The blue house in Coyoacán where she was born, lived with Rivera, and died, kept as it was left.
La Casa Azul was built by Frida Kahlo’s father in 1904. She was born in it in 1907, lived in it with Diego Rivera for much of her marriage, and died in it in 1954 at 47.
Rivera gave it to the nation four years later on condition it opened as a museum, and it did in 1958.
What is in it
The house is arranged largely as it was lived in — the cobalt-blue walls, the courtyard garden with its pyramid of pre-Hispanic idols, the kitchen with its clay pots, and the dining room.
Her studio, with the easel Rockefeller gave her, her wheelchair at it, and her brushes.
Her bedroom, with the mirror fixed to the canopy of the four-poster so that she could paint herself while immobilised — she was in a bus crash at eighteen that broke her spine, pelvis and right leg in eleven places, and she painted from bed for long periods.
Her death mask on the bed, and the urn holding her ashes.
Paintings — a modest number, since most are elsewhere, but including Viva la Vida, painted eight days before she died, and Frida and the Caesarean.
The wardrobe
In 2004, fifty years after her death, a bathroom that Rivera had ordered sealed was opened. It contained around 300 items of her clothing, her jewellery, letters, medicines, and her prosthetic leg with a red boot.
A rotating selection is now displayed in Las Apariencias Engañan — Appearances Can Be Deceiving — including the plaster corsets she painted, and the Tehuana dresses she wore, which she chose partly because the long skirts concealed her leg and partly as a political statement about indigenous Mexico.
It is the most powerful part of the museum.
Trotsky
Leon Trotsky and his wife lived in the Casa Azul from 1937 after Rivera arranged their asylum in Mexico. He had an affair with Kahlo. He moved out in 1939 and was assassinated with an ice axe at his own house a few streets away in 1940.
The Museo Casa de León Trotsky on Río Churubusco is fifteen minutes’ walk and is worth adding — the study is preserved as it was, with the bullet holes from an earlier attempt led by Siqueiros still in the bedroom wall.
Practicalities
Book online in advance. Timed entry. Closed Mondays.
Photography requires a paid permit; without it phones must stay away.
Allow two hours including the queue at the entrance even with a booking.
Coyoacán around it is one of the best neighbourhoods in the city and the reason to make a half-day of it.
More Museums
Museo Nacional de Antropología
One of the great museums of the world, holding the Aztec Sun Stone and the whole of Mesoamerica, under a concrete umbrella.
Museo del Templo Mayor
The Aztec great temple, found by electricity workers in 1978 under the corner of the Zócalo, excavated and left open.
Museo Soumaya and Museo Jumex
A silver-scaled asymmetric tower built by the richest man in Latin America, free to enter, next door to a serious contemporary gallery.