EXHIBITION: HOW FRIDA MADE HERSELF.

Not many art enthusiasts had known much about Frida Kahlo until the release of the film Frida in 2002, in which the Mexican actress Salma Hayek had magnificently played the title role. She was even nominated for the best actress Oscar award for her performance.

At the moment, the Galliera Museum of Paris, already reputed for its exhibitions on unusual and often eccentric themes, is running a show of Kahlo's work. The Mexican painter, who had lived a revolutionary life until her death at age 57, created original works that no critic has been able to connect with any traditionally known art movement.

While looking at Kahlo's paintings it is shocking to realise that her birth and her entire life were followed by tragedies, although she had the courage and talent to turn these disasters into unprecedented artistic creativities. Born with a unibrow and later, as she grew up, having a faint line of hair above her upper lip, she was, in addition, the surviving victim of a polio epidemic at age six.

Later, still a teenager, she would be involved in a disastrous traffic accident which gave her a limp for the rest of her relatively brief lifetime. Spending many days in a coma in a hospital, she famously declared on waking up, 'I am not dead yet and I have only one reason to go on living... painting!'

Globally celebrated Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's works and items of everyday use are on exhibit together for the first time in Paris

While still in her bed in the hospital and looking at the mirror in front of her, she would create a number of self portraits, never forgetting for a moment her unibrow and the hair on her upper lip.

When Diego Rivera, the most celebrated Mexican painter of the time, saw one of her...