Art by Frida Kahlo

At 18, Kahlo was in a bus accident so severe, a steel handrail impaled her pelvis, that she spent much of the rest of her life in and out of medical treatment and near-constant physical pain, a fact that shows up directly and repeatedly in her paintings. She married muralist Diego Rivera twice, divorcing and remarrying him within a single year, and lived much of her adult life at Casa Azul, the blue house in Coyoacán that's now a museum. Her self-portraits, often incorporating Mexican folk imagery, Tehuana dress, and unflinching depictions of miscarriage, surgery, and heartbreak, turned deeply personal suffering into some of the most widely reproduced images in 20th-century art.