Museo Casa Kahlo, also called Casa Roja (Red House), has opened its doors as a museum in Mexico City, offering a new window into Frida Kahlo’s intimate and family life beyond what the familiar Casa Azul (Blue House) depicts. 

The museum, located just steps away from Casa Azul in the Coyoacán neighborhood, was originally the home of Frida Kahlo’s parents and later of her sister Cristina. Until just two years ago, direct descendants of the Kahlo family lived there, where they catalogued and preserved personal belongings before turning the property into a museum.

The new museum intends to broaden Kahlo’s image beyond her art and mythologized fame by revealing intimate details about her close-knit family. 

According to Kahlo’s great-niece María Romero Kahlo, who took the Associated Press on a tour, the family decided to paint the house red and keep it that way over the years, because, she said, it symbolizes “the heart of the Kahlo family.” 

“You can find a more human approach to her story, to her origins,” the museum director Adán García said, adding that visitors will see that behind the great artist was a child who “struggled with polio and who was fond of her father and her mother.”

To get a sense of Kahlo’s private life, visitors will see extensive correspondence between Frida and her family, including her sister and caregiver Cristina, whom Frida has described as the other half of her heart. 

Casa Roja also displays the work of her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a professional photographer. Visitors learn about his arrival in Mexico from his native Germany, as well as details about his first marriage, his two daughters, and how he met Frida’s’s mother, Matilde Calderón. 

Personal items like jewelry pieces worn by Kahlo in pictures, embroidered dresses, her paint brushes and even a microscope the artist used as a child to find insects, are displayed throughout the house. 

The exhibition also offers glimpses of the young Frida Kahlo’s artistic awakening, including the embroidery of a small house she completed when she was five, drawings of distant landscapes copied from postcards, and what is thought to be the only murals painted by the artist.

According to María Romero Kahlo, visitors to the museum will discover “the real Frida. The one who cried, who laughed, who shared secrets with her sisters — and these walls will reveal some of them.” 

The museum is open Wednesday through Monday, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

With reports from The Associated Press and El País