La Casa Azul, Trotsky's House and Dolores Olmeda
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| Mexico |
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| Mexico City |
Coyoacán
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| Coyoacán |
La Casa Azul, The Frida Kahlo Museum
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| Frida Kahlo, owner of the world's most celebrated monobrow 'Fulan Chang and I', 1937 self-portrait, Museum of Modern Art, New York |
La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in the Colonia del Carmen district of Coyoacán was built in 1904 for German-Mexican photographer Guillermo Kahlo. Frida Kahlo, the third of his four daughters was born here in July 1907 (or perhaps at her maternal grandmother’s house nearby.)
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| La Casa Azul, The Frida Kahlo Museum, Coyoacán |
Frida Kahlo spent her childhood here and then lived here with her husband Diego Rivera from the late 30s until her death in 1954. Rivera died in 1958 and donated the house and contents as a museum in Frida’s honour. The inscription in the courtyard claiming Diego and Frida lived here 1929-54 invokes some poetic license, they lived in rural Mexico and the USA (1929-33) and in Mexico City’s San Ángel neighbourhood for much of the rest of the 30s.
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| Inscription, courtyard, La Casa Azul |
Like most local houses, La Casa Azul is built round a courtyard. The courtyard contains a garden, a collection of pre-Columbian artefacts and other sculptures.
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| In the courtyard, La Casa Azul |
Frida’s life was dogged by misfortune. At the age of six she contracted polio which left her right leg shorter and thinner than her left. In 1925, aged 18, she was returning from school when her bus was involved in an accident. She was impaled on an iron rail which fractured her pelvis, and she also broke several ribs and both legs. Three months later an investigation of her continuing back pain revealed displaced vertebrae. She was placed in a rigid corset and confined to bed for another three months.
Shelving her ambition to become a doctor, she had an easel constructed that allowed her to paint in bed and a mirror positioned to facilitate the first of many self-portraits. She began to think of art as more than a mere hobby.
Frida Kahlo’s paintings are in galleries all over the world but La Casa Azul retains a few, including her (unfinished) family portrait - not perhaps her best work.
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| Family portrait, Frida Kahlo, La Casa Azul |
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| Frieda y Diego Rivera (Thanks Wikipedia) The original is in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art |
[Kahlo was christened Magdalena Carmen Frida but always used her third name, spelling it Frieda until the late 1930s when (for understandable reasons) she felt a need to dissociate herself from her German heritage.]
Over the next couple of years Rivera worked on his mural ‘The History of Mexico’ which we had seen in the National Palace ( Mexico City (2)).
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| The History of Mexico (part). Diego Rivera, National Palace, Mexico City |
They spent 1931-33 mainly in the USA. The marriage was tempestuous, Rivera was a ‘self-confessed womaniser’ and Kahlo also had several affairs. Kahlo’s medical history meant it would be unwise or maybe impossible for her to have children. She had two abortions in the 1930s and a miscarriage later and dealt with the problems in her art. A curled foetus appears in many of her paintings, including her family portrait above.
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| Frieda and the Caesarean, 1931, La Casa Azul |
Frida left Diego in 1935 after discovering his affair with her younger sister Christina, but they were soon reconciled. In 1937 they persuaded the Mexican government to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky, and he and his wife moved into the Casa Azul in 1937. Trotsky and Frida Kahlo had an affair, probably among the reasons the Trotsky’s left in 1939.
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| Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, La Casa Azul |
The affair may also have been a major factor (or final straw) in Frida and Diego’s 1939 divorce. The divorce was not a success, they remarried in 1940.
Amid all this mayhem it almost surprising to find their Casa Azul kitchen so very normal – and very Mexican.
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| Kitchen, La Casa Azul |
Most of the remaining exhibits on the ground floor concern Frida's clothing. She favoured the Tehuana traditional dress of the Zapotec woman from Oaxaca. The flowing dresses covered up the physical imperfections caused by polio and her bus accident, but, equally importantly, her maternal grandfather had been a Zapotec, and their matriarchal society reflected her feminist ideals.
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| Frida Kahlo's dresses |
Always frail, her medical problems continued throughout her life - she had an appendectomy in the 1930s and two gangrenous toes were amputated at much the same time. In 1950 she had more back surgery, which resulted in an infection, after which she spent much of her time in a wheel-chair. Gangrene caused the amputation of her right leg in 1953.
