Episode Details

Frida Kahlo has become one of the most commodified images in art history — her face on tote bags, refrigerator magnets, and Halloween costumes. But the real Kahlo was far more dangerous than the merchandise suggests: a communist revolutionary, a bisexual provocateur, a woman who turned catastrophic physical suffering into some of the most viscerally honest paintings ever made.

This episode recovers the radical Kahlo from the commercial myth, tracing her near-fatal bus accident, her volcanic marriage to Diego Rivera, her political activism, and the art that transformed personal agony into universal power.

• The bus accident that shattered Kahlo's body and launched her career as a painter
• Her turbulent marriage to Diego Rivera — the affairs, reunions, and creative rivalry
• Kahlo's communist politics and her affair with Leon Trotsky
• How her unflinching self-portraits redefined what art could say about pain, identity, and the body