Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist known for her self-portraits, hard fate and striking looks.

Her work surprises and inspires, evokes the strongest emotions and reflects her complex life confusion.

Her work is often associated with Mexican surrealism, and she became a symbol of Mexican culture and feminism. Frida Kahlo was also married to the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

At the age of 18, Frida was in a terrible accident: the bus on which the future celebrity was traveling collided with a streetcar.

The result was a leg broken in eleven places, a triple fracture of the pelvis, a dislocated left shoulder, a fractured femoral neck, and a triple fracture of the spine in the lumbar region.

It was after the tragedy, while bedridden, that Frida asked her father for brushes and paints, and her mother ordered a special stretcher that allowed her to paint lying down.

Standing in the middle of the bare desert under a stormy sky, almost naked, vulnerable and defenseless Frida is the personification of loneliness and pain, the burden of which has become unbearable for one fragile human being. The dark gaps in the ground echo the fault line in Frida's body, which reveals a crumbling Ionic column. All this fragile structure is held together only by a corset that seems woven from weightless bandages rather than assembled from suffocating metal rims.

The painting was done after spinal surgery, to address complications from the accident.

The painting was painted after Frida's second miscarriage. This work was the first painting in the history of world painting dedicated to the loss of an unborn child.

All the symbols depicted in the painting have great significance. The child is the lost son Frida dreamed of. The snail is the time that crawled so agonizingly slow in the hospital. The pelvic bones, shattered in that long ago accident, are the reason Kahlo was unable to bear a child. The orchid is a symbol of sexuality, femininity and motherhood. The strange mechanical device is the inhumanity, coldness and cruelty of medical procedures.

Mentioning this painting in her diary, Kahlo writes that she was inspired by memories of a small imaginary friend. But this diary was often a chronicle of a very different Frida's life, beautiful and happy, bearing little resemblance to the real one. Later, the artist did admit that the double portrait was the fruit of her feelings about the crisis in her family relationship, which ended in her divorce from Diego Rivera

The painting depicts the two selves of Frida - the one Diego loved (in one of the traditional Mexican costumes he loved so much) and the one he rejected (dressed up in a Victorian-style doll wedding dress). And both are miserable, as one's love is in the past and the other is doomed to an existence without a heart. Both are in danger of perishing because the already meager life force that the tiny portrait of Diego the child feeds their one-and-only heart is draining away without a trace, despite Frida's attempts to stop the bleeding with a surgical clamp. This self-portrait makes it very clear that at that moment Kahlo had the only close being left - herself.

Standing in the middle of the bare desert under a stormy sky, almost naked, vulnerable and defenseless Frida is the personification of loneliness and pain, the burden of which has become unbearable for one fragile human being. The dark gaps in the ground echo the fault line in Frida's body, which reveals a crumbling Ionic column. All this fragile structure is held together only by a corset that seems woven from weightless bandages rather than assembled from suffocating metal rims.

The painting was done after spinal surgery, to address complications from the accident.

The painting was painted after Frida's second miscarriage. This work was the first painting in the history of world painting dedicated to the loss of an unborn child.

All the symbols depicted in the painting have great significance. The child is the lost son Frida dreamed of. The snail is the time that crawled so agonizingly slow in the hospital. The pelvic bones, shattered in that long ago accident, are the reason Kahlo was unable to bear a child. The orchid is a symbol of sexuality, femininity and motherhood. The strange mechanical device is the inhumanity, coldness and cruelty of medical procedures.

Mentioning this painting in her diary, Kahlo writes that she was inspired by memories of a small imaginary friend. But this diary was often a chronicle of a very different Frida's life, beautiful and happy, bearing little resemblance to the real one. Later, the artist did admit that the double portrait was the fruit of her feelings about the crisis in her family relationship, which ended in her divorce from Diego Rivera

The painting depicts the two selves of Frida - the one Diego loved (in one of the traditional Mexican costumes he loved so much) and the one he rejected (dressed up in a Victorian-style doll wedding dress). And both are miserable, as one's love is in the past and the other is doomed to an existence without a heart. Both are in danger of perishing because the already meager life force that the tiny portrait of Diego the child feeds their one-and-only heart is draining away without a trace, despite Frida's attempts to stop the bleeding with a surgical clamp. This self-portrait makes it very clear that at that moment Kahlo had the only close being left - herself.

In the famous painter Diego Rivera Frida fell in love at school, which seriously frightened her family: he was twice as old and was known to be an egregious ladies' man. However, no one could stop the determined girl: at the age of 22, she became the wife of a 43-year-old Mexican.

The marriage of Diego and Frida was jokingly called the union of an elephant and a dove (the famous artist was much taller and fatter than his wife). Diego was teased as a "toad prince", but no woman could resist his charm.

Frida knew about her husband's numerous affairs, but only one of them she could not forgive. When, after ten years of so-called married life, Diego cheated on Frida with her younger sister Cristina, she demanded a divorce.

Diego again proposed to Frida, and still loving artist set the condition: marriage without intimacy, living in different parts of the house, material independence from each other.

Their family had never been exemplary, the one thing that could have remedied the situation was not given to them - Frieda got pregnant three times and suffered miscarriages three times.

In 1937, Vogue magazine placed Frida's photo on its cover, proclaiming her a style icon.

The first in the industry to take an interest in Frida was Elsa Schiaparelli the Parisian fashion designer and fashion designer. It was she who made the "Madame Rivera" dress for the cover of Vogue.

In 1997, Jean Paul Gaultier dedicated an entire collection to the Mexican artist.

Blood-red lips, dark eyebrows, crowns of thorns and long black curls: Gaultier's models almost completely reproduced the artist's tragic self-portraits.

In 2003, a movie about the life of a Mexican artist starring Salma Hayek was released, which was awarded an Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe.

Frida Kahlo's niece was so impressed with the movie that she gave Salma Hayek the artist's necklace.

Frida died in 1954 at the age of 47. The official cause of death was pneumonia.

By this time in her country she had already become a national symbol, a legend. Her funeral was attended by prominent artists and former Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas.

The site was developed by Anastasia Koreyeva as part of a course on creative layout by Ania Melnik