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50 free Frida Kahlo trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Frida Kahlo trivia quiz covers the life behind the self-portraits. It begins in Coyoacán with a German-born photographer father, the polio that shortened her leg, the elite preparatory school where she was one of 35 girls among 2,000 students, and the streetcar collision that ended her plans to be a doctor and started her painting from a bed with a mirror above it. From there it follows the marriage her parents called 'an elephant and a dove', the years in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, the retablo-style paintings of pain and miscarriage, André Breton's 'ribbon around a bomb', the New York show attended by Georgia O'Keeffe, the Paris disaster and the Louvre purchase, Trotsky's stay at La Casa Azul and their affair, the divorce and remarriage, the 28 corsets, the amputation, the opening night she attended in her four-poster bed, and the death that may not have been what the certificate said. It ends with Fridamania: the export ban, the 500-peso note, Salma Hayek, Coco and the 2025 auction record. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí quizzes next.
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Q 01Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, then a village on the outskirts of where?
Mexico City
She always claimed to have been born at La Casa Azul, though the registry says it was her grandmother's house nearby.
Q 02Kahlo's father Guillermo, who emigrated from Germany in 1891, worked as what?
A photographer
He taught her to retouch and colour photographs; his business suffered badly during the Mexican Revolution.
Q 03Kahlo said her father was Jewish. What did German genealogists find in 2006?
He was a Lutheran
She had claimed her paternal grandparents were Jews from Arad.
Q 04Which illness at age six left Kahlo's right leg shorter and thinner than her left?
Polio
The isolation made her reclusive but also her father's favourite; he encouraged her to play sports to recover strength.
Q 05At the National Preparatory School, Kahlo was one of how many girls among 2,000 students?
35
She studied natural sciences hoping to become a physician and ran with a rebellious clique called the Cachuchas.
Q 06Why did Kahlo claim to have been born on 7 July 1910 rather than 1907?
To make herself a 'daughter of the revolution' and hide her age
1910 was the year the Mexican Revolution began; she kept up the story all her life.
Q 07On 17 September 1925, Kahlo's bus was hit by what?
An electric streetcar
She and boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias had got off an earlier bus to look for an umbrella she had left behind.
Q 08In the accident, Kahlo was impaled through the pelvis by what?
An iron handrail
She described it as 'the way a sword pierces a bull'; her spine was broken in three places and her right leg in eleven.
Q 09How did Kahlo's mother help her paint while confined to bed after the accident?
She had a special easel made for use in bed
A mirror was fixed above it so Frida could see herself; her father lent his oil paints.
Q 10Complete Kahlo's explanation: 'I paint myself because I am often alone and…'
'I am the subject I know best'
Painting became her way of exploring identity and existence during the long recovery.
Q 11Kahlo first met Diego Rivera briefly in 1922 while he was doing what?
Painting a mural at her school
They were reintroduced at a Tina Modotti party in 1928, when she asked him to judge whether her paintings had talent.
Q 12Kahlo's parents described her marriage to Rivera as a union between what?
An elephant and a dove
He was 21 years older, tall and overweight; she was petite and fragile. They wed at Coyoacán town hall in August 1929.
Q 13Kahlo's favoured traditional dress came from the women of which region, reputed to be matriarchal?
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Q 21Kahlo had her own 1935 affair with which Japanese-American sculptor?
Isamu Noguchi
Both she and Rivera continued their infidelities after reconciling.
Q 22Which exiled revolutionary lived at La Casa Azul from January 1937 to April 1939?
Leon Trotsky
Kahlo and Rivera had petitioned for his asylum; she and Trotsky had a brief affair and she painted him a dedicated self-portrait.
Q 23Why was Kahlo arrested and held for two days in August 1940?
She was briefly suspected in Trotsky's assassination
The Tehuana outfit let her express feminist and anti-colonial ideals as well as her mestiza ancestry.
Q 14Kahlo's 1931 painting of horticulturist Luther Burbank depicted him as what?
A hybrid of human and plant
It dates from her productive six months in San Francisco, where she also painted the double portrait Frieda and Diego Rivera.
Q 15On arriving in Detroit in 1932, Kahlo told journalists what about herself and Rivera?
That she was the greater artist of the two
'Of course he does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.'
Q 16Kahlo's Detroit works such as Henry Ford Hospital adopted the format of what?
Retablos, small votive images on metal
She owned some 2,000 of these amateur ex-votos and hung them on the walls of La Casa Azul.
Q 17How did the Detroit News headline its 1933 interview with Kahlo?
'Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art'
None of her works were exhibited in the city.
Q 18Rivera was fired in 1933 from a mural commission at which New York landmark?
Rockefeller Center
He then painted for the New Workers School; Kahlo, homesick, made only one painting that year, My Dress Hangs There.
Q 19The couple's San Ángel house, designed by Juan O'Gorman, was two sections joined by what?
A bridge
Kahlo's half was blue, Rivera's pink and white; O'Gorman had studied under Le Corbusier.
Q 20Rivera's affair with which family member drove Kahlo out of the house in 1935?
Her younger sister Cristina
They reconciled later that year and Frida became a loving aunt to Cristina's children.
She knew the murderer; her sister Cristina was held with her.
Q 24Who made Kahlo's first significant sale in summer 1938, buying four paintings at $200 each?
Edward G. Robinson
The film star was also an art collector.
Q 25How did André Breton describe Kahlo's work when he met her in 1938?
'A ribbon around a bomb'
He claimed her as a Surrealist at once; she came to detest Surrealism as 'bourgeois art'.
Q 26Kahlo's first solo exhibition, in November 1938, was at whose Manhattan gallery?
Julien Levy's
Georgia O'Keeffe and Clare Boothe Luce attended; she sold half the 25 paintings despite the Depression.
Q 27Clare Boothe Luce commissioned Kahlo to paint which socialite, who had jumped to her death?
Dorothy Hale
Kahlo also had affairs with her gallerist and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. during her three months in New York.
Q 28In Paris in 1939, who helped Kahlo arrange a show after Breton left her paintings in customs?
Marcel Duchamp
The Renou et Colle gallery would show only two of her paintings; she called the Surrealists 'coocoo lunatics'.
Q 29Which Kahlo painting did the Louvre buy in 1939, making her the first Mexican artist in its collection?
The Frame
The Paris show lost money and she cancelled a planned London exhibition.
Q 30Which fashion designer created a dress inspired by Kahlo during her 1939 Paris visit?
Elsa Schiaparelli
Vogue Paris featured her too, and Picasso and Miró welcomed her warmly.