Frida Kahlo today has outshone her husband Diego Rivera in international renown. Neither, I feel, was truly a great artist: Rivera worked in various mediums, but his focus tended to be polemical and Marxist, while Kahlo painted herself and her inner world too studiedly and too often, and nobody can live with her paintings easily. But where Rivera’s appeal is strictly to his compatriots, Kahlo became a favourite of the Surrealists, then the feminists, then of people who need a sprinkling of the multicultural combined with the erotic in their art.

She is impossible to ignore once you’ve learned a little about her. In my own case, I bought Hayden Herrera’s Frida Kahlo: The Paintings at a time when my Mexican friend L was living in Toronto, and was totally captivated. Primarily, the book gave L, who had been a haunted enigma to me until then, a context. Both she and Kahlo had a similar sense of horror, and both refused to keep it politely hidden. They both knew and lived in Mexico City, and both had, or have, an artists’s sensibility with which to respond to it. L has perhaps had to fight harder against male dominance, while Kahlo decided to treat it with fiercely contemptuous humour. Despite her disabilities - the dreadful streetcar accident in her teens, compounded by either childhood polio or spina bifida, and the dozens of surgeries she underwent - she lived to know she had made an impact beyond Mexico. Even the constant betrayals of Rivera, the worst being with Kahlo’s own sister Christina, left her angry but not defeated. She loved Rivera, as he, in his way, loved her. Their story is compellingly dreadful.

Some years ago, L brought me a little altar with Frida Kahlo’s image, and on cold winter’s nights I light a candle before it. Women in Mexico today, I’m told, sometimes pray to her for healing from pain, physical and mental, though I just burn the candle to remind me of southern warmth.

But I also have a good-sized print of one of her self portraits in my office. I work for a large corporation, and I like the subversiveness of the image of a bisexual Stalinist being pinned on one of its walls. I can’t look at it too often, because even though it’s one of her softer ones - a painting from 1943, with three monkeys sitting around her or grasping her blouse - it does not reveal a sympathetic personality.

This is where I feel she lies to us. Any of the photographs, such as those by her sometime lover Nikolas Muray, or candid shots taken by friends, show a kinder face. The moustache she darkened in her self-portraits, or the joined eyebrows she overemphasised, are more subdued. She probably didn’t suffer fools well, but the warmth in her eyes, and the need for love that she masks in her paintings (while simultaneously declaring it in every tear and drop of blood) are transparently evident in the photos.

I find it odd that, Rivera’s incessant philandering apart, the thing that hurt her most was her inability to bear a child. Feminist icons, at least until recently, were meant to be their own women, but her miscarriages were among the most terrible ordeals she endured. She may have been a self-possessed woman, but she was still a Mexicana born a hundred years ago, and children were a necessary but missing part of her self-image.

The house she shared with Rivera is not far from the square in Coyoacan, and their spirits still haunt it - hers, perhaps, more than his. He is more easily found a few kilometres away at the museum dedicated explicitly to his work, where his painter’s jacket is left hanging over a chair on which he left it the day he became too ill to work any more.

But I also think, when I look at the bronze coyotes in the square (for which Coyoacan was anciently named), that they form a none-too-subtle reference to the famous local pair. The sparks flew when one of them, usually Rivera, went too far beyond their accepted boundaries. And also, they were both hunters, avid for living, and for life.

“The irritating Frida Kahlo,” a Canadian writer called her recently, and I understand why. Anyone that caught up in herself is clearly uncool by today’s standards, even though saying this was droll hypocrisy, given the utter self-absorption of Toronto arts writers. But whenever Mexico (or L) baffles me, I pull out that book of Herrera’s, and look at the paintings yet again.

The dark and the hurt are there. But the woman grabbed at whatever life and love her pained body offered her, and there is a singular courage in what she offered in her work. Mexico has guts, and so did Frida Kahlo.