In honor of the 50th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s death, a special exhibit of 26 paintings by the fabled Mexican artist went on display at the Casa Azul (the Blue House)in Mexico City where she was born, lived, loved, worked and died.Kahlo passed away in 1955 at the age of 47. The paintings, from the Dolores Olmedo Museum, will remain in the permanent collection at the Casa Azul, making it the largest single trove of the artist’s work in existence.
Meanwhile, London’s famed Tate Modern Museum, beginning June 9 through Oct.9, will stage Britain’s first major respective of her work with 70 paintings as well as watercolors and drawings.
In New York, there she is again, when El Museo del Barrio, now through July 31, displays its Points of View Photography from its permanent collection – including photographs of Frida by her husband Diego Rivera, one by Fritz Henle, and another by Emma Lou Packard, a friend and assistant to Diego Rivera.
The Casa Azul in Mexico City’s Coyoacan district -- which she shared for 25 years with husband Diego Rivera (she was the third of his four wives) – remains the epicenter of her creative genius. Long a neglected gem among Mexico City museums, it has been brought into full flower by a recent surge of popularity in Kahlo's work and fascination with her life. The popular Salma Hayek movie, “Frida,” drew huge crowds to the museum doors, as many as 1,500 on a single weekend.
Located in the residential section of Coyoacan, on Londres and Allende streets, the museum immediately sweeps visitors into Kahlo's presence, which is everywhere. Painted a startling cobalt blue trimmed in red, the house is preserved much as it was during the periods when Kahlo and Rivera lived there, from their marriage in 1929 to her death in 1954. (They were divorced in 1939, only to remarry again the following year on the groom's 54th birthday.) Its interior is filed with personal possessions and folk art; carved Indian masks, brightly colored calaveras, retablos, and pre-Columbian statuary. A large unmarked Mayan urn contains Kahlo's ashes, behind glass now, beneath a death mask that hangs on the wall.
The exhibitions, museum officials note, have remained much the same in spite of several building renovations -- photographs, love letters, an address book opened to the New York address of a friend, financial ledgers, the four-poster bed in which Kahlo was born, a glass case filled with butterflies, and her collection of Japanese dolls. The brightly tiled kitchen is lined with Mexican ceramic ware; elsewhere are shelves of well-thumbed books on art, history, and politics. In the well-lighted studio a wheelchair is pulled up in front of an easel upon which rests an unfinished canvas of Joseph Stalin.
Roped-off sections in the museum's interior now keep the flow of visitors within specific areas. An electronic security system sounds an alarm if anyone wanders off or reaches beyond these restricted areas. A team of young female guides has replaced most of the surly guards who were previously posted throughout the museum. All students from the tourism school in Mexico City, the guides wear cobalt-blue uniforms matching the building's exterior and neck scarves depicting a Frida Kahlo painting. New are several machine-gun totting security guards wearing bullet proof flack jackets.
A ticket kiosk at the entrance has replaced the two welcoming 20-foot-tall papier-mache Judas figures, which were moved to the basement level. When Rivera gave the Kahlo residence to the Mexican government for use as a museum it was with the stipulation that admission would always be free. But the Bank of Mexico (which operates the Diego Rivera Fiduciary and financed the renovations) decided to charge admission to help with the building's maintenance. The spruced up museum now has a gift shop offering books, prints, posters and postcards, a facility notably missing in the past. On sale too are Frida Kahlo T-shirts and video cassettes. Also new is a library and a small coffee shop located at the basement level, off the back patio. Here visitors may peruse more than 20 different Frida Kahlo biographies, 10 on Diego Rivera, plus numerous other books, brochures and magazine articles about Mexican art and the celebrated couple.
Kahlo's father, Guillermo, a successful photographer, built the house for his family at the turn of the century. After their marriage, Rivera bought the land behind the house for a garden in which his young bride could work. A wall around the property was added years later, when the couples' fame began attracting crowds of the curious, anxious for a glimpse of them. Until then only a cactus fence had separated the grounds from public view. Even the streets of Coyoacan were unpaved until the early 1950s.
When they lived in the Blue House, as it was called, Casa Azul, Kahlo and Rivera formed the nucleus of contemporary art in Mexico, and around them, sparkling like fallout from a starburst, were some of the brightest and most creative personalities of the day.
Although the Blue House has lost some of its former intimacy to museumlike efficiency, it is still an enchanted place, filled with sunshine, pain and bright colors, the very essence of the artist herself.
It was a longtime interest in the work of Diego Rivera that brought me to the Frida Kahlo Museum for the first time. I had anticipated little more than a footnote of insight into Rivera's life. Yet I was overwhelmed by what I saw.
The museum was still virtually unknown in the early 1980s. In mounting frustration, the taxi driver drove up one street and down another before finally pulling up in front of a nondescript gray building that he insisted was the address I wanted. I entered what appeared to be a deserted elementary school cafeteria.
As I turned to leave I was started by a dark-haired woman coming toward me from the far side of the dimly lighted room. She was on crutches. My heart almost stopped -- she looked like Frida Kahlo herself. With a deep, throaty laugh, the woman apologized for having frightened me and directed me to my destination, a one-story stucco structure a few blocks away.
Crippled by polio as a child, Frida Kahlo was further handicapped in adolescence by a streetcar accident that shattered her hip and spine. As a result, the artist spent much of her life bedridden, on crutches, or in a wheelchair.
Despite critical acclaim during her lifetime -- and major shows in Mexico City, Paris and New York -- Kahlo's work fell into obscurity after her death. But it has resurfaced during the past few years. Exploded would be more apt.
Her work is everywhere today. Vanguard of an unprecedented worldwide boom in Latin American art, her tormented self-portraits (Frida wearing a crown of thorns to show her suffering; Frida, her exposed heart worn like a religious medal) today grace magazine covers as well as museum walls, films, books, videos and t.v. documentaries.
In Mexico City, I saw one sidewalk entrepreneur selling necklaces made from flattened bottle caps -- each disk embedded with a photo of Frida.
- Ron Butler is the author of DANCING ALONE IN MEXICO, a travel narrative published by the University of Arizona Press and now in its second printing. He lives in Tucson.
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