Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was BOTD in 1907. Born in Coyoacán to a middle-class family, she showed an early interest in art, assisting her photographer father in his studio. In 1922, she entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, intending to study medicine. At 18, she was severely injured in a bus accident, causing her lifelong illnesses, multiple operations and chronic pain. During her convalescence, she taught herself to paint, creating brightly-coloured self-portraits influenced by Mexican folk culture and Catholic iconography. She joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, where she met the artist Diego Rivera, a folk hero 21 years her senior. He became her artistic mentor and eventually her lover, agreeing to marry in 1929, despite his reputation as a notorious womaniser. Their unlikely pairing was strikingly represented in Kahlo’s 1931 painting Frieda and Diego Rivera, in which the giant-sized Rivera towers over the diminutive Kahlo, dressed (ironically) as a traditional Mexican wife. They had a loving if tempestuous relationship, marked by Kahlo’s multiple miscarriages and arguments over Rivera’s compulsive infidelities. After time spent in the United States in the early 1930s, they returned to Mexico, living in adjoining houses with separate studios. Kahlo’s work became increasingly autobiographical and boldly surrealist, portraying her accident, miscarriages and stillborn babies with impressive frankness. The Riveras also hosted gatherings for left-wing activists, notably the displaced Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, with whom Kahlo had an affair. In 1939, she had solo exhibitions in New York and Paris, and became the first Mexican artist to have a painting included in the Louvre Museum’s collection. An expert manager of her own public image, she posed in traditional Mexican dress for a photo shoot for American Vogue, playing with gender norms by accentuating her monobrow and moustache and dressing in men’s clothes. She had a number of affairs with men and women, including Dolores del Río, Maria Felix, Nickolas Muray, Isamu Noguchi and Chavela Vargas. Biographers have speculated that she also had affairs with Paulette Goddard, Tina Modotti, Georgia O’Keeffe and Josephine Baker. After years of ill health, the partial amputation of her leg and a resulting addiction to painkillers, she died in 1954, aged 47. Largely forgotten until the 1970s, her work became hugely popular in the 1980s with international retrospectives of her work, Hayden Herrera’s bestselling biography and celebrity fans including Madonna. Fridamania reached its peak in 2002 with Julie Taymor’s visually bold and painterly biopic starring Salma Hayek, earning six Oscar nominations and winning for original score and make-up. Now one of the world’s most famous and instantly recognised artists, she has been hailed as a feminist, queer and Chicano icon.