Frida Kahlo’s singular image still circulates on 500-peso bank notes in Mexico. Travelers at the airport in Mexico City can buy a fragrance that borrows her name. Elsewhere, the painter’s visage — her striking eyebrows, her piercing stare — adorns tote bags, crew socks, insulated tumblers, you name it.
Seventy-one years after her death, Frida Kahlo remains arguably the most recognizable woman in Mexico, rivaled perhaps only by the Virgin of Guadalupe.
And every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to a pair of neighborhoods in Mexico City to visit Casa Azul, the bright-blue home where she was born and where she died, and the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, where she lived and worked with her husband, the painter Diego Rivera.
As of Saturday, Frida Kahlo devotees will have a new pilgrimage site to visit in Mexico City: Museo Casa Kahlo, also known as the red house, where the artist’s parents lived starting in 1930. Just three blocks from Casa Azul, the new museum centers on the artist’s family and her origins. It’s intended to be a prequel of sorts, adding intimate context and texture to what might otherwise feel like a well-known tale.
“We always wanted to tell these stories from the family’s side,” said Frida Hentschel Romeo, 35, a great-granddaughter of one of the artist’s sisters, “and show how, in the end, having a support network as unconditional as Frida had contributes to becoming extraordinary.”
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The post Frida Kahlo’s Prequel: A New Museum Shows Her Family Roots appeared first on New York Times.
