Mexico Guide
Mexico City
Museo Frida Kahlo
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5.45pm
Price: M$45, ticket also valid for Museo Anahuacalli
Website: www.museofridakahlo.org
Address: Londres 247 at Allende
The Museo Frida Kahlo (Metro Coyoacán) is just a few minutes' walk from the centre of Coyoacán. The appropriately named Blue House was the Kahlo's family home and this is where Frida was born and spent most of her life, sporadically with husband Diego Rivera, who donated the house to the nation shortly after her death. It was during Frida and Diego's tenure here in the late 1930s that they played host to the newly arrived Leon Trotsky and his wife. Trotsky, ever fearful of assassins, apparently expressed his concern about the ease of access from a neighbouring property, and in a typically expansive gesture Diego simply bought the other house and combined the two. Continually at the centre of the capital's leftist bohemian life, Diego and Frida hosted a coterie of artist and intellectuals at this house – D.H. Lawrence visited frequently, though he had little political or artistic sympathy with Kahlo – or Trotsky, for that matter.
Several rooms have been set aside as galleries. The first features around twenty relatively minor (and less tortured) examples of Frida's work, from some of her early portraits through to her final work, Viva la Vida, a still life of sliced watermelons. She painted it in 1954, when the pain and trauma of her recent leg amputation had taken their toll on her painterly control, if not her spirit. Look too for a beautiful charcoal self-portrait from 1932 and the more political Marxism Gives Health to the Sick from 1954. A room full of Frida's signature tehuana dresses leads on to more paintings, including over a dozen by Rivera, such as Paisaje de la Quebrada, which shows a rock face at Acapulco into which Diego has painted his own face in purple. Alongside are several works by Velasco and Orozco, as well as a Klee and a Tanguy.