Frida Kahlo’s declaration that she had read the history of her country and of nearly all nations, that she knew their class struggles and economic conflicts, and that she understood the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, comes from the diary she kept in the last decade of her life. In it she called those thinkers the pillars of a new communist world. The passage reveals a side of Kahlo often erased by the industry that has turned her face into a brand. Kahlo was a committed communist who saw her art, her life, and her suffering as bound up with the struggle of the working people of Mexico and the world.

Born in Coyoacán in 1907, Kahlo often gave her birth year as 1910 to align herself with the Mexican Revolution. She survived polio as a child, and at eighteen she was gravely injured in a bus accident that left her in pain for the rest of her life. Bedridden, she began to paint. She joined the Mexican Communist Party as a young woman and married the muralist Diego Rivera, and the two became central figures in a revolutionary cultural movement that celebrated Mexico’s Indigenous heritage and its working people. Their home, the Casa Azul, welcomed revolutionaries from around the world. In her paintings Kahlo turned her own body, her pain, and her Mexican identity into images of startling honesty and power.

In her final years, confined to a wheelchair, Kahlo painted works such as Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. Her last public act, days before her death in 1954, was to join a demonstration in Mexico City against the CIA-backed coup that had overthrown the democratic government of Guatemala. At her funeral, her coffin was draped in the flag of the Communist Party. This print reclaims Kahlo as she understood herself: a revolutionary artist who believed in a communist future and placed her art in service of the struggle against imperialism.