An hour before closing time, culminating my whirlwind one-day art tour focusing on Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, I arrived at La Casa Azul in Mexico City’s lovely barrio of Coyoacán.
Casa Azul, home of the Frida Kahlo Museum, is appropriately named, the outside a cobalt blue that is unrivaled in nature. Inside, the rooms were bathed in light any painter would envy.
Here, off and on, Frida lived with Diego Rivera. It is the same house where she was born, grew up and died. In 1958, Diego had donated the house in Frida’s honor.
Highlighting my subsequent visit to Casa Azul in late 2014 was a temporary exhibit of Kahlo’s leg corset, crutches and a prosthetic leg attached to a colorful boot that she decorated with Chinese dragons. Diego had not allowed these objects to be displayed until at least 50 years had passed since her death in 1954.
The medical devices revealed the full extent of Frida’s constant pain, resulting from polio as a child and by a metal bar that had impaled her when she was in a streetcar accident. She had decorated each object as if it were a canvas, providing further insight into her character.
