PHILADELPHIA — For contemporary audiences long familiar with Surrealism, Expressionism, confessional-, folk-, and Outsider-art, the self-portraits of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, which embrace all of these approaches, may be among some of the most compelling and accessible figure paintings made during the 20th century. I certainly was aware of the wide appeal of Kahlo’s work as I slowly maneuvered through the wall-to-wall crowds in the absorbing Kahlo retrospective, which opened recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — the show’s only East Coast venue.

Kahlo’s art has the therapeutic power both to slap and to console viewers simultaneously. And in Philadelphia it was not only the adults who were engrossed and staring wide-eyed at her paintings, as if to absorb their every possible meaning. Midway through the show, I overheard a girl, no older than 6 or 7, earnestly explain the work to her mother: “Well, Mom, you see,” she said in hushed and reverent tones, “I think she had some very bad experiences.” And the girl is right. And it is also true that Kahlo’s work, in its almost child-like symbolic simplicity — with its iconography of open wounds, bleeding hearts, necklaces of thorns, human-faced animals, threatening demons, angels, and bedridden self-portraits — speaks of illness, nightmares, love, dreams, birth, hate, and death with a kind of universal, if not visionary, voice that can be understood by adults and children alike. Kahlo’s paintings, embracing Mexican folklore, universal allegories, symbols, and mythology, are as frighteningly clear as a Romanesque “Last Judgment” tympanum.

Kahlo (1907–54) suffered from polio as a child, which gravely affected her right leg. At 18, she was horribly injured in a bus accident. Throughout her life, she was in nearly constant pain and bedridden or in a wheelchair (for comfort she turned to both drugs and alcohol). Kahlo endured numerous and frequent spinal surgeries, miscarriages, abortions, and an amputation of her leg — not to mention the infidelities of her husband (the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera), including his year-long affair with Frida’s younger sister Cristina. To retaliate, she had affairs of her own, including one with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Kahlo spent time in both Europe and America, where her work was collected and well-received, and she was made an honorary member of the Surrealists (a title she rightly rejected). In 1925, during recuperation, Kahlo began to paint — producing altogether about 200 easel pictures.

Generally, the life of the artist can, and should, remain separate from the life of the work. (One is no explanation or excuse for the successes or failings of the other.) In Kahlo’s case, however, the paintings, so entwined with the story of the artist, read like an open visual diary — if not an emotional and spiritual vivisection. Kahlo’s work is immediate, frank, symbolically and allegorically clear. Kahlo’s pictures often feel Surreal; but she did not twist or distort the world because it was fashionable to do so. Kahlo’s images appear to have arisen, or to have bled to the surface, or to have been exorcised. The images, far from concocted, are riveting confessions made seemingly under the duress of fever dreams.

Nearly all of Kahlo’s paintings are autobiographical and confessional; and in her work she makes it easy, if not essential, to empathize with Kahlo the woman, as well as with Kahlo the artist. The Philadelphia show embraces this fact, maybe a little too heavily. Organized by Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera, the Walker Art Center’s Elizabeth Carpenter, and, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michael Taylor and Emily Hage, the compact exhibition, which presents more photographs than paintings, is a portrait of the artist as much as it is a presentation of her art. Still, the 42 paintings on view (coupled with the often gorgeous photographs of the artist and her milieu) are well worth a trip to Philadelphia.

Kahlo was beautiful, more beautiful perhaps even than Salma Hayek, who played the artist in Julie Taymor’s biographical film. Kahlo’s is a commanding, stark, and beautiful face — built up out of rushing brushstrokes burning just beneath its polished, bronze surface. Her self-portraits are locked into place with defiantly pursed red lips and animated by a swooping, black, bird-like monobrow. That burning face stares out at us, holds us, like an ancient Fayum mummy portrait, from nearly every wall of the show. Sometimes Kahlo is accompanied by monkeys, cats, parrots, butterflies, Christian saints, Mexican gods and goddesses. Borrowing from the ex-voto tradition, in which painted images, often accompanied by words, are offered in gratitude to God or saints (the show includes some 19th-century originals), Kahlo makes offerings and scrawls text across her pictures. In her oeuvre she brings together Hieronymus Bosch, Henri Rousseau, pre-Columbian figurines, and medieval marginalia.

The metaphors and symbols embraced by Kahlo can at times verge on cliché: Her skies don’t rain, they cry; and her tears are stars, pearls, nails, or thorns. But Kahlo, without fail, holds fast to her seemingly first and almost child-like ideas — and makes them work wonders. Clearly articulated, Kahlo’s face is the flower or the rock amid a jungle of glowing, numinous leaves. She is androgynous. She anthropomorphizes everything. She is animal, woman, sacrificial lamb, and cloud. In one picture, her head, complete with horns, has the body of a running deer that, like that of St. Sebastian, is riddled with arrows. In another, she is bedridden and vomits up a volcanic eruption of butchered animals, human skulls, and viscera. In “The Dream” (1940), again bedridden, she floats through a pearly sky. Vein-like, tentacle-like, root-like, thorny vines claw and bind her; and a skeleton, an alter image, somewhere between Death and a reclining figure by Henry Moore, floats above her on the bed’s canopy.

In her self-portrait “The Broken Column” (1944), she stands in a desolate landscape, wrapped in one of her binding, therapeutic corsets. “The Broken Column” has a sadomasochistic overtone. Her chest is big and bold and bare; she is riddled with nails; white tears streak her face and, from chin to groin, she is eviscerated. Inside her body is a broken Corinthian column, which acts as a crumbling spine. She develops the metaphoric connections among wound, fissure, skeleton, classical column, body, landscape, the act of suffering, and the act of painting, which keeps her engaged and able to communicate. What keeps this picture alive is Kahlo’s ability to transform her symbols into metaphors; to make us believe in the fact of her painting — in the invention and necessity of her forms — rather than pity her. Kahlo gives us beauty and light — hope — amid the suffering. She may be a tortured soul, but she floats like an angel.

Kahlo’s paintings, which come from a place of crisis, are elegies and visions; but they are also simple facts told simply and compellingly. Kahlo exposes herself. Her paintings are wounds, self-inflicted, then stitched or cauterized. Kahlo understands that she cannot separate her life in art from her life in pain, and she presents us with the tragedy of that fact. In this sense, Kahlo is a saint or a savior delivering us to paradise, no less than a messenger or a demon offering us visions of hell.

Until May 18 (Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, Philadelphia, 215-763-8100).