Casa Roja, a new Frida Kahlo museum focused on her family life, opens in Mexico City

Museo Casa Kahlo, besides called Casa Roja (Red House), has opened its doors arsenic a depository successful Mexico City, offering a caller model into Frida Kahlo’s intimate and household beingness beyond what the acquainted Casa Azul (Blue House) depicts. 

The museum, located conscionable steps distant from Casa Azul successful the Coyoacán neighborhood, was primitively the location of Frida Kahlo’s parents and aboriginal of her sister Cristina. Until conscionable 2 years ago, nonstop descendants of the Kahlo household lived there, wherever they catalogued and preserved idiosyncratic belongings earlier turning the spot into a museum.

Visitors tin research the Kahlo basement, a favourite refuge of Frida wherever she utilized a microscope to survey insects. (@Ancher_Politics/X)

The caller depository intends to broaden Kahlo’s representation beyond her creation and mythologized fame by revealing intimate details astir her close-knit family. 

According to Kahlo’s great-niece María Romero Kahlo, who took the Associated Press connected a tour, the household decided to overgarment the location reddish and support it that mode implicit the years, because, she said, it symbolizes “the bosom of the Kahlo family.” 

“You tin find a much quality attack to her story, to her origins,” the depository manager Adán García said, adding that visitors volition spot that down the large creator was a kid who “struggled with polio and who was fond of her begetter and her mother.”

To get a consciousness of Kahlo’s backstage life, visitors volition spot extended correspondence betwixt Frida and her family, including her sister and caregiver Cristina, whom Frida has described arsenic the different fractional of her heart. 

Casa Roja besides displays the enactment of her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a nonrecreational photographer. Visitors larn astir his accomplishment successful Mexico from his autochthonal Germany, arsenic good arsenic details astir his archetypal marriage, his 2 daughters, and however helium met Frida’s’s mother, Matilde Calderón. 

Personal items similar jewelry pieces worn by Kahlo successful pictures, embroidered dresses, her overgarment brushes and adjacent a microscope the creator utilized arsenic a kid to find insects, are displayed passim the house. 

The accumulation besides offers glimpses of the young Frida Kahlo’s creator awakening, including the embroidery of a tiny location she completed erstwhile she was five, drawings of distant landscapes copied from postcards, and what is thought to beryllium the lone murals painted by the artist.

According to María Romero Kahlo, visitors to the depository volition observe “the existent Frida. The 1 who cried, who laughed, who shared secrets with her sisters — and these walls volition uncover immoderate of them.” 

The depository is unfastened Wednesday done Monday, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

With reports from The Associated Press and El País