The largest collection of her work celebrates the bicentenary of Mexico’s independence and the centenary of its revolution at Bozar in Brussels. The 19 canvases, six drawings and one etching form a unique part of Frida Kahlo’s personal biography, in which she lays bare the most mentally and physically-taxing periods of her life.

In September of 1925, the 18-year-old Frida, studying to go to medical school, was seriously injured during a bus accident in Mexico City. Pierced by a pole, her pelvis, spine and right leg were shattered.

It wasn’t the first physical trauma she had faced – polio at the age of six had left her with a deformed right leg and a limp. But being bed-ridden in a plaster corset for months forced her to abandon thoughts of studying medicine, and, out of boredom as much as anything, she started painting on the plaster. Amongst the projection of fantastic photographs that accompany the collection, one shows her lying on her back straining with concentration to paint a hammer and sickle on the front of her corset – symbols of communism adopted in Russia only a few years before.

Her father, a photographer, brought her paints and canvas. With a mirror hanging above her bed, she began to observe herself. The accident left her unable to bear children and led to several miscarriages, anorexia and 32 torturous surgical operations over 30 years. A series of self portraits reflects these realities and makes up more than one-third of her entire body of work.

The world according to Kahlo

Walking into Frida Kahlo y su mundo (Friday Kahlo and Her World), you are at once thrown into the complexities of these moments. “El camion” (“The Bus”), a painting of a bus shelter, greets you as you enter the semi-darkness, with Frida sitting at the end of a bench alongside a crosssection of Mexican society, waiting for the bus. Painted four years after the accident, she shows herself in a dress that falls above her knees and a red scarf that flutters in the air around her neck – almost a snapshot of her last carefree moments.

An instant later, reflected in a vast mirror, you catch the penetrating gaze of an older Frida in her late 30s. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know about her several miscarriages and the infidelities of her husband at this point. She holds your stare, asserting her identity in traditional Mexican clothing and poised with her indigenous pets. This self-portrait painted in 1945 is a favourite of Bozar director Paul Dujardin. “You really feel her need to paint,” he says.

The collection also contains “La Columna Rota” (“The Broken Column”), one of her most famous paintings from 1944, when she was forced to spend five months in constant pain in a steel corset. She stands in a barren landscape, her hair down and her body split open, revealing a crumbling column that replaces her spine. Nails pierce her naked skin, but she looks straight ahead through her tears, challenging herself and us to examine her situation.

It glows in a pool of light and seems to hover in the air a few centimetres in front of the tall, slanted canvas wall. The collection’s seminal works are all hung from canvases like this one, propped up against Bozar’s own walls. Supported by a steel cross frame and backed by mirrors, you catch your reaction to the work just as Frida would have caught her own reaction. The presentation is no accident. Brussels architect Peter Swinnen was chosen specifically for the task of staging the collection. “We wanted to create a labyrinth for people to discover the work without all crowding around the same piece,” he tells me. Having seen the collection at its home – a rambling stone hacienda museum surrounded by lush gardens in the hot Mexican sun – “We didn’t want to transport Mexico here,” he says. “It felt incongruous. The idea was to make the work autonomous.”

The Olmedo collection

The collection comes from the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Xochimilco but originally belonged to Frida’s friend and neighbour Eduardo Morillo Safa, whose portrait is on display. Dolores was at school with Frida and also knew the artist Diego Rivera, whom Frida married in 1929.

As Dolores became a successful business woman, she started collecting Rivera’s work. However, Frida and Dolores fell out as teenagers. “People think my mother didn’t like Frida because of Rivera. It’s not true,” her son Carlos Phillips Olmedo tells me just before the exhibition’s opening. “My mother didn’t like Frida because of Alejandro Gómez Arias, her first boyfriend, who then also became Frida’s first boyfriend.” It seems the jilted Dolores avoided Frida, even though they were part of the same social circles, throughout their lives.

Rivera slept with other women whilst married to Frida, and she reciprocated with lovers of both sexes, including, most notably, Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky. But according to Carlos, Dolores and Rivera were only ever friends. “People say they were other things, but that’s not true,” he adds with a laugh. “My mother met Riviera in 1926. He painted her while she was engaged to my father. She didn’t see him again until 1954 when Frida died.”

After Frida’s death, Rivera persuaded Dolores of the importance of the Safa collection, and she bought 28 of the 30 or so pieces, later swapping two for pieces of Rivera’s work.

Carlos tells me that “La mascara de la locura” (“The Mask of Madness”) touches him profoundly “because she didn’t want to show herself crying,” he says. Painted in 1944, it shows Frida concealing her face behind a purple-haired mask – a caricature of a conflicted figure from Mexican history. “She wasn’t afraid to show herself crying in the other paintings; she wasn’t afraid of anything,” adds Carlos. But here, covering her face serves to unmask her vulnerability.

Frida Kahlo y su mundo
Until 18 April
Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23
Brussels
Daily admission restricted to avoid overcrowding;
advance booking advised
www.bozar.be