Twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo often commented, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." Some critics and biographers argue that such a reality was more a surreal nightmare than reality or dream, for many of Kahlo's two hundred paintings are self-portraits, dealing directly with her battle to survive a horrific accident when she was eighteen years old. As her biographer, Hayden Herrera, noted in Grove Art, the self-portraits "are a kind of exorcism by which she projected her anguish on to another Frida, in order to separate herself from pain and at the same time confirm her hold on reality." Her primitive style and elements of fantasy are immediately recognizable, as is her black-haired subject with the full eyebrows grown almost into one. Blending European influences such as surrealism with distinct Latin-American iconography, Kahlo was praised by surrealists such as Andre Breton, and by her husband...