She was concerned about being able to portray her political convictions, stating that "I have a great restlessness about my paintings.

As treatment she had to wear a plaster corset which confined her to bed rest for the better part of three months. Her financial situation improved when she received a 5000-peso national prize for her painting Moses (1945) in 1946 and when The Two Fridas was purchased by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. She started to consider a career as a medical illustrator, as well, which would combine her interests in science and art.

To salvage what she could from her unhappy situation, Kahlo had to learn to keep still - so she began to paint.

Although the painting is fairly abstract, Kahlo’s soft modeling of her face shows her interest in realism.In 1941, her works were featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and, in the following year, she participated in two high-profile exhibitions in New York, the Twentieth-Century Portraits exhibition at the MoMA and the Surrealists' First Papers of Surrealism exhibition. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón [a] was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City.