By Jim Farber
Wander the old residential district of Coyoacan on the southwest periphery of Mexico City and you will come to a one-story stucco structure at the corner of Londres and Allende Streets. Built like a fortress behind dark blue walls, this is the Museo Frida Kahlo.
The museum has rightly been described as one of the most extraordinary places in Mexico. But be advised, to pass through the wrought iron gates of the Casa Azul — the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera — is to enter a realm of the spirits.
Far from a traditional museum, Casa Azul is an illustrated biography told by moving through the rooms where it all happened: the jubilant parties on the junglelike patio with its menagerie of Frida's pet monkeys and parrots; arguments over Communist ideology; the parade of luminaries from French surrealist painters and Hollywood movie stars to the American industrial tycoon, Nelson Rockefeller and the exiled leader of the Russian Revolution with a price on his head, Leon Trotsky. And ruling over all of them all, this tiny woman with the fractured body dressed in Mexican finery who transformed her life into art — Frida Kahlo.
Since its inauguration in July 1958, the Museo Frida Kahlo (and its gardens) have displayed Frida and Diego's personal objects and paintings, their collections of folk art and Pre-Columbian sculpture, photos, documents, personal mementos, books and furnishings, as well as Frida's signature dresses — the ambience that inspired her art.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon, the third daughter of the Kahlo Calderon family, was born July 6, 1907. Precocious, outgoing and clearly a talented artist, her life changed in an instant on Sept. 17, 1925, when the bus in which she was riding was struck by a trolly car and pushed to the point that it split in half, causing a metal handrail to impale Kahlo through her pelvis.
She would spend weeks in the hospital and months in her bed at the Casa Azul sealed in a plaster cast. Throughout her life she underwent more than 70 operations that required her to wear the most extreme corsetry in order to support her spine. These harnesses (of leather and metal), along with the colorful dresses that concealed them, make up the museum's most painfully poignant exhibit.
Bittersweet is the long corridor with its tall windows overlooking the garden where Frida (by then forced to use a wheelchair) would sit and paint. Her easel holds one of her last paintings along with her brushes and the small mirror she relied on to render her self-portraits.
By the end of her life (with one leg partially amputated), she would lie on her mirror-topped bed, paint and receive visitors. She died on July 13, 1954, just days after her 47th birthday. Her bed and beautifully arranged death mask create an unforgettable culminating experience. Since her death, she has become an icon, the most famous female artist in the world. The Casa Azul is not so much a museum as a haunted time tunnel through her remarkable life.
The film "Frida," directed by Julie Taymor and starring Selma Hayek, was shot on location at the Casa Azul.
WHEN YOU GO
The Frida Kahlo Museum and timeline: museofridakahlo.org
For tickets: boletos.museofridakahlo.org.mx/en
Jim Farber is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The studio where Frida Kahlo painted is much as she left it in the Casa Azul in Mexico City. Photo courtesy of Jim Farber.
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