Moments from Museo Frida Kahlo

Known universally as the Casa Azul, the cobalt-blue house in Coyoacan where Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 and died in 1954 was also, for much of that time, the home she shared with Diego Rivera, and it opened as a museum in 1958 at Rivera's own instruction, a wish he made shortly before his death that the house and its contents be preserved essentially as they were. Because it was a lived-in home rather than a purpose-built gallery, the museum retains a genuinely intimate, domestic quality rare among artist house-museums, her studio, her four-poster bed fitted with a mirror on the canopy so she could paint self-portraits while bedridden, and Rivera's own collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts scattered through the rooms.

Book timed tickets well in advance, the Casa Azul is consistently one of the most in-demand museum tickets in Mexico City and routinely sells out days ahead. Spend real time in the garden courtyard as well as the interior rooms, it was as central to Kahlo's daily life and her paintings, full of Mexican flora and her collection of pet monkeys and birds, as any single room inside. The house rewards reading it as biography rather than a conventional art collection, this is where her physical suffering, her marriage, and her political convictions all played out in the same rooms as her painting.