A photo hangs on the wall – there are many – in which Frida Kahlo sunbathes.
The painter has leaned her head on the chest of her sister Cristina, her lips painted red, her hair taut with two blue bows.
They seem at peace on the roof of the New York hospital where they operated on the Mexican artist to fuse four lumbar vertebrae.
It is July 1946, Frida has just turned 39 and Cristina, 38, has left her children in Mexico in the care of the other two Kahlo sisters.
"They had such a close relationship," says Mara de Anda, the artist's great-grandniece, "that Frida would not have been able to survive [without them]."
Above him hangs another photograph taken by Nickolas Muray in Manhattan.
It is one of the walls of the house where that link was forged: “We call it the Red House because it is the heart of the Kahlo family.”
The Red House had belonged to the mother's family and is located in the south of Mexico City, very close to the Blue House, but it is more unknown than the residence where the artist lived with her parents and later with the muralist Diego Rivera. , and that today is a museum.
The family does not release the address for security and keeps it closed to the public.
However, they want it to be known that the artist's “refuge” was there, where she could also be “human”.
“When she got mad at Diego, she would come here.
She hid here and they protected her here, ”explains De Anda, 44 years old.
Her mother, Mara Romeo, 69 and great-niece of the Mexican painter, lived in that house in the Coyoacán neighborhood when she was little and returned to live there 20 years ago.
She there she learned to play the guitar and sing like her four sisters did.
“They were like muégano”,
Frida Kahlo and her sister Cristina, in New York, in 1946. COURTESY
The closest were Frida and Cristina: they were 11 months apart.
"You already know that you are half of my life," the painter wrote to her younger sister.
The relationship did not suffer even after the artist discovered, in 1935, that Cristina was having a relationship with Diego Rivera.
“My grandmother was always at the foot of the canyon.
She accompanied her to her operations, ”recalls Romeo.
The painter had to undergo 32 surgeries in her life.
When she was little she got polio and at 18 she had an accident while traveling on a bus in which her spine was broken and an iron pierced her abdomen.
"The one who supported Frida was Cristina because Diego, at the end of the day, was still painting outside," Romeo points out.
She was her friend, her confidant, her assistant, her driver.
That afternoon on the roof of the New York hospital, days after her vertebrae were welded, Frida Kahlo saw the river and "came down in a better mood," Cristina said in a letter to her sisters.
In the letters, the youngest of the four also unloaded: "It brings me sunny, because she has no one to take it out on but me, as always."
Cristina dressed her up, sang to her, bought her a music box to entertain her, according to what is read in those writings.
"Frida is fine, now she can stand up to two hours of standing and walking and sitting," she told them one day, and another day she told them: "They already gave Frida her special shoes, but they are terrible, because they look like a nun's." ”.
The address of the letters was always that of the Red House.
Luis Martín-Lozano, editor of
Frida Kahlo, complete pictorial work
(Taschen), describes that house as “an operations center”.
"Anything was around the corner from the Blue House," explains the historian.
When the artist was traveling or bedridden with severe pain, her sisters made sure that everything was in order in that house and even helped Rivera.
Martín-Lozano explains in a book dedicated to the bond between them,
El Círculo de los Afectos
, that Matilde, the eldest, kept the muralist under surveillance "so that he bathed and cut his nails" and Adriana, the second of the sisters, made him the cotton balls he needed to cure his eye.
Garden of the Red House of Frida Kahlo.CLAUDIA ARÉCHIGA
In the Red House – which was not always red, although the family does not know exactly when it was painted that color – Frida Kahlo also secretly received other men, such as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, or the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
“It's not like she couldn't do it at the Blue House.
Although Diego was very jealous, she was the owner of the house," says Martín-Lozano.
“I think she did it out of prudence.
The employees were very close, like family, and [Frida Kahlo] did not want them to see that she received a man there, ”she points out.
In the basement, a small place that the family does not show, but which is nothing more than a “little square”, Frida Kahlo painted, drew or wrote letters that she signed with the pseudonym of Mara.
