MARY KENNY Frida Kahlo, the revolutionary painter who declared ‘what doesn’t kill me, nourishes me’

Today, Frida Kahlo is probably the most famous female artist in the world. Although she died in 1954, aged 47, she is truly contemporary: she is the artist of the selfie, since most of her paintings are self-portraits. Even in her own lifetime, she had revolutionised the genre of the self-portrait, bringing not only a dazzling female sensibility and intensity to it, but a narrative of family, nativist culture, costume, obsession with fertility, Surrealism, revolution and religious iconography.

Even those who have taken scant interest in Kahlo’s work will recognise her image, reproduced ubiquitously: for a Stalinist she has been merchandised very successfully through the wiles of capitalism.

Frida is so recognisably modern. She was outspoken, radical, passionate, sexually liberated — bisexual in some of her relationships — and boldly feminist in her presentation of her authentic self. Nothing is more emblematic of her self-affirmation and audacity than her renowned monobrow. Her eyebrows were strong and thick, but instead of plucking them into a more manageable line, she emphasised them by joining them together with a Revlon product called ‘Ebony’.

She had a fine growth of dark hair on her upper lip: rather than waxing or threading it away, as many of us do so anxiously, she flaunted it — even emphasising her moustache in her paintings of herself.

Her narcissism was unapologetic. Quite logically, she said she painted herself frequently because that was the subject she knew best. “I’ll paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.”

Frida Kahlo is bold, modern, and self-confident in her ‘selfie’ art, and yet she represents pain, sorrow, loss, disability, and the haunting presence of death. She mixed religious images with Communist revolutionary symbols and took upon herself a secularised crown of thorns.

In our world, which so emphasises comfort, convenience, choice and rights, Kahlo’s work, even when lushly invoking the exquisite folk costumes of her native Mexico, carries that disconcerting message: life is suffering.

She was born in Mexico City in 1907, the third of four daughters of a Mexican mother of mixed heritage, and a father who was a Jewish-Hungarian German speaker: thus her name, originally spelt ‘Frieda’, the German for ‘Peace’. Her father, a ‘cultured European’, was an accomplished photographer and significantly, she was his favourite child. She probably also inherited her visual sense from Guillermo Kahlo.

She had a bout of polio aged six, from which she recovered: yet it was a preparation for a lifelong struggle with disability. At 18, she was seriously injured in a tram accident coming home from school: her spine, ribs and collarbone were broken, her shoulder dislocated