Frida Kahlo's house museum, Mexico City

Australia is presenting a wonder­ful exhib­ition, Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution (Jun-Sep 2023) in South Aust­ralia’s Art Gallery from Jacques and Natasha Gelman's collection of Mexican modernism. But what about Kahl­o’s own Mexican home, la Casa Azul/Blue House?

Visitors queuing to enter Frida Kahlo Museum

 

The house was built in 1904 with a French-inspired design in the Coyoacán neighbourhood, a rural and arty part of the Fed­eral District of Mexico City. Guillermo Kahlo completed the fam­ily home there before Matilde gave birth to their daughter Frida (1907-54).

Frida contracted polio at 6 and was bedridden for 9 months. The di­s­­ease caused her right leg to losing weight, limp­ing forever. So she wore long skirts for life! Her beloved fat­her encour­aged her to do sports to help her recover: so­ccer, swimm­ing, wrest­l­ing!

She attended Mexico City’s famous National Preparat­ory School in 1922 where only 35 female students were enrolled. This con­fid­ent lass first met and admired the famous Mexican Diego Riv­era who was working on the school’s assembly hall mural.

That year, Kahlo joined students who shared leftwing political views, loving the leader Alejandro Gomez Ar­ias. She and Ar­ias were on a bus when it collided with a tram and a steel handrail imp­al­ed Frida's hip. Her spine and pelvis were fractured, leaving endless pain. She had to stay in the Red Cross Hospital Mexico, then went home in a full-body cast for months. Her parents loved art, bought her br­ushes and paints, and made her a special bed-based easel. So she painted her first self-portrait in bed.

Frida's bed

with a mirror above, set into the canopy

Kahlo re-found Rivera in 1928, asking him to ev­al­uate her work and he encouraged her, professionally and rom­antically. Frida was young (21), dressy, physically handicapped and living with her parents. Rivera was middle-aged (42), totally famous and messy. Despite parental ob­jec­t­ion, Frida and Diego married in 1929 then moved around, based on Diego's work in the US.

In 1932, Kahlo painted more surrealistic components. In Henry Ford Hospital (1932) she was lying on a hospital bed naked, surr­ounded by a foetus, flow­er and pelvis, connect­ed by veins and floating. She  was pregnant but suf­fered a heart-breaking miscarr­iage from ear­lier injuries.

In 1933, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Rivera to paint a mural at Rockefeller Centre. Rivera included Vladimir Lenin, but Rockefel­ler had Lenin painted over and the couple quickly escaped to Mexico!

Frieda and Diego Rivera, married in 1929,

She painted this wedding portrait in 1931

The couple were keeping separate homes and studios for years, yet despite the many affairs, they always returned together. In 1937 they helped Leon (and wife) Trotsky, exiled rival of insane Soviet lead­er Joseph Stalin. The Riv­er­as welcomed the Trotskys into their Blue House where Frida and Leon had a brief affair. But when the Trot­skys relocated, Leon was tragically assassinated.

In 1938 Kahlo befriended Andre Breton, a Surreal­ist who helped her create a successful gallery exhibition in N.Y. In 1939 Kahlo was in­vited by Br­eton to Paris to exhib­it her work. There she was befriended artists Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and loved it.

The couple divorced in Nov 1939, then remarried in Dec 1940 when she showed her per­spective in Diego on My Mind (1940). Even then they had separate lives, both of them cheating. Kahlo painted some of her most famous paintings after her homecoming, in­clud­ing The Two Fridas (1939) and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace & Hummingbird (1940).

Be­fore Frida’s father Guill­ermo's death in 1941, the couple moved to the Blue House, and quickly adapted it. The Blue House was given a bigger garden and brighter colours, especially the blue painted walls seen today, enclosing the courtyard completely. Juan O’Gorman did the redesign work in 1946. To separate the new from the old, a stone wall divided the patio area in two, with a foun­tain, stepped pyr­amid, pre-Columbian artefacts, pool and their arch­aeological collect­ion. They built a sunny art studio and covered its white faç­ade in cob­alt blue paint.

Diagnosed with foot gan­­g­rene in 1950, Frida was bedridden for another 9 months, in hosp­ital for sur­g­eries. Still, she contin­ued to work in her par­ents’ home,  her biographical paintings revealing a new approach to exploring feminism. The Blue House welcomed intel­l­ectual and avant-garde act­ivity; the couple hos­ted a special array of stars from Mexico and abroad. The house together had some of her most famous works eg Portrait of My Father (1951). 

Some of Frida's old Mexican clothes

hanging in the Museum

She had a solo exhibition and despite the pain, Frida arrived by ambulance, welcomed the at­t­endees and opened the 1953 ceremony from bed. Months later, her right leg was partly amputated to stop the gangrene. Thus her last political outing was in 1954! 

They lived in the house for the rest of Kahlo's short life. At 47, Frida died in 1954 at her beloved Blue House from a pul­monary em­bolism. The Blue House physically displayed the col­our­ful life she left and rep­res­ented her admiration for the indigen­ous Mexic­ans. Cr­utches and med­icine displayed her years of suffering, plus toys, jewellery and cloth­ing. Was she a hoarder? Probably - after all, it took years to discover the 6,500 photos and c22,000 documents left in the Blue House, along with magazines, books, paintings, drawings etc.

Frida and Diego's kitchen

 
Frida and Diego had wanted to leave her house as a museum for all Mex­ic­ans to enjoy. So the widower paid out the mortgage, and paid off the health debts for them both. Rivera set up a foundation for to preserv­e the house and con­vert­ it to a Museum dedicated to her life and works. Its administrat­ion was assigned to a trust under the central Banco de México, and constit­uted by Rivera in 1957. He had the Museum formally dedicated to her life in 1958, including its gardens.

Kahlo gardens

Museo Frida Kahlo presents the house how it was in the 1950s. In addition to the couple’s works, the museum also collects their Mexican folk art and pre-Hispanic artefacts. There are ten rooms. On the ground floor is the kit­chen where her Mex­ican culture was really vis­ible. It was trad­it­ion­ally decorated with clay pots, in bright ind­ig­enous Mexican co­lours. The second room has Frida’s let­t­ers, notes and photos, while on the walls are Frida’s trade­mark pre-Hispanic neck­laces and folk dresses. The third room has Rivera’s art. The fourth room has cont­emporary paint­ings by Paul Klee, José María Vel­asco and others. The fifth room has monsters from Teotih­uacan cul­ture that Kahlo used in her art. Her top bedroom-studio was in the wing Rivera built, with a painted plaster corset worn to sup­port her damaged spine, and a mirror still facing down.

In the 1970s inter­est in her work and life was renewed due to fem­in­­ism; she was viewed as an icon of female creat­iv­­ity. In 1983, Hayd­en Herrera published the excellent Biography of Frida Kahlo. And from 1995, read The Diary of Frida Kah­lo:  and The Letters of Frida Kahlo. 

Today, the Blue House is one of the most visited museums in Mexico City.

Self portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird, 

www.FridaKahlo.org, 1940