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| Frida Kahlo's medical appliances, La Casa Azul |
Upstairs is her studio with her wheel-chair in front of her easel.
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| Frida Kahlo's studio with her last still life on the easel, La Casa Azul |
In 1954 bronchopneumonia led to a pulmonary embolism and Frida Kahlo died on the night of 12th of July aged only 47. Her death mask rests on her bed….
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| Frida Kahlo's death mask, La Casa Azul |
…while her ashes sit in a pre-Columbian urn on her dressing table.
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| Frida Kahlo's ashes in the urn on her dressing table. La Casa Azul |
During her life Kahlo was largely known as Diego Rivera’s wife. Her work was reassessed in the 1970s and she is now regarded as a serious artist in her own right. Whatever her quality as an artist, it is impossible not to admire the spirit and commitment with which she lived her life.
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| Frida Kahlo in her corset with hammer and cycle (and a foetus), La Casa Azul |
La Casa de Leon Trotsky
F drove us the short distance to the Leon Trotsky Museum on Avenida Vienna. He dropped us off and we waited for him, thinking he had gone to park. It was a surprisingly lengthy wait - he thought he was waiting for us to see the museum. We discovered the misunderstanding when he returned, sent him away again and entered the museum.
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| Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, Avenue Vienna, Coyoacán, Mexico City |
The display had some interesting photographs, but was mostly documents. We can read Russian, spelling out the words like a six-year-old but understanding nothing, and although our Spanish is better, it is not good.
We moved quickly through to the house. It is less forbidding seen from the garden but the watch-tower, top right, is an obvious reminder of Trotsky’s priorities.
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| The courtyard of the Trotsky House |
Leon Trotsky had been a leader of the Russian revolution and in 1918 was head of the Red Army. When Lenin died in 1924 Trotsky was his natural successor, but he was outmanoeuvred by Josef Stalin. Intolerant of all opposition Stalin side-lined and demoted Trotsky and in 1929 exiled him from the Soviet Union. As a political hot potato Trotsky was a largely unwelcome guest in Turkey, France and then Norway where he was placed under house arrest. The Norwegians were delighted when Mexico offered him asylum in 1937.
After spending two years at the Casa Azul, having an affair with Frida Kahlo and so falling out with Diego Rivera, he had to move. Knowing Stalin wanted him dead he needed a house with better security and moved to the Avenida Vienna house in March 1939. He lived and worked here with his family and entourage.
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| Trotsky's bedroom |
An ineffectual attempt at his murder in April 1939 led to increased security. The thickness of the doors shows how worried Trotsky was….
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| Security door and bullet holes, Casa de Trotsky, Coyoacán |
…and the bullet holes in the plaster show those worries were justified. In May 1940 painter and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros led an assault group comprised of men who had served under him in the Spanish Civil War and members of the Miner’s Union. They broke into the compound, sprayed the house with machine gun bullets, lobbed in some grenades and withdrew confident that nobody had survived. In fact, all survived uninjured except Trotsky’s grandson who was shot in the foot. That grandson, Vsevolod (later Esteban) Volkov, now in his 90s is still a trustee of the museum.
The Assassination of Leon Trotsky
Guile succeeded where brute force had failed. The American lover of long time NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, infiltrated Trotsky’s entourage as a secretary. Once she had his confidence, she introduced Mercader who posed as a Canadian sympathiser.
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| Sectretary's office, Trotsky's house, Coyoacán |
He entered Trotsky's study on the pretext of showing him a document. As Trotsky perused the document Mercader took an ice-axe from under his coat and struck Trotsky on the back of the head. Trotsky fought back, his bodyguards rushed in and overpowered Mercader. Trotsky was taken to hospital where he died the next day and Mercader was removed by the police. He was convicted of murder and served 20 years. On his release in 1961 the USSR awarded him the Order of Lenin and he lived in retirement in Cuba until his death in 1978.
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| Trotsky's study, where the fatal blow was struck, Coyacán |
Trotsky is buried in the garden of his Avenida Vienna house.
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| Trotsky's grave at his house in Coyoacán |
The Dolores Olmeda Museum
F was waiting outside when we emerged. He drove us to the Dolores Olmeda Museum, not far away but just outside the borders of Coyoacán.
The museum is housed in a hacienda with extensive gardens giving a feel of the countryside, although it is well within Mexico City’s urban sprawl.
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| Garden, Dolores Olmeda Museum |
Xoloitxcuintlu Dogs and Other Creatures
Outside there are geese, ducks and peacocks….