They were addressed to the Catalan painter Josep Bartolí, who was also her lover.
"That's a beautiful story about my name," says Mara Romeo, who recounts: "In 1938 a movie called
Tarzan and the Sirens
came out .
The main character was a mermaid named Mara.
Every full moon she grew legs, she came out of the sea and went to look for a prey to procreate.
When she sees her, Frida adopts the pseudonym of Mara”.
Romeo did not meet Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954 at the age of 47, but the painter did meet her.
“You are the most beautiful girl I have ever met in my life”, she left her written in a letter, as she remembers her great-niece.
“She was a sweet, loving person,” she adds.
This can be seen in the letters that she wrote to Isolda, Cristina's daughter and Romeo's mother, every time she went on a trip.
“Even if I don't write to you, you do so so that life in these gringo cities becomes less burdensome.
Your uncle Diego sends you lots of kisses.
(...) Send me a portrait of yourself, I love your drawings”, he wrote from the Alexander Hamilton hotel in 1940, with the signature “Aunt Frida”.
Personal care items used by Frida Kahlo.CLAUDIA ARÉCHIGA
a virtual visit
The rooms facing the street are now the offices of the Kahlo Family Foundation, created in 2021. The rest of the house is inaccessible to anyone who is not from the family or close because it is currently Romeo's home.
In those spaces, according to mother and daughter, there are no references to the artist.
"We don't live with images of Frida, just these, for you to see," De Anda says, pointing around her.
There are fragrances, enamels and pillboxes that belonged to the painter;
photos of Trotsky or Cristina;
prehispanic pieces;
votive offerings and photos taken by Frida's father, Guillermo Kahlo, who was a photographer for the Government of Porfirio Díaz.
There is also an original fabric made by the artist and replicas of her self-portraits.
There have been Madonna or the Mexican actress Salma Hayek, who played Frida Kahlo in the 2002 film directed by Julie Taymor.
Also the singer Katy Perry.
"She's a superfan," De Anda says, "we do welcome people who are fans, of course."
Together with the company ezel.life, the family is preparing a recreation of the house in the metaverse "to give people the chance to get to know the Red House and Frida's intimacy."
From a brick extracted from the foundations of the building, the house will be duplicated in a virtual universe.
A room in the Red House of Frida Kahlo that functions as an office for the Kahlo Family Foundation.CLAUDIA ARÉCHIGA
"In this house you can see not the artist Frida, but the human Frida," Romeo points out.
His daughter adds: “A little is unknown and today, as a family, we want to make it known.
Maybe you don't identify with her painting, but you do identify with her heart”.
The Kahlos received Republicans who fled from Spain during the Civil War in these rooms and also gave a pantry to single mothers.
“Frida and Cristina gave a basic pantry to more than 500 women: a kilo of sugar, a kilo of beans, a liter of oil…”, says De Anda.
On Saturdays, in those years, the family prepared quesadillas of huitlacoche or pumpkin flower and the gate was opened.
The legal battle for the rights of the Frida Kahlo brand
Frida Kahlo's family – Isolda Pinedo, the painter's niece, and her daughter, Mara Romeo – signed an agreement in 2005 by which they contributed the Frida Kahlo brand to a company based in Panama.
The Frida Kahlo Corporation, which was created that same year, is 51% owned by a Venezuelan businessman and 49% by the family.
"It was formed so that the management and the results were shared," explains José María Mallol, Mara Romeo's lawyer.
Since 2008, however, the family has tried to regain ownership of the brand because it considers that "the other party has systematically breached" the agreement.
The legal representative of the majority of Frida Kahlo Corporation, on the other hand, is blunt: "The brands are ours and they tried to take them away from us."
The precautionary measures filed by the family have not borne fruit so far.
The new legal team led by Mallol recently filed a lawsuit that has not yet been resolved.
The parties, meanwhile, accuse each other of "trying to fool people."
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