By THE NEW YORK TIMES

                MEXICO CITY, July 13 (AP)--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.

                A year ago, too weak to stand for more than ten minutes, she sat daily at her
                easel, declaring: "I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."