Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Mexico City. Her real name was Magdalena Carmen Frida Calderon; she was the daughter of a German Jewish father and a Mexican mother. She lived her adult life in the shadow of her husband, Diego Rivera, the muralist who was a Mexican national hero. She had known him since childhood and when he divorced his second wife, they embarked on a violent courtship.

Both were temperamental and noisy Communists; she proudly pointed out that she had never been expelled from the party as Diego was. He was gross (300 lbs.) and psychologically abusive (he seduced her younger sister, for instance). But the bisexual Frida retaliated with affairs of her own (with Leon Trotsky, for one, and the sculptor Isamu Nog...