Visual art - Richard Cork feels humanised by Frida Kahlo's visceral paintings, showcased in a major retrospective

Frida Kahlo's work refuses to let us escape from the ghost of human mortality. The very first exhibit at Tate Modern is called Thinking of Death. It shows the 36-year-old artist with a skull painted on her forehead. It seems to be pressed deep into Kahlo's flesh. Beneath it, however, she remains undaunted.

The wonder is that such a frail woman, who never reached 50, managed to produce a large and impressive body of work. During her childhood in Mexico, Kahlo was assailed by polio. In 1925, as a teenager, she was embroiled in a disastrous accident. On a trip home from school, her bus was hit by a tram and a metal handrail pierced her stomach, "the way a sword pierces a bull". Her spine was fractured in three places and the impact also broke her pelvis, collarbone, ribs and leg.

Intelligent and resourceful, she abandoned her ambition to study medicine and decided instead to start painting. In this respect, the accident proved the making of her. Deciding that she was "bored as hell in bed", she taught herself to use brushes and employed a special easel that enabled her to paint while lying down.

At 19, she painted the first of many self-portraits. Wearing an elegant velvet dress, she seems as poised as a Renaissance princess, yet the nocturnal landscape behind her is turbulent. Soon afterwards, in 1927, in a portrait of Miguel N Lira, she includes a blanched skull with green eyes and a gaping, hungry mouth. This was the year when Kahlo met Diego Rivera.

Rivera had begun to emblazon public buildings in Mexico with heroic, politically committed murals extolling the country's history and revolutionary potential. Kahlo joined the Communist Party, and two years later they married. She celebrated their union in a large double portrait that openly acknowledges his dominance. Tall and portly, Rivera towers over his wife and grasps palette and brushes with an air of resolve. He was already renowned not only in Mexico but in the US as well.

In 1931, the year Kahlo painted this grave canvas, he was given the accolade of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the portrait, she stands beside him, swathed in traditional Mexican clothes and placing one hand on his. One can detect no sign of artist's equipment in her other hand, which pulls a red shawl across her dress in a defensive gesture. She had good reason to feel vulnerable. In 1930, Kahlo had needed to have an abortion; two years later she suffered a miscarriage in Detroit, where Rivera was executing a monumental mural scheme.

The trauma is dramatised in one of the first paintings where Kahlo reveals her full originality. Stranded on a blood-spattered bed, the weeping artist clasps her stomach and mourns her loss. The foetus floats above her, cross-legged and helpless. The loss of a second pregnancy may have made Kahlo lament her infertility, but it liberated her as a painter.

In 1932, she produced My Birth, an equally intense picture. Above the bed is an icon of a distraught Madonna; below it, a woman whose identity is hidden. She could be Kahlo's mother, who had recently died, or the artist. But there is no mistaking the dead child jutting out of the woman's vagina. It is Kahlo. Death prevails and all hope of new life is extinguished. Paintings would be her only creations, and she cast off any inhibitions about admitting the presence of death, never a taboo subject in Mexico.

A room full of still lifes shows how she explored the vulnerability of fruit, even while relishing their ripeness. The ground in one has been heaped with ripe red pitahayas, which Kahlo thought tasted "like a kiss blended of love and desire". But some have been cut open with surgical precision, and the Grim Reaper rests his bony frame on rocks nearby, scythe ready for more slicing.

Kahlo's self-portraits made her a celebrity, and she had no hesitation in using them to expose her most acute, lacerat- ing anguish. Her most alarming one was painted in 1939, when she briefly divorced Rivera. In The Two Fridas, a grand, im-posing canvas, the seated artist is shown duplicated and with her heart ripped out. However, her face remains proud, resolute and defiant. By exposing the full extent of her ordeals, she succeeded in surpassing Rivera, defining herself as a hypnotic explorer of the damaged, yet resilient self.

"Frida Kahlo" is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888) until 9 October

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