The Sealed Room at the Casa Azul

The Casa Azul, the cobalt blue house at the corner of Londres and Allende streets in Coyoacán, has been a Frida Kahlo museum since 1958. Diego Rivera, by then a widower, donated the house to the nation on the condition that it be preserved as Frida had left it. He selected which rooms would be public, which objects would be displayed, and which would be locked away. He died the next year. The museum opened to visitors. For the next forty-seven years, the rooms Rivera had chosen were the rooms the public saw.

In 2004, a curatorial team led by Hilda Trujillo Soto opened a small upstairs bathroom, several wardrobes, and a sealed storage room that had not been entered since Rivera locked them in 1957. The contents had been packed and dated. Diego had not destroyed the things he set aside. He had simply not wanted them seen yet.

This article is about what was inside, and what it changed.

What Diego curated

The public Casa Azul that Rivera designed in 1958 was a sentimental shrine. Frida's pre-Hispanic ceramic collection on the kitchen shelves. Her papier-mâché Judas figures in the courtyard. Her bed with its mirror suspended overhead, the mirror her family had installed during her convalescence so she could paint herself. The kitchen with its yellow ceramic tile pattern reading FRIDA Y DIEGO 1929 1944. A wheelchair set in the studio, facing an unfinished portrait of Stalin on the easel.

Rivera's curation made Frida visible as a wife, a Mexican folk patriot, an invalid who painted from her bed, and a partner of Diego. It did not make her visible as a working artist with a separate practice, a chronic medical patient, or a woman with bisexual private life. Those Fridas were behind the sealed door.

The medical corsets

Frida Kahlo's spine was fractured in three places, her pelvis was broken, her right foot was crushed, and a metal handrail had pierced her abdomen and exited near her hip in the bus accident of September 17, 1925. She was seventeen. The injuries did not heal completely. From age eighteen until her death at forty-seven she wore some form of orthopaedic corset. The corsets were her constant companions. She had thirty of them at the end of her life.

The sealed room contained twenty-two. Plaster casts. Leather. Some of them painted by Frida while she was wearing them. A hammer and sickle on one. A foetus, presumably the third miscarriage she suffered in 1934, on another. A monkey, a hummingbird, the tehuana headdress she would draw on the corset over her shoulder. The corsets were her diary in plaster.

The museum now displays them in a dedicated gallery on the upper floor. They are some of the most affecting medical objects in any art museum. They are also self-portraits, painted in the moment of being worn.

The dresses

Frida Kahlo built her public costume around the Tehuana traditional dress of southern Mexico. The huipil, the embroidered blouse. The enagua, the long pleated skirt. The resplandor headdress with its lace halo. She wore the Tehuana dress because, in part, it concealed her right leg, which had been weakened by polio and then crushed in the accident. It was also a deliberate political statement, an alignment with indigenous Mexico against the European-style mestizo elite. Rivera, who never wore traditional dress himself, encouraged it.

The sealed wardrobe held three hundred outfits. Tehuana skirts in seven colours. Huipiles from Oaxaca and Chiapas. Pre-Hispanic style necklaces. Hand-embroidered shawls. The clothes had been ordered chronologically, with notes in Diego's handwriting pinned to several of them indicating where Frida had worn them.

In 2007 the museum opened a permanent exhibition titled "Appearances Can Be Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo." The collection has since travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, the V&A in London, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Frida's costume is now studied not as decoration but as a deliberate self-construction.

The letters

Three hundred personal letters were in the storage room. Letters to her mother. Letters from Diego, including correspondence during their year-long divorce in 1939 and their remarriage in 1940. Letters from her doctor Leo Eloesser, who treated her in San Francisco. Letters from the photographer Nickolas Muray, with whom she had a multi-year affair in the late 1930s. Letters from José Bartolí, a Catalan artist with whom she had a correspondence-only relationship through the 1940s. Letters from her sister Cristina, with whom she had a strained relationship after Cristina's affair with Diego in 1934.

The letters confirmed what biographers had already inferred about Frida's private life. They also gave it her own voice, which had been edited out of the Rivera-curated museum.

What the sealed room did

Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, and was largely forgotten outside Mexico until the late 1970s. Her global rediscovery, driven first by the feminist art history of the 1970s and then by Hayden Herrera's 1983 biography, was based on her paintings and her diary. The Casa Azul during that revival was a thin source. Diego had locked the most personal material away.

The 2004 opening changed that. The Casa Azul became one of the most thoroughly documented artist's homes in the world. The 2018 V&A exhibition "Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up" drew on the corsets, the dresses, and the cosmetic objects from the sealed room. The retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum the same year used the same archive.

Visitors to the Casa Azul today see two museums layered together. The 1958 Rivera curation in the downstairs rooms, sentimental, public, and partial. The 2004 curation upstairs, medical, intimate, and complete. Walking from one floor to the other is walking from the version of Frida her widower wanted preserved to the version she preserved for herself.