Drawn from Life

KAHLO: Self Portrait with Monkey, 1940

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's self-portraits are now reproduced on boxes, bags and chairs, but she can never be entirely domesticated her painful images still belong to her, and still have the power to shock. See them at "Frida Kahlo," a retrospective of nearly 90 works at London's Tate Modern until Oct. 9 (tel: [44-20] 7887 8008; www.tate.org.uk ). Her work has been labeled socialist, feminist and Surrealist but she defied every pigeonhole. What is certain is that her life played like a soap opera: at 18 she was horribly injured in a bus crash.

In 1929 she married muralist...

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