A survey of 20th-century art would identify few individuals with as remarkable a story as Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), the Mexican painter whose life was one of those stranger-than-fiction phenomena. Already crippled by polio, the teenage Kahlo was impaled on a steel handrail in a trolley accident that shattered her spine. During a long rehabilitation she taught herself to paint and went on to produce acclaimed self-portraits depicting the agonizing pain that was her lifelong companion.

She was courted by Andre Breton and the Surrealists, whom she spurned. Bold, beautiful and bisexual, Kahlo married, divorced and remarried muralist Diego Rivera, and had affairs with the likes of Georgia O'Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated while staying with her in Mexico City.

It is an oft-repeated story that at her cremation the incinerator doors exploded open, sending Kahlo's blazing body flying into the air, her lips twisted in a mocking grin, her long hair describing a fiery orange halo.