Life at Frida Kahlo’s “Spiritual Home”

F or decades, the great 20th-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has captured the collective imagination, her work and persona becoming a symbol of strength and perseverance while her face seemed to enter the public domain, co-opted by merch culture and emblazoned on T-shirts and tote bags, tea towels and key rings. There’s not much that has not already been revealed or written about Kahlo: From illustrated children’s books and dense biographies to diaries and catalogues raisonnés, hundreds of titles explore her life and art with varying degrees of accuracy and grace. The Kahlo canon, if you will, is well-stocked, perhaps oversaturated, but a new book, “Casa Kahlo: Frida Kahlo’s Home and Sanctuary,” out this spring from Rizzoli Electa, proffers something novel: an attempt to protect and reclaim a more personal and private side of Kahlo’s story, all in the name of family.

Written and curated by Kahlo’s great-niece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, and her two daughters, Mara de Anda and Frida Hentschel, this is the first book to celebrate Casa Kahlo, a substantial terracotta-colored house in the Coyoacán area of Mexico City. Originally purchased in 1930 by Frida Kahlo’s parents, Matilde Calderón and Guillermo Kahlo, this became a family home for generations—most recently occupied by Romeo Kahlo. Now, Casa Kahlo has been re-imagined as a museum: an homage to Frida as an artist, sure, but also as a daughter, sister and aunt, her existence shaped deeply by those who came before her and contextualized by those who followed.

During the 1930s, when Kahlo lived just a few blocks away with her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, at Casa Azul—her childhood home—she would often visit her parents and three sisters at Casa Kahlo. It was an escape from the complexities of a blossoming career and an infamously volatile marriage. Over the years, Kahlo taught countless students in the garden of Casa Kahlo, and she maintained a small studio in the basement, which the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky used as an occasional hiding place during his political exile in the ’30s.

The book makes the argument that while Casa Azul was a public space—a gathering place for the creative class of the time—Casa Kahlo was Kahlo’s “spiritual home,” the place where she was really herself. “If you go to Casa Azul, you’ll find Frida’s story as Diego Rivera’s wife,” says Hentschel of the fabled cobalt-blue house that has operated as a museum since 1957, funded by a trust that Rivera created after Kahlo’s untimely death in 1954, at age 47. “That house was not his to give away, it was the family’s, and since the museum’s creation in the late ’50s, the family voice has always been secondary,” Hentschel adds. “What we want to do is bring Frida back to her tribe and make sure that everything that is made in her name or image carries the values that she represented: ‘Más amor, más familia, más México’ [more love, more family, more Mexico]. That’s what we’re trying to share, and this book actually gives us the voice to do that.”

T he book, much like Casa Kahlo itself, collates a trove of never-before seen documents, artworks, photographs and memorabilia: recipes from Kahlo’s mother’s cookbooks; postcards sent to friends; a bottle of Kahlo’s nail polish (Revlon’s “Plumb Beautiful,” a deep berry red); a collection of earrings that once punctuated her spectacular outfits. Its pages invite readers to find meaning in the ordinary as they consider the backdrop where the intimate minutiae of the everyday unfolded: Here is the kitchen where meals were cooked and shared, where Kahlo painted a mural of plants and birds; the bathroom where wounds were tended and lipstick applied; the bedrooms where rest was found and dreams encountered—a reminder that even extraordinary lives are composed of small, universal mundanities, often witnessed only by family.

Across its seven chapters, the comprehensive tome details Kahlo’s life in the context of both kin and kinship. It recounts how her father, who was an accomplished photographer and artist, sowed the seeds of creativity in his daughter. It reveals her inseparable relationship to her sister Cristina, 11 months younger, who became her lifelong confidant and carer. Romeo Kahlo, Cristina’s granddaughter, notes that much has been written about an alleged affair between her grandmother and Diego Rivera, a notorious womanizer—a rumor she has not been able to confirm. Instead she underscores the longevity of the sisters’ relationship, which only strengthened over time.

O ne chapter considers the evolution of Kahlo’s iconic, colorful style, which boldly toyed with notions of culture and gender; another highlights the many fruitful friendships and professional relationships that captured her sweet and sometimes vulnerable nature—she signs a 1933 letter written to Georgia O’Keeffe: “I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.” The book also chronicles Kahlo’s lasting effect on her students—including the painter and muralist Arturo Estrada Hernández, who became one of the most celebrated of Kahlo’s protégés, collectively known as “Los Fridos”—and how the ripples of fame continue to affect her family, even generations later. It is a complicated inheritance, but also often eventful: De Anda recalls that her grandmother, Isolda (Cristina Kahlo’s oldest daughter), called her one day in the late 1980s to tell her that someone named Madonna was ringing at her front door. The singer wanted to make a film about Frida Kahlo, so she had turned up unannounced at the doorstep of Frida’s closest living relative; de Anda, who was in sixth grade at the time, got an autograph and was thrilled. She admits that, to her preteen self, Madonna’s celebrity felt much more exciting than being the descendant of Frida Kahlo.

The appetite for Kahlo’s work and the curiosity surrounding her persona has hardly waned in the decades since that encounter. Her 1940 masterpiece “El sueño (La cama),” “The Dream (The Bed),” set new records at Replica Shoes ’s in November, selling for $54.7 million (or $55 million with fees), making it the most expensive artwork by a woman artist ever auctioned and breaking her own record. And 2026 alone sees several major venues consider Kahlo anew. “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” which opened at the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston in January and travels to the Tate Modern in London in June, traces Kahlo’s posthumous rise from “relatively unknown painter to global brand.” Meanwhile, in New York City, MoMA will open “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream” on March 21. The exhibition presents works by both artists as part of an installation designed by Jon Bausor, who is also the set and co-costume designer for “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” a magical-realist portrait of the creative couple from composer Gabriela Lena Frank and playwright Nilo Cruz debuting at the Metropolitan Opera in May.

A t home in Mexico and beyond, the Kahlo family is embarking on another legacy project, a creator platform and licensing program that would ensure that reproducing Kahlo’s likeness also gives back to the local community, capturing Kahlo’s passion for her country and its people. Hentschel and de Anda admit that it is a gargantuan task and part of that process is also acknowledging that the proliferation of her image is too widespread to be contained. “But we can invite people to do it the right way going forward,” says Hentschel, adding that the family is, of course, buoyed by Kahlo’s ability to transcend culture and demographic, to remain firmly ingrained in the mainstream consciousness, beloved both near and far—especially during a time of global tumult, there’s certainly beauty to be found in that.

“I think the interest in Frida only grows because people can see themselves in her: She had so many layers, and people can relate to her as a woman, as a person who had physical difficulties, as someone who had a troublesome relationship, as someone who endured and expressed herself through art in so many ways,” says Hentschel. “She is a symbol of courage, resilience and success, and I think that’s a story everybody would like to be associated with.”