The house known as Casa Azul was built in Coyoacán in 1904 by photographer Guillermo Kahlo and his wife Matilde Calderón. Their daughter Frida was born in 1907 and spent much of her childhood there. Coyoacán was then a town distinct from central Mexico City, with colonial streets, gardens, and strong local traditions. Frida contracted polio as a child and suffered catastrophic injuries in a streetcar-bus collision in 1925. During her long recovery, family rooms became places for medical care, reading, and the intensive self-portraiture through which she developed as an artist.

Frida married muralist Diego Rivera in 1929. Their relationship joined artistic collaboration, political commitment, infidelity, divorce, and remarriage. They lived at several addresses in Mexico and the United States, but Casa Azul remained an emotional center. After returning to Mexico, they filled the property with pre-Hispanic objects, devotional paintings, folk art, furniture, plants, and vivid color. The house became a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, and political activists rather than a private studio isolated from the cultural debates of post-revolutionary Mexico.

The exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova stayed at Casa Azul after arriving in Mexico in 1937, before moving to another Coyoacán house. Kahlo’s work increasingly transformed her body, family history, clothing, Indigenous and European ancestry, miscarriage, disability, and political life into tightly constructed images. In the 1940s, architect and painter Juan O’Gorman designed a new studio wing using volcanic stone and large windows. Its materials connected modern architecture with the lava landscape and collecting interests that Kahlo and Rivera shared.

Kahlo’s health declined through repeated surgery, pain, and the amputation of part of her right leg. She continued painting in the studio and from a decorated bed equipped with a mirror. Her first major solo exhibition in Mexico took place in 1953; she famously attended while lying in bed. Kahlo died at Casa Azul in July 1954. The rooms, garden, medical devices, clothing, paints, books, kitchenware, and personal collections preserve the physical setting in which art and daily life remained inseparable.

Rivera placed the house and collections in trust and requested that it become a museum. The Museo Frida Kahlo opened in 1958, a year after his death, and is administered through a trust associated with the Bank of Mexico. Previously sealed rooms were opened in 2004, revealing clothing, photographs, documents, medicines, and other material that expanded research into Kahlo’s life and disability. Casa Azul is not preserved exactly as it appeared on one day. It is a carefully maintained biographical museum whose architecture, reconstructed displays, archives, and intensely personal objects have helped shape Kahlo’s global reputation.