Frida Kahlo Museum

The Frida Kahlo Museum is not, by its own account, a picture gallery: it holds only a small number of paintings by Frida and by Diego Rivera. Its real strength is as an intact domestic and material archive of the two of them, built from three overlapping collections that were never assembled with a museum in mind. The first is Rivera's own pre-Hispanic holdings, the second is the couple's collection of Mexican popular and folk art, in particular one of the country's more complete groups of votive paintings, and the third is Frida's own body, worked through her clothing, jewellery, medical devices and hand-painted corsets, which the museum treats as primary material on the same footing as the paintings. The 2004 discovery of her sealed wardrobe added a fourth, later layer to that material record, one that is still being catalogued.

The house was built in 1904 in Coyoacan's Colonia del Carmen, then a separate town south of Mexico City, by Frida Kahlo's father, the German-born photographer Guillermo Kahlo. Frida was born in it on 6 July 1907 and lived there as a child. After the September 1925 bus accident that fractured her spine and pelvis and left her in recurring pain for the rest of her life, she spent long periods confined to the house recovering. She married the muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, and from then on, through a divorce in 1939 and a remarriage the following year, the house on Calle Londres was the couple's main home in Mexico City. Rivera expanded it in 1941, adding the courtyard's stepped pyramid and enlarging the studio wing.

Frida Kahlo died in the house on 13 July 1954. Rivera outlived her by three years and used that time to turn the house into a museum in her name, establishing a trust under Banco de Mexico in 1957 to hold and administer it, alongside the Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum he was then building across the city to house his own pre-Hispanic collection. Their friend, the museographer and poet Carlos Pellicer, designed the first installation of rooms and objects. The Frida Kahlo Museum opened to the public in July 1958, its exterior painted the cobalt blue that gave it its popular name, La Casa Azul.

A fixed route leads visitors through around ten rooms on two floors. The ground floor holds a formal living room where the couple entertained visiting artists, political figures and intellectuals, galleries hung with paintings by Frida, by Rivera and by contemporaries of their circle, and the kitchen and dining room, kept in the traditional Mexican style the couple favoured: yellow and blue tile, hand-thrown cazuelas, and a recipe for Frida's mole sauce painted directly onto the kitchen wall. Papier-mache Judas figures, the effigies traditionally stuffed with firecrackers and burned in the days before Easter, hang from the dining-room ceiling, one of several places in the house where the couple's collecting of Mexican folk and popular art is on direct view rather than confined to a case.

The upper floor holds the more private rooms: Frida's bedroom, with the four-poster bed and canopy mirror that let her paint self-portraits while lying down, and her studio, added in Rivera's 1941 expansion and fitted later with an easel that Nelson Rockefeller had built for painters with limited mobility, positioned facing the wheelchair she used toward the end of her life. Diego Rivera kept a separate bedroom and workroom across the courtyard, shown with his own personal effects and, among them, drawings for the Anahuacalli museum. The courtyard garden itself, with its stepped pyramid, fountain and dense planting, is where the museum's small cafe sits, and is generally the calmest part of a visit that is otherwise dictated by crowd flow through comparatively small rooms.

Rivera was an obsessive collector of pre-Hispanic art, assembling more than sixty thousand objects over his lifetime, divided today between this house and the Anahuacalli museum, which alone displays about two thousand pieces at a time from a holding of more than forty-five thousand. What remains at Casa Azul includes a basalt sculpture of Chicomecoatl, the Mexica goddess of maize and fertility, jade beads and necklaces, and the urn that now holds Frida's ashes on the dresser in her bedroom.

The couple were also serious collectors of Mexican popular and folk art on their own account: more than 450 votive paintings, or ex-votos, small devotional works in which ordinary people gave thanks for surviving accidents or illness, described by the museum itself as one of the most complete such collections in the country. Frida is recorded as having preferred examples that showed beds, women and animals. Alongside the ex-votos are Judas figures, painted ceramics, a clay Tree of Life candelabra from Izucar de Matamoros, and Frida's own huipils, skirts and rebozos, garments chosen in part because their length let her conceal the asymmetry and the orthopaedic supports her injuries required. Her jewellery, prosthetic leg and the several plaster corsets she decorated by hand, one with a shattered column standing in for her spine, another marked with the hammer and sickle, sit alongside her medicine bottles as a direct record of thirty years of surgery and pain management run in parallel with the painting.

Diego Rivera asked that a bathroom adjoining Frida's bedroom, used to store her wardrobe and personal effects, be kept locked after her death. His instruction was honoured first by the trust and later by Dolores Olmedo, the couple's friend and patron who oversaw the museums for decades, and the room stayed sealed for exactly fifty years. It was finally opened in 2004, revealing around 300 items: traditional and everyday garments, jewellery, medicines and orthopaedic devices that had never been catalogued or seen since Frida's death. The Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako was given access to document the find using natural light, and the resulting photographs later formed the core of the exhibition Appearances Can Be Deceiving, which put a selection of the wardrobe on public view for the first time. The museum describes the 2004 discovery, which also turned up letters, magazines, books and photographs from the house's archive, as the largest single find in its history; more than 6,500 photographs from the wider archive have since been catalogued.

The Fideicomiso de los Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, the private trust under Banco de Mexico that Rivera set up in 1957, still administers both this museum and the Anahuacalli, and also holds the copyright to Frida Kahlo's work. That copyright interest put the trust at the centre of a public dispute in 2009 and 2010, when a couple running an antiques shop in San Miguel de Allende, Carlos and Leticia Noyola, announced a forthcoming book, Finding Frida Kahlo, built around an archive of paintings, letters, diaries and sketches they said had come down through a woodcarver who once worked for Rivera. A dozen Kahlo specialists, including the dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who had founded the Latin American art department at Sotheby's, and the art historian James Oles, signed a letter denouncing the material as fake; Oles, shown laboratory dating results the Noyolas had commissioned from a Chicago laboratory, said he did not consider the science relevant to his judgment. The trust filed a criminal complaint and sought to block publication. The Noyolas maintained the works were genuine and argued that the experts were protecting a sanitised, market-friendly version of Frida Kahlo rather than engaging with the personal archive they had found. Newsweek's account of the dispute, published in 2010, left the matter unresolved between the two camps, and no announcement since has settled which side was right.

The house underwent a structural restoration in 2009 and 2010, partly funded by the German government, that also went toward conserving roughly a third of the collection. The museum now draws on the order of 25,000 visitors a month, making it one of the most visited single-site house-museums in Mexico City, and ticketing has moved entirely online in response: there is no box office, and in high season same-day availability can run out before the doors open. A ticket to Casa Azul also covers entry to the Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum on the other side of Coyoacan, the pre-Hispanic collection Rivera built for himself, which most visitors treat as a separate trip rather than a same-day double booking given the distance between the two sites.

Visitors consistently describe the museum less as a picture gallery than as an intact house: the couple's own paintings are few, and what people remember afterward is the kitchen, the corsets, the bed and the garden rather than any single canvas. Nearly every account also mentions the same two frustrations, in some order: the length of the queue, and having to buy a timed ticket online weeks in advance because there is no box office at the door.