahlo's choice of when to paint and when to write: Durozoi, Gerard (2002). History of the Surrealist Movement. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. p.356. ISBN 978-0-226-17412-9. a b c Maranzani, Barbara (17 June 2020). "How a Horrific Bus Accident Changed Frida Kahlo's Life". Biography . Retrieved 6 July 2020. Michael Marra sings Frida Kahlo's visit to the Taybridge Bar" . YouTube . Archived from the original on 27 October 2021 . Retrieved 24 July 2021. Deffebach, Nancy (2006). "Frida Kahlo: Heroism of Private Life". In Brunk, Samuel; Fallow, Ben (eds.). Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-71481-6.Bakewell 1993, pp.168–169; Castro-Sethness 2004–2005, p.21; Deffebach 2006, pp.176–177; Dexter 2005, p.16. Book Genre: Art, Art History, Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, Feminism, History, Memoir, Nonfiction, Womens The demonstration worsened her illness, and on the night of 12 July 1954, Kahlo had a high fever and was in extreme pain. [247] At approximately 6 a.m. on 13 July 1954, her nurse found her dead in her bed. [248] Kahlo was 47 years old. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism, although no autopsy was performed. [247] Herrera has argued that Kahlo, in fact, committed suicide. [84] [247] The nurse, who counted Kahlo's painkillers to monitor her drug use, stated that Kahlo had taken an overdose the night she died. She had been prescribed a maximum dose of seven pills but had taken eleven. [249] She had also given Rivera a wedding anniversary present that evening, over a month in advance. [249] Castro's Rainbow Honor Walk Dedicated Today: SFist". SFist – San Francisco News, Restaurants, Events, & Sports. 2 September 2014. Archived from the original on 10 August 2019 . Retrieved 13 August 2019.

Inevitably, Frida’s profound ambivalence about her inordinate emotional dependence on Diego bubbles to the surface, along with all the other flotsam and jetsam streaming from her unconscious. “Nobody will ever know how much I love Diego. I don’t want anything to hurt him. nothing to bother him or to sap the energy that he needs to live,” she writes on another leaf. This is a classic case of what psychoanalysts call “negation” and what Shakespeare called “protesting too much.” Why bring up “hurting,” “bothering,” and “sapping” at all, unless it is in fact a secret wish? Nearly a century later, Rebecca Solnit would write her own lyrical meditation on blue as the color of distance and desire. In the United States, Kahlo's paintings continued to raise interest. In 1941, her works were featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and, in the following year, she participated in two high-profile exhibitions in New York, the Twentieth-Century Portraits exhibition at the MoMA and the Surrealists' First Papers of Surrealism exhibition. [56] In 1943, she was included in the Mexican Art Today exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century gallery in New York. [57] What? Spanning 1944-54, the final ten years of the artist's troubled lifetime, the diary is a captivating commonplace book filled with Kahlo's thoughts, poems and dreams. Her brightly coloured, rounded script is accompanied by watercolour illustrations which offer wonderful insight into her creative approach – the sketches and paintings were often reworked and incorporated into Kahlo's later works. Baddeley, Oriana (2005). "Reflecting on Kahlo: Mirrors, Masquerade and the Politics of Identification". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.

What Elvis Presley is to good old boys, Judy Garland to a generation of homosexuals, and Maria Callas to opera fanatics, Frida is to masses of late-20th-century idol seekers. Every day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 1931 double portrait of newlyweds Frida and Diego Rivera draws a worshipful horde, as reverent as the devotees gathered daily before the Louvre’s Mona Lisa. Says Hayden Herrera, author of the groundbreaking 1983 biography Frida, “Her paintings demand—fiercely—that you look at her.”