Frida Kahlo

This 1933 painting of Frida Kahlo by Magda Pach hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

"Since the late 1970s Frida Kahlo has emerged as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the art of portraiture. Mexican artist Diego Rivera was an early supporter of her work, and the couple married in 1929. While Rivera worked on large-scale history murals, Kahlo's work was intimate in both scale and subject matter. These qualities stemmed partly from her lifelong health challenges after a streetcar accident that occurred when she was eighteen. Through her self-portraits she expressed her physical and emotional pain, as well as her fluid identity as a politically engaged, modern, cosmopolitan woman and heir to Mexico's indigenous traditions. For her championing of personal experience and identity as valid art subjects, Kahlo is a cultural icon for feminists, gays, and U.S. Latinos, among others." -- National Portrait Gallery