La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Universe
Hilda Trujillo Soto

The History of a House

La Casa Azul [The Blue House] was the place where Frida Kahlo, the most renowned Latin American artist in the world, came into this world, lived, and took her last breath. The building, which dates to 1904, was not a large-scale construction. Today it has an 800 m2 building surrounded by property measuring 1200 m2. Diego and Frida filled it with color, folk art, and pre-Hispanic pieces to show their admiration for the peoples and cultures of Mexico.
 
The construction underwent two major modifications. When Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky lived with Diego and Frida in 1937, the property today occupied by the garden was purchased. In 1946 Diego Rivera asked Juan O’Gorman to build Frida’s studio.

The interior of the house has been maintained virtually intact. This was respected by the poet and the couple’s friend, Carlos Pellicer, who designed the museum display for the space after Frida’s death. Therefore, the house and its contents preserve that intimate atmosphere.

The Intense Life of an Artist

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón was born on July 6, 1907. She was the third of four daughters of Guillermo Kahlo—of Hungarian-German ancestry—and Matilde Calderón—originally from Oaxaca. Since she was a child, Frida was faced with sickness. At the age of six, she was struck with polio, but that did not stop her from eventually going to high school at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and to dream of devoting her life to Medicine. However, when she was 18, on September 17, 1925, she was in a tragic accident. The bus she was riding was hit by a tram. Badly injured and immobile for the first few months of her recovery, Frida took up painting.

She was in contact with numerous artists, including painter Diego Rivera, whom she wed in 1929. The couple lived in different places in Mexico and in other cities in the United States. After ten years of marriage, the couple divorced, but a year later, in 1940, Frida and the muralist remarried.

Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and an instructor at the National School of Painting and Sculpture known as La Esmeralda, where she trained a group of young painters who were referred to as “Los Fridos” in her honor. The artist held several exhibitions of her work, including those in New York (1938), Paris (1939), and Mexico City in the gallery of Lola Álvarez Bravo (1953).

In 1953 Frida had surgery to amputate her right leg. The artist passed away in the Casa Azul on July 13, 1954. Today, more than one hundred years since her birth, Kahlo’s works can now be found in collections in Mexico, Europe, and the United States.

A House that Speaks

Following Diego’s wishes, the Casa Azul was turned into a museum in 1958, four years after Frida Kahlo died. Currently it is among the most well attended museums in the country; every month it receives some twenty-three thousand visitors.

Each corner of the house bears witness to the things that Frida loved and the sources of her inspiration. The museum halls display a facsimile of her diary, as well as some of her best known paintings: Long Live Life (1954), Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (1954), Frida and the Caesarean (1931), and the polemic Still life (1942). Within the walls of the house are canvases by the couple’s painter friends and contemporaries, and the work Rivera did at the Academy of San Carlos and during his stay in Paris. 
 
The museum also houses her collection of clothing and jewelry that reflect Frida’s taste for indigenous garb and her admiration for Pre-Columbian cultures, so much a part of the image that marked her distinctive personality. The bedroom that Frida used in the daytime has the bed with the mirror on the canopy that her mother had made after the accident. Her brushes, books, and easel, a gift from Nelson Rockefeller, are still in the studio. The night bedroom houses her butterfly collection, a gift from Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi, in addition to the portrait that her friend and lover, photographer Nickolas Muray, did of her.

The house in Coyoacán speaks of the daily life of Frida and Diego. The kitchen and dining room show signs of the pleasure they took in entertaining the luminaries who visited them. The Casa Azul also reflects the couple’s love for folk art, such as the papier-mâché judas figures by Carmen Caballero and the sculptures by Mardonio Magaña. The ex-voto collection on the stairway is one of the most important in the country. Both painters also collected pieces of pre-Hispanic art. Many of these pieces decorate the interior and gardens, where Diego had a pyramid built to put his favorite pieces.

The Secrets of the Casa Azul

Before his death, Rivera established a trust—presided over by his friend and patron, Dolores Olmedo—to protect the Anahuacalli and Frida Kahlo museums. Diego asked Lola not to open certain spaces in the Casa Azul for a lapse of fifteen years. During her lifetime, Lola Olmedo respected the will of her friend. However, when she passed away in 2004, the Board of the Trust decided to open the spaces that had remained closed in the Casa Azul.  Therefore, thanks to the support of ADABI (Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas), in January 2007—months before the centennial of Frida’s birth—what came to light were more than 28,000 new documents, 5,800 photos, works, drawings, engravings, pieces of printed matter, and personal items, including almost 300 garments from Frida’s wardrobe.

The archives in the Casa Azul discovered a wide range of surprises, from the earrings that Picasso gave Frida and that were presumed to be lost to the photographic self-portraits of Guillermo Kahlo, the stencils of Diego’s first mural, and the drafts of the text Frida wrote about the muralist for an homage in his honor at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Today, the Casa Azul continues to reveal secrets about the prolific life of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Inside its walls, the visitor can better discover these larger-than-life personalities from the twentieth century.

Londres 247
Col. del Carmen
Coyoacán
c.p. 04000
Tel. 5554 5999
Fax. 5658 5778
relacionespublicas@museofridakahlo.org.mx

LINKS:
www.museoanahuacalli.org.mx
www.museodoloresolmedo.org.mx