When Frida Kahlo died, in 1954, she was known as the wife of Diego Rivera, Mexico’s great muralist. The second paragraph of the obituary that appeared in The New York Times began, “She also was a painter.”

Kahlo was discovered, at least by most Americans, in the 1990s, and today she is known for her provocative, disturbing work, as well as for her personal life, typified by a tempestuous 25-year on-and-off marriage to Rivera and countless affairs, including one with Leon Trotsky and several with women.

But The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo, a documentary airing this week on PBS, suggests that Kahlo’s sex life is not what draws people to her story. What is even more fascinating is the horrific bus accident that almost killed her (she was impaled through the abdomen by an iron rail), temporarily crippled her and left her in severe pain for the rest of her life. After which she embraced life with all her remaining strength.

“From someone who is ill, one doesn’t expect such an explosion of vitality,” Carlos Monsivais, the Mexican writer, says in the film. “That was Frida’s great scandal. Not what she said or who she slept with. But rather a sick person who refuses to resign herself to be covered with the veil of pity.”

Kahlo was born near Mexico City in 1907, the daughter of a German photographer and his Mexican, mostly Indian wife. Growing up in a largely Victorian culture, Kahlo was unorthodox, often dressing as a boy. She was 18 at the time of the bus accident and began painting during her long recuperation. Four years later, she married Rivera, 41, whom she idolized. He was unfaithful to her again and again, even having an affair with her sister Christina.

Rivera was more than 6 feet tall and weighed 300 pounds; Kahlo was 5 feet 3 and weighed less than 100 pounds. Many photographs suggest that Alfred Molina and Salma Hayek, who played the couple in Julie Taymor’s 2002 film Frida, were well cast.

The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo doesn’t have its subject’s energy or style, but it would be worth watching for its visual offerings alone. Intriguing home movies of Kahlo are interspersed with haunting full-screen images of her work, still photographs and comments by the likes of the author Carlos Fuentes, journalists, students of Rivera and Kahlo, one of Rivera’s assistants and an elderly German art collector who was, in his youth, Kahlo’s lover.

As Rivera’s fame increased, he and Kahlo began to travel. She was not impressed with San Francisco or its people. “I don’t like the gringos at all,” she said. “They’re very boring, and they’ve all got faces like unbaked rolls.”

But she enjoyed New York and came to love the Marx Brothers, malted milk and other symbols of American culture. She was in Detroit when she had a miscarriage, an experience that led her to use her personal tragedies in her work.

Kahlo was called a surrealist but rejected the label. “I never painted dreams,” she said. “I paint my own reality.”

ON TV

Program: The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo

With: Rita Moreno, narrator; Lila Downs (voice of Kahlo)

Airs: 11 p.m. Sunday on WPBT-Ch. 2