1907 On July 6, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón is born in Coyoacán, Mexico, the third of Matilde Calderón and Guillermo Kahlo’s four daughters.
1910 The Mexican Revolution begins. Later in life Kahlo claimed
1910 1910 was the year of her birth.
1913 Frida suffers an attack of polio, permanently affecting the use of her right leg.
1922 Fifteen-year-old Frida enters the National Prepatory School, where she plays pranks on Diego Rivera, who is painting his mural Creation at the school. Though she does not actually meet Rivera, her jokes make an impression on him. She is one of thirty-five girls in a student body of two thousand.
1925 On September 17, Frida nearly dies in a trolley accident. Her spinal column is broken in three places. Her collarbone is broken, and also her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg has eleven fractures, and her right foot is dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder is out of joint and her pelvis is broken in three places. The steel handrail of the trolley goes straight through her abdomen. She will never fully recover from these injuries.
1926 Frida begins to paint while convalescing at home.
1929 On August 21, Frida marries Rivera. She is twenty-two (nineteen, to those who think she was born in 1910) and he is forty-three.
1931 In San Francisco, Frida meets Dr. Leo Eloesser, who becomes her physician for the rest of her life.
1934 Frida and Diego live in adjoining houses with a bridge between them. Frida has three operations, one to have her appendix removed, one for an abortion, and one because of foot problems.
1935 Frida and Diego separate. Frida moves to an apartment in Mexico City. In July she travels to New York. When she returns, the couple reconcile. She has a foot operation. Her foot takes six months to heal.
1936 Frida experiences intense back pain and has another foot operation.
1937 On January 9, Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, arrive in Mexico and stay at Casa Azul. (Trotsky was one of the founders of the Soviet Union but had to flee his country when he came under disfavor with the Soviet leadership.) Like Trotsky, Frida and Diego are ardent communists.
1938 French surreallist André Breton visits Mexico and meets Frida. American collector and actor Edward G. Robinson purchases four works, her first significant sale.
From October 25 to November 14, Frida has her first solo exhibition in New York, at the Julian Levy Gallery.
1939 Frida travels to Paris for Mexique, an exhibition curated by André Breton that included her paintings. The Louvre purchases her self-portrait The Frame.
Frida returns in April, when Diego begins divorce proceedings against her. The divorce is finalized in November.
1940 In January The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table are exhibited in the International Surrealism Exhibition organized by the Gallery of Mexican Art. Her Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird is sold to photographer Nicolas Munay, who had previously purchased her work.
Frida goes to San Francisco for medical treatment by Dr. Eloesser. She shows her work in the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exhibition. The Two Fridas is shown in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.
On December 8 Frida remarries Diego in San Francisco.
1942 Frida’s Self-Portrait with Braid is included in the exhibition Twentieth-Century Portraits at the Museum of Modern Art.
1943 One of her paintings is exhibited at the Benjamin Franklin Library in Mexico City in the group show, A Century of Portrait in Mexico (1830-1942). Her work is also exhibited in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Frida begins teaching at the Ministry of Public Education’s School of Painting and Sculpture, La Esmeralda.
1946 Frida goes to New York for surgery on her spine. She paints The Wounded Deer and Tree of Hope, Stand Fast.
1947 Her Self-Portrait as a Tehuana is exhibited at the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City.
1949 Frida writes the essay “Portrait of Diego” and paints Diego and I and The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego, and Mr. Xólotl, which is exhibited at the Salon de la Plástica Mexicana in Mexico City.
1950 Frida is hospitalized for nine months because of recurring spinal problems.
1953 From April 13 to 27, Frida’s only individual exhibition in Mexico is held at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.
In July her leg is amputated below the knee because of gangrene.
1954 Frida is hospitalized in April and May. On July 2, convalescing from bronchial pneumonia, she takes part in a demonstration protesting United States intervention in Guatemala. On the night of July 13, she dies. Her doctor determines she died of pulmonary embolism, but rumors persist that her death was a suicide.