The Dali Museum displays the works of the most celebrated female artist of all time in Florida’s first solo Frida Kahlo exhibit

Frida Kahlo has been called one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and one of the most important figures in Mexican history. Kahlo, who abandoned her dreams to be a doctor after a tragic bus accident left her bedridden for months, took to painting.

“Following the accident she was kind of thrust into needing to do something. She lost the ability to study medicine, and she had never been trained formally as a painter, so I think she was really doing this as journaling or scrapbooking. It was something that she could do while she was mostly horizontal in bed,” says Peter Tush.

Tush is the curator of education at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, where an exhibit of more than 60 pieces of Kahlo’s work, including 15 original paintings – many of them among Kahlo’s own favorites – seven drawings, and more than 45 of her personal photographs are on display through April 17.

“Frida was a person who was born into the world in a way that actually seems to invite a lot of pain and a lot of suffering and a lot of difficulties,” Tush says. “But despite those situations she seemed to find opportunities to build upon her strength and persevere.”

Kahlo contracted polio at the age of six, bedridden for the first of many times in her life, it left her with permanent damage to her right leg and foot. Kahlo was impaled by a steel handrail in the bus accident, which occurred when she was 18, causing fractures to her spine and pelvis.

“I think ultimately at the end of the day, once you’ve gone through an exhibition or read through one of the books about her, it seems that she’s a person who was formed through very, very difficult circumstances and it’s a way that she handled the circumstances that has come to be what Frida’s remembered for and celebrated for by so many people,” Tush says.

Kahlo’s ability to stand true to her beliefs, whether political or social, has made her an icon across many marginalized groups; including feminists, Hispanics, Jews (Kahlo was half Jewish) and within the LGBTQ community.

“It was a well-known fact that Frida was bisexual,” Tush says. “In fact, the list of people she had sexual encounters with is pretty sensational.”

Kahlo had many lovers – among them, rumor has it, Josephine Baker and Georgia O’Keeffe – throughout her life, despite being married to world famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

“She was very sexually active and she was very much proud of her bisexuality,” Tush says. “It seemed as though Diego, who was quite the womanizer, was fine with her sexual conquests with women. He was jealous of anytime she was with a male.”

Kahlo, who would also often dress in traditional men’s clothes, used her painting to express her fluidity in sexuality and gender.

“There’s a painting of hers called ‘The Flower of Life’ from 1944, and it’s flower looking somewhat like a Poinsettia, but it’s clearly a figure and a vulva, many people see that as a self-portrait of her,” Tush says. “It’s beautiful and it seems to allude to O’Keeffe’s flower works, but it’s certainly not the same kind of design. I think the thing that appealed to her about flower and plants is the bisexuality of them, that they are both male and female simultaneously.”

“In a way she’s sort of presenting herself her as a complete package, a self-contained entity. Out of the 153 paintings that she did throughout her life over 80 of them were self-portraits,” he says.

Kahlo has said, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and I am the subject I know best.” Spending so much of her life in bed due to her bouts of illness and accidents, Kahlo’s time alone became this intimate experience of looking at the mirror and thinking about herself and who she was.

“Her story is that of two Frida’s,” Tush says. “There’s this constant duality in her work. She sees herself as broken yet persevering, as both European and indigenous Mexican, moving toward death but also passionately caught up in life and in sexuality. So I think that she’s constantly defining herself by those polar opposites, you know, broken body but also the body is something desirable that she’s fascinated by. She’s both heterosexual and homosexual; she’s both traditional and modern.”

The Kahlo exhibit seems like a perfect fit in The Dali says Tush. While Kahlo and Dali never met during their magnificent careers, Tush says there are many similarities between the two tragically beautiful artists.

“The similarities between Dali and Frida are not necessarily in their works, but more in their approach to life,” he says. “The first is the very flippant observation that they both have facial hair that has become iconic for both of them. Her unibrow is equal to Dali’s mustache in terms of recognition.”

While their works do tend to differ, Tush says that both Dali and Kahlo draw on their dreams for content in their work.

“Dali would argue that it’s the dreams that are amplified and he’s trying to unlock the unconscious,” Tush says. “For Frida, she would argue that her dreams are her reality that there’s not a separation, there’s no dividing line. Which is why she’s been so influential to the people in the realist style.”

Both Dali and Kahlo were praised by French surrealist André Breton. Breton, who called Kahlo’s work a “ribbon around a bomb,” arranged to have some of her pieces exhibited in Paris and Manhattan.

The Dali exhibit features some of Kahlo’s most striking and powerful pieces: “The Bus” from 1929, which depicts her on a bus believed to be moments before the accident, a surreal look at Frida after she had a miscarriage called “Hospital Henry Ford” from 1932 and “A Few Small Nips” from 1935.

“This painting is about a sex murderer,” Tush says. “There’s a gentleman standing over the corpse of a naked woman who’s probably a prostitute, who he just proceeded to stab many, many times on the painting, and there’s blood everywhere on the painting.”

The period that Kahlo painted “A Few Small Nips” corresponds with the time in her life when she discovered her husband and sister were having an affair.

“The piece was sort of this cathartic moment where she just exploded all of her rage at the situation onto the painting,” Tush says. “She even paints blood onto the frame around the canvas, and then, using a knife, puts punctures in the frame.”

One of Kahlo’s most well known pieces, 1944’s “The Broken Column,” was painted 10 years before her death and depicts her fading health.

“She couldn’t stand of her own volition, so she had to start wearing corsets,” Tush says. “They exasperated her pain and her life became this tortuous existence.”

“The Broken Column” is a self-portrait and depicts Kahlo in one of her corsets, her breasts exposed and her body ripped open. Her spine is replaced by a shattered column seen in western architecture. Her body is pierced with arrows.

“The iconic column replacing her spine is seen as stability in western culture,” Tush says. “Having it shattered shows the pain and suffering she is going through. The arrows all over her body reference the martyr Saint Sebastian. In western art, Saint Sebastian is always pierced with arrows and is usually a symbol for homosexuality. It’s Frida’s duality again; she’s presented herself both desirable and suffering at the same time.”

Frida and Doctor Juan Farill in her studio in the Casa Azul in front of her 1951 “Portrait of Doctor Farill,” 1951. Gisèle Freund. Vicente Wolf Photography Collection.

Frida Kahlo Autorretrato con changuito (Self Portrait with Small Monkey), 1945 Oil on composite board Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo La columna rota (The Broken Column), 1944 Oil on canvas Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo Retrato do Luther Burbank (Portrait of Luther Burbank), 1932 Oil on composite board Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo Retrato de Alicia Galant (Portrait of Alicia Galant), 1927 Oil on Canvas Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo, 1945 [seated next to a lithographic stone of Diego Rivera’s 1930 self-portrait, Casa Azul]. Photograph by Lola Álvarez Bravo, ©1995 Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation. Vicente Wolf Photography Collection.