Home was at the heart of Frida Kahlo’s practice. The famed Mexican artist was raised in the suburb of Coyoacán, Mexico City, and was born, died and spent most of her life in a house built by her parents and later subsidised by her husband, Diego Rivera.
Now known as the Museo Frida Kahlo (though better recognised as the Casa Azul, thanks to a cobalt-blue paint job initiated once the newlyweds moved in) this sprawling property became a hub of both creative and convivial activity. Here, surrounded by friends, family and a menagerie of pets, the artist cultivated a domestic life that was just as distinct as the self-image she conveyed through her canvases and indigenous dress.
In Frida Kahlo at Home (Francis Lincoln) author Suzanne Barbezat discusses the significance of the artist’s chosen residence, bringing the relation to her personal and artistic life to the fore. Much is quite rightly made of the fact that Kahlo and her husband were obsessive collectors, who used their Coyoacán house as a backdrop to showcase their wares, thus exemplifying the pluralalist nature of a modern Mexico. They embraced both native heritage and European influences, placing ancient Mesoamerican ritual objects alongside Oaxacan ceramics and modern folk sculptures.
Throughout Kahlo’s life, Casa Azul underwent several renovations to accommodate both changes in lifestyle and a fluctuating array of guests. This included the introduction of a reinforced perimeter and entirely new wing once Leon Trotsky sought refuge among his sympathisers in 1937. Soon after, a large, stepped pyramid was erected in the expanded central garden, to showcase some of the finest statuary the couple had amassed – it still stands to this day.
Mosaics were also designed to surround a metre-high fountain, which include toads (Rivera’s beloved symbol), embedded conch shells and a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The kitchen, too, was adorned with declarations of love between the pair, articulated among Talavera tiles and a vibrant shade of canary yellow. It was filled with traditional Mexican implements such as metates (grinding stones) and enormous clay pots, which Kahlo used when preparing elaborate feasts for both her spouse and visitors.
While this home was undeniably the anchor of the Kahlo family, the artist needed only stroll down the street to visit the home both her parents and beloved older sister, Cristina, shared. Now the Museo Casa Kahlo (also known as Casa Roja), it features a set of kitchen murals attributed to the artist, and another extensive hoard of objects she collected throughout the country and much further afield, including East Asian dolls secured during her trips to the Chinatown districts in the USA. It seems she was just as devoted to bestowing gifts as she was adorning her own homestead.
Beyond carrying the markers of artistic and political intent, Casa Azul also functioned as a place of respite during Kahlo’s ongoing ill health. Indeed, it was here that she recovered from her life-changing accident aged 18, taking up painting as a therapeutic endeavour thanks to a bespoke, elevated easel. Unsurprisingly, the interiors of her home not only incubated the creation of her art, but also actively featured in her paintings.
In the current exhibition ‘Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon’ at Tate Modern one can see The Dream (The Bed) (1940). This lauded work depicts the canopied, colonial-style bedstead where the artist slumbered, but in this painted vision she is seemingly unaware of the skeletal memento mori that lies above her.
In less fantastical works such as Still Life (I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht) (1951), an assemblage of fruits surrounds a dog-shaped funerary statue from a Colima tomb, with references to national pride in the form of the Mexican flag. This was one of several works made in the latter years of her life, when she was practically housebound. As a result, she turned her eye to objects in her immediate vicinity as sources of compositional inspiration. The potent legacy of the house is also evident in photographs taken by Graciela Iturbide. She documented the bathroom that was sealed off by Rivera following his wife’s death, which he filled with artefacts and ephemera that remained unseen for 50 years.
With the image of the Casa Azul looming so large, it would be easy to forget that Kahlo occasionally lived elsewhere. Barbezat not only chronicles her time abroad (including an ill-fated stay with André Breton in Paris, where she was appalled by squalid conditions) but the completion of a new ‘twin house’ in the San Angel district, designed by architect Juan O’Gorman. He favoured Le Corbusier’s principles of functionalism, yet created a truly hostile environment for a disabled resident.
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Barbezat notes that Kahlo was so stultified by her austere living quarters (Rivera’s grander proportions were much more hospitable) that she returned to Casa Azul, retreating to familiar surroundings where she was no longer plagued by steep, unsteady steps and a strange isolation from her husband. For Kahlo, the ‘blue house’ would always be her true home, and to this day her ashes reside there. They sit in a pre-Columbian urn displayed on her dresser, interred within a domestic altar entirely of her own making.
‘Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon’ runs at Tate Modern, London until 3 January 2027. For more information visit tate.org.uk
