In Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography of Frida Kahlo, a black and white photograph taken in 1951 depicts the Mexican artist reclining in a hospital bed, holding an ornately decorated sugar skull with her name printed across its forehead.

In Mexico, sugar skulls (calaveras de azúcar) are created in honor of Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) to decorate graves and altars lit by flickering candles. Observed on November 1 and 2 -- All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on Christian calendars -- the tradition is actually a celebration of life marked by gatherings of friends and families in honor of deceased loved ones. No life story embodies that intimate intertwining of vitality and death more than Kahlo’s.

Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in 1907, the year of the Mexican Revolution, the artist now celebrated as a feminist icon drew much inspiration from physical suffering and brushes with death, including a childhood bout with polio that warped her right leg and foot.

Herrera captures another life-defining trauma with this description brought so vividly to life in the 2002 biopic directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek in an Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Kahlo, and Alfred Molina as her politically and creatively controversial artist husband, Diego Rivera:

“On September 17, 1925, when she was eighteen, the bus that took her home from school was rammed by a streetcar in Mexico City. She was literally impaled on a metal bar in the wreckage; her spine was fractured, her pelvis crushed, and one foot broken. From that day until her death, twenty-nine years later, she lived with pain and the constant threat of illness.”

While recovering in bed, she took up painting, laying the foundation for an intensely autobiographical style characterized by self-portraits in which she straddled the worlds of the living and the dead. In an announcement for the Frida Kahlo Centennial Exhibition, based in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center, organized in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Herrera captures that symbiosis:

"The most important aspect of Kahlo’s painting is, I believe, its emotional force. Looking at her self-portraits, you feel that she is speaking directly to you. Whatever it was that propelled her to paint herself again and again connects with the viewer on the deepest level. She painted her own image because she wanted to know herself and to make herself known. She wanted to be kept in mind. She also painted to dispel loneliness, to exorcise pain, and to strengthen her fragile hold on life."

Despite Kahlo’s often discomfiting confrontation with death in her work, her immersion in life’s most existential extremes allowed her a certain levity. Late in life, according to Herrera, she dressed cardboard skeletons in her own clothes and ordered that sugar skull emblazoned with her name.

“I tease and laugh at death,” Kahlo liked to say, “so that it won’t get the better of me.”

In the spring of 1953, that attitude manifested in a triumphant one-woman exhibition of her paintings at Lola Alvarez Bravo’s gallery in Mexico City’s fashionable Pink Zone, curated with Kahlo’s imminent death in mind.

Carried in by ambulance on a hospital stretcher, dressed in native costume and jewelry, she held court from her own four-poster bed, installed in the gallery for the show, surrounded by young fans and crippled old friends.

"A grinning skeleton Judas affixed to the underside of her bed’s mirror-lined canopy lay face down as if he were watching her..." Herrera writes. "Like the sugar skulls she loved, or the grinning Judas, Frida’s opening was as macabre as it was gay."

A lifetime of that juxtaposition makes hers the perfect incarnation to celebrate on this Day of the Dead.