Frida Kahlo: Public Image, Private Life. A Selection of Photographs and Letters, on view at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, reveals Frida’s public passion for life and her private suffering. The life and times of Frida Kahlo is a complicated story of love, tragedy, and unwavering beauty. The exhibition celebrates her 100th birthday.

The photographs in Frida Kahlo: Public Image, Private Life chronicle the artist’s quintessentially Mexican beauty. Starting as young as 18, most of them demonstrate the public enchantress that she was – striking, ageless, self-assured. Her hair is always parted down the middle, or intricately knotted and adorned with flowers or dyed fabric, creating a sea of illustrious black. Her ears weighted with earrings heavy and silver, her fingers embellished with rings that engulf her whole hand. She wears a brazen expression that is soft and motherly, yet somehow boasts her actively communist political views. She often looks like a movie star or a model in Mexican Vogue on an elaborate set arranged to feature this season’s Mexican-inspired designs. In fact, Frida was known to spend hours getting into costume in the morning, donning her favorite traditional Mexican rebozo, dresses, headpieces, jewelry, and gowns, especially when photographers were scheduled to make a visit. She kept her house – the famed La Casa Azul – similarly kept, painted with luxurious colors and decorated with indigenous Mexican artifacts. Even when she traveled, Frida brought her most priced objects with her.

So important were the objects she adored to the public’s consumption of her celebrity, both then and now, that the only glimpse we have of her truly personal life is found in those very objects. Handwritten letters from the States to her family back in Coyoacán, express her wild distaste for the treatment of Mexicans on the American side of the MexiCali border. She writes, "all the gringos are ugly," "the movie stars are worthless," and "Mexicans are working like mules," always lovingly signing her letters "Frieducha." Makes one wonder how she would have felt about the current border situation, brought on by a "gringo" who shares her birthday. But she was not always complaining. In one letter home, she describes her indisputable popularity among her husband’s flock of groupies – all the women dropped their jaws at the sight of her jade necklaces, and all the male painters wanted her to pose for them.

She was so gorgeous, possessing such an exotic splendor that she had many men panting. She man have been disfigured by her accident (and her subsequent surgeries). She may have worn baggy, utilitarian pants and smoked cigarettes endlessly. She may have had a unibrow. But the male intellectuals of her day just couldn’t get enough of her. Diego Rivera, her tumultuous husband of great fame, although he cheated on her ceaselessly and publicly, showed unusual love for her throughout her life. They were hildishly intimate one minute, furiously hostile the next. Isamu Noguchi, the distinguished Japanese-American sculptor, wrote love letters to her expressing his lusty affections (one is on display). Then there was Leon Trotsky. Perhaps the most famous of her and Diego’s many extramarital affairs, Frida’s romance with Trotsky began in 1937 when he sought political sanctuary from Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union.

Frida Kahlo: Public Image, Private Life begins with a masterpiece of the museum’s collection. Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky that serves as Frida’s ode to their relationship. Unlike many of her self-portraits that depict herself undergoing medical torment, in this painting Frida portrays herself standing on a stage-like wooden floor between white curtains dramatically tied back with heavy cords. Her feminine hands hold a small bouquet of wild flowers and a sheet of paper. The letter she holds is inscribed with an expression of love to the Russian revolutionary leader.

Renowned Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide recently chose to photograph Frida’s secluded bathroom quarters to unveil the mysteries surrounding the beloved character of art history. Sealed away for almost 50 years after Frida’s death, this room contained many objects of her brutal physical afflictions – therapeutic corsets, crutches, and a prosthetic leg – all flooded with Frida’s lifelong story of anguish.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is located at 1250 New York Avenue, N.W. and is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, 12 to 5 p.m. Frida Kahlo: Public Image, Private Life runs until October 14.

Shown: Nickolas Muray, Frida Kahlo with Idol #11, Coyoacán, Mexico, ca. 1940. Color carbon print; and Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1937. Oil on Masonite; images courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.