Above: Frida at work (©Gisèle Freund / IMEC / Fonds MCC)

Kahlo turned to painting after she was severely injured in a bus accident. Her fearless representations of the female form and her own suffering, coupled with her personal strength and independence in the early 20th century, are widely celebrated by the feminist art movement.

Brilliant and volatile, She and Rivera had a notoriously stormy relationship - they divorced and re-married in the same year - with a fiery creative dynamic at its heart.

"I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego," Kahlo once declared, upon discovering her husband had had an affair with her sister in 1935.

Theirs was a creatively stimulating but fiery union punctuated by infidelity on both parts. Kahlo was friends with the painters Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and had an affair with the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky (he and his wife lived with the couple for a while in Mexico, where Trotsky was later assassinated).

Rare and loving photos of Frida Kahlo capture the artist and feminist icon in the last years of her life