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"I thought I was a surrealist too, but I never was. I've always painted my own reality, not my own dreams.
Reading Frida Kahlo's diary we can come across this and many other enlightening sentences which, in addition to investigating her work as an artist, help us to understand her spirit as a wife and woman at the beginning of the last century.
Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907, daughter of a German photographer and a rich Mexican woman. Her biography is internationally known and hundreds of books have been written about her. We recommend you to watch her movie "Frida" about her life, her stormy marriage with the artist Diego Rivera and her paintings.
Today, however, we will not talk about the life of the Mexican artist or her artworks: we will focus on her living space and how it gradually adapted to the lifestyle of the artist.
Since she was a child, Frida has always expressed a strong bond for her culture, inspired by Mexican customs and traditions. Harmony reigned in the house she wanted after her marriage to Diego. The artist was spending several hours painting in the enchanting inner courtyard, among peacocks and monkeys with which she loved to be surrounded. Her culture was expressed in terracotta vases, custodians of very tall cacti, decorative wooden objects and straw seats.
Following the numerous infidelities of her husband Frida went to live alone and then, begged by Diego, accept to return to live with him.
The two Rivera couple entrusted the very young architect Juan O'Gorman, at the age of 26, with the design of their home-studio, which at the time caused a sensation because "until then we had never seen a building in Mexico whose shape derived entirely from the function".
The result was a home-telling, the materialization of the couple, their union and their love. The house was designed in 1931 and finished in a year, the reality is that they are two studio houses joined together: a larger one for Diego and a smaller one, almost small and fragile as Frida herself.
The bridge that joins the two houses is more of a symbolic than a functional connection because "you have to go up through external stairs to the terrace, pass from one body to another exposed to the elements and then come, slowly descending into the spaces of the daily life of the other".
In her last years of life, however, Frida decided to return to her family home. She moved with Diego to the house where she was born, the Casa Azul, built by her father in 1904 and now a museum of the artist. It is a typical Mexican house full of terracotta objects and floral elements, but for Frida it became much more: often forced to bed because of her illness, she made her home her universe. Her biographer on this subject tells us: "It was as if her house were her dress... she decorated it, taking particular care of it and so her house became a sort of reflection of Frida herself.