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| Peacock, Dolores Olmeda Museum |
…and Xoloitzcuintli dogs. ‘Xolos’ are a native Mexican breed and are generally (though not exclusively) hairless. They were favourites of Dolores Olmeda and appear in photos with, and paintings by, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. I find them extraordinarily ugly – but I am no dog lover.
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| Xoloitzcuintli dogs sleep beside a statue of one of themselves |
Dolores Olmeda's Diego Rivera Collection
Businesswoman Dolores Olmeda bought the property in 1962 with the intention of creating a museum. She donated her art collection and, after her death in 2002, funds for the museum's upkeep.
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| The Dolores Olmeda Museum, Mexico City |
Her collection is vast and covers pre-Columbian, colonial, folk, modern and contemporary art, though unsurprisingly she has the premier collection of the works of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Equally unremarkably she was Diego Rivera’s lover – he hardly met a woman who wasn’t.
We started in the Day of the Dead exhibition…
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| Day of the Dead, Dolores Olmeda Museum |
…though Diego and Frida get in there as well.
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| Diego and Frida at the Dolores Olmeda Museum |
The Diego Rivera collection includes preliminary drawings for the ‘History of Mexico’ mural.
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| Diego Rivera: preliminary drawing for the History of Mexico |
Rivera never seemed to decide on his preferred style. ‘History of Mexico’ has notes of socialist realism, while the nudes below are anything but.
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| Diego Rivera nudes, Dolores Olmeda Museum |
Other paintings flirt with late impressionism or resemble Picassos or Gaugins. And then there is ‘El Picador’ painted in 1909 which combines precise draughtsmanship with great sensitivity.
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| El Picador, Diego Rivera, 1909. Dolores Olmeda Museum |
Pablo O'Higgins
Finally, we had a look at the lithographs of Pablo O’Higgins, an American-Mexican artist, muralist and illustrator. Born Paul Higgins Stevenson in Salt Lake City in 1904, he became a student of Diego Rivera in 1924 and spent most of his working life in Mexico.
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| The Brickmakers, Pablo O'Higgins, Dolores Olmeda Museum |
Back to the City and Homewards
It was now two o’clock and time for our ‘free' lunch. F asked if we wanted it at the museum or at any of several restaurants he could recommend near our hotel. We decided to head back, thinking we would there about three.
The traffic had been bad in the morning, but it was much worse now. Roads were closed and intersections grid-locked; for long periods nobody went anywhere. Drivers accepted it all with resigned patience but we could see our lunch vanishing as the clock ticked past three, half past and then four. We were scheduled to leave for the airport at five.
We arrived, F insisted we still had time to eat and headed into the restaurant of a department store. Lynne & F ordered a spicy soup while I went for enchiladas and F explained the need for speed to a waitress in a folk dress. Lynne’s soup wasn’t spicy and my enchiladas were just tacos in a bland, sloppy, allegedly cheesy sauce. We had started with great expectations but had found Mexican food almost universally disappointing. This was not even that good but was eaten at such speed it hardly mattered.
Our airport transfer phoned to say he would not be able to pick us up any time soon so F volunteered to take us to the airport. ‘Twenty minutes normally,’ he said, ‘forty minutes today.’
I was sceptical but he was right and we were near enough on time for check-in. We were grateful to him and did not envy his long cross-town journey home.
The gate opened on time but were held there for ages and left an hour late. ‘Sorry for the delay,’ the senior steward said, ‘I could make excuses, but the simple truth is that some of the crew were stuck in traffic. Sorry.’
The remainder of our journey home was as planned.
[update: Our 'free' lunch turned out to be little recompense for the missed tour. However, on returning home we were pleased with the speed and happy with the size of the refund.]
South East from Mexico City
Part 2: Mexico City (2) Centro Historico and Teotihuacan
Part 3: Cholula, a Big Pyramid and Fresh Grasshoppers
Part 4: Puebla, Cinco de Mayo and Street Food
Part 5: Oaxaca (1): Monte Alban
Part 6: Oaxaca (2): Cooking a Mole
Part 7: San Cristóbal de las Casas. Chamula and Zinacantán
Part 8: The Sumidero Canyon and Chiapa de Corzo
Part 9: San Cristóbal to Palenque via Toniná
Part 10: Palenque and Back to Mexico City
Part 11: Mexico City (3) Kahlo, Rivera and Trotsky
THE END
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