General Knowledge
Which Mexican painter's Blue House is now her museum?
- Frida Kahlo
- Remedios Varo
- Maria Izquierdo
The answer is Frida Kahlo. In Coyoacan.
Frida Kahlo. La Casa Azul in Coyoacán is where she was born, where she spent much of her life, and where she died; Diego Rivera turned it over as a museum four years later, on condition that one room stay sealed. It stayed sealed for fifty years.
When it was opened in 2004 it held about 300 of her garments, thousands of photographs, letters, medicines and the plaster corsets she painted while wearing them. The clothes turned out to be an argument rather than a wardrobe: the long Tehuana skirts that read as national pride also concealed a leg withered by childhood polio and eventually amputated, and the embroidered huipils sat over a torso held together by a corset.
She was in a bus crash at eighteen that drove a handrail through her pelvis, and had somewhere over thirty operations afterwards. About a third of her roughly 143 paintings are self-portraits - she said she painted herself because she was so often alone and was the subject she knew best. In her lifetime she was largely known as Rivera's wife; the reversal, to the point where he is now often introduced as her husband, happened mostly in the 1980s.