President Bush and Sylvester Stallone are 59 today. Nancy Reagan is 84 and Merv Griffin 80.
Bill Haley (“Rock Around the Clock”) was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1981.
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born on this date in 1907 [she claimed 1910]. The following is from the obituary in The New York Times when Ms. Kahlo died in 1954:
Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera, the noted painter, was found dead in her home today. Her age was 44. She had been suffering from cancer for several years.
She also was a painter and also had been active in leftist causes. She made her last public appearance in a wheel chair at a meeting here in support of the now ousted regime of Communist- backed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala.
Frida Kahlo began painting in 1926 while obliged to lie in bed during convalescence from injuries suffered in a bus accident. Not long afterward she showed her work to Diego Rivera, who advised, “go on painting.” They were married in 1929, began living apart in 1939, were reunited in 1941.
Usually classed as a surrealist, the artist had no special explanation for her methods. She said only: “I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.” She gave one-woman shows in Mexico City, New York and elsewhere, and is said to have been the first woman artist to sell a picture to the Louvre.
Some of her pictures shocked beholders. One showed her with her hands cut off, a huge bleeding heart on the ground nearby, and on either side of her an empty dress. This was supposed to reveal how she felt when her husband went off alone on a trip. Another self-portrait presented the artist as a wounded deer, still carrying the shafts of nine arrows.