Frida Kahlo's life in the house

Childhood in Coyoacán

Frida Kahlo was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a photographer who had emigrated from Germany; her mother, Matilde Calderón y González, was of Indigenous and Spanish descent. Kahlo said she was born in the Casa Azul and that the year was 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began; the civil register gives 1907 and her grandmother's nearby house. Either way, the Blue House was her childhood home. At six she caught polio, which left her right leg thinner and shorter than the left.

The accident and the mirror

On 17 September 1925, a streetcar struck the bus she was riding. An iron handrail pierced her pelvis, and she suffered fractures to her spine, right leg and foot. Her plans to study medicine ended, and pain followed her for life. During the long recovery her mother had a special easel made so she could paint in bed, with a mirror placed above it so that she could paint herself. That bed and mirror are in her bedroom at the Casa Azul today, and they explain why so much of her work is self-portraiture.

Read next: Inside Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul

Diego Rivera

Kahlo married the painter Diego Rivera in a civil ceremony on 21 August 1929; the courtyard inscription dates their life in the house from that year. Rivera paid off the family mortgage on the house. The couple divorced in November 1939 and remarried in December 1940, and Rivera moved into the house in 1941, adding the volcanic-stone wing where her studio and bedroom moved. The house filled with folk art, ex-votos and pre-Hispanic pieces. Their friends and visitors, Mexican and foreign, came to the house for both painters.

A house full of Mexico

Kahlo's work drew on Mexicanidad, the nationalist movement that followed the Revolution, and on Mexican folk art, above all the small votive paintings called retablos. The house shows that taste in three dimensions. The couple collected hundreds of ex-votos, folk pottery from Metepec, Oaxaca, Tlaquepaque and Guanajuato, dinnerware from Tzintzuntzan and pre-Hispanic sculpture, which they set out on the stepped pyramid in the garden. Her Tehuana-style dresses, now on show, belong to the same story. Rivera carried the collecting further at Anahuacalli, his volcanic-stone museum for pre-Hispanic art.

Trotsky in the Blue House

From January 1937 to April 1939 the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova lived in the Casa Azul. The street windows were sealed with adobe bricks for his safety. The stay ended after a falling-out with Rivera over ideology, and the Trotskys moved to a house nearby in Coyoacán, now a museum of its own.

The last years

In April 1953 Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico, at the Galería Arte Contemporáneo. She arrived by ambulance and was carried on a stretcher to her bed for the opening. She died in the Casa Azul on 13 July 1954, aged 47, in an upstairs room. Her ashes rest in an urn in her bedroom. Rivera set up the trust that runs the house in 1957, and the museum opened in July 1958, with the poet Carlos Pellicer planning its displays.

Who this isn't for

This is a short life story for visitors, not a study of her art. Readers who want analysis of the paintings will find fuller accounts in biographies and in the museums that hold her major canvases. If you would rather meet the house without a story attached, skip ahead to the room-by-room guide.