The Blue House (casa Azul) is a must-see while visiting Mexico City to appreciate the most intimate universe of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. There she was born, lived, worked, and fell in love with fellow artist Diego Rivera. La Casa Azul wasn’t just her residence, it was the “artistic and aesthetic universe that nurtured Kahlo’s work,” explains art history expert Luis-Martín Lozano. Kahlo adorned Casa Azul with everything from ancient Aztec artifacts to native plants and Beaux Arts objets found at flea markets. Others show the artist existing in her own oasis, Rivera often by her side. Trotsky lived there for two years after his expulsion from Russia and, for a short period, so did Nobel Prize in Literature winner Octavio Paz. “Kahlo built an idyllic and aesthetic environment at the Casa Azul,” says Lozano. “It was a unique, cosmopolitan environment and a vision of universal culture.” With Kahlo’s almost mythical status as an artist, even almost 70 years after her death—for many visitors is an almost a spiritual experience.
The house was acquired by the Kahlo’s in 1905 when the then white structure was an example of constructive colonial typology: a central courtyard surrounded by rooms that limit in continuous facade with the street, though the composition of that building underwent many changes. Frida would use her childhood home, after getting married, as a residence and art studio, making modifications and expansions to the original project. Of the changes, the most striking work of art in itself was to paint the house an intense blue. Similar to a spiritual sky, the Blue House, evokes the sensation of transcendence.
Today, La Casa Azul is museum. Thousands flock there daily to wander around its ten rooms. Some have been retrofitted into gallery spaces, while others are made to appear the same as they were when Kahlo died in 1954. The Coyoacan mansion is also one of the most visited museums in Mexico City, along with the National Museum of Anthropology and the Tamayo Museum.
