The artist decorated her famous house in Mexico without regard to logic or interior fashion, so the decor turned out to be as original as her work.
For its turquoise-painted facades, this house in the Cayocan metropolitan area of Mexico was nicknamed Casa Azul – “Blue House”. It was built by the artist’s father in the early 1900s: Frida was born here, lived for a long time, and died here. Since 1955, the house was converted into a museum, but the furnishings were left the same as they were during the life of the Mexican woman.
The colonial-style property has a simple layout with white walls and ten rooms furnished with brown wooden furniture. Most of the windows face the courtyard, so the rooms are always cool.
Initially, the house was intended to be one-story, but over time a second floor appeared with another bedroom and a spacious workshop – it was completed by the artist’s husband Diego Rivera.
Even the most outrageous personalities will not dare to call the interior ordinary. The artist subsequently diluted the home environment typical of her region, in which Frida grew up with her family, in her own way: she painted the doors and floors in bright colors, placed hand-painted ceramics on the shelves, and hung pagan masks and skeletons.
Moreover, every thing here is not accidental and absolutely accurately reflects something that happened in the artist’s life.
Like her husband, Frida was interested in ancient pre-Columbian culture, so artifacts like stone gods can be found in abundance not only indoors, but also outside, in the garden. Papier-mâché skeletons, another passion of Diego Rivera, also decorated the artist’s interior. Diego made many of them himself in continuation of the folk tradition, when similar men, or Judas, were burned on Easter Sunday as a sign of the destruction of evil forces.
There are also a lot of things that are not related to the work of the spouses and therefore no less strange: just look at the jar with embryos – an amulet designed to scare away uninvited guests. Unusual objects attracted the artist. “This, of course, is terrible – but it’s wonderful,” she said about such finds and willingly surrounded her home with them.
However, the paintings of the artist, her husband and their friends are not at all lost in this colorful environment. Maybe it’s the white walls, which Frida didn’t repaint, preserving the ideal backdrop for any creativity?
