The two houses of Kahlo

If Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul and the Dolores Olmedo Patino Museum had been people instead of buildings, you wouldn’t have dared leave them in the same room together. They might’ve called each other names. They might’ve clawed each other’s eyes out. They might’ve mimicked the kinkier parts of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

Like their former mistresses -- the iconoclastic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the real-estate magnate and art collector Dolores Olmedo Patino -- these private homes-turned-national-landmarks have spent much of their lives locked in a bizarre, sometimes fierce, rivalry. But now, amid a citywide cultural blowout marking this summer’s 50th anniversary of Kahlo’s death, the museums finally are patching up their differences and cohosting this year’s largest, most striking display of Kahlo’s paintings anywhere in the world. The irony is that it took the deaths of both women for their namesake institutions to make peace.

For all their personal differences, Kahlo and Olmedo had plenty in common. Both were women of passion, formidable talent and no little ego. Both were bohemians who liked dressing as Indian peasants. Both were intimates of artist Diego Rivera -- one his protege, soul mate and sometime spouse, the other his steadfast patron, reputed lover and posthumous manager of a large part of his legacy. Both modeled nude for him, Kahlo in a discreetly introspective pose, Olmedo in full-frontal luxuriance, eyes drooping with sleepy sensuality. Both tried continually to satisfy Rivera’s Rabelaisian appetites.

And both, frankly, couldn’t stand each other. “I know my mother didn’t like Frida,” says Carlos Phillips Olmedo, Dolores Olmedo’s son and the current director of both museums. “They were contemporaries; at one time they had the same boyfriends, and that creates friction between women. Between men as well.”

A dapper businessman who looks astonishingly like the perestroika-era Mikhail Gorbachev, Phillips chuckles at this idea as he sips cappuccino in the shady gardens of the Casa Azul, where Kahlo was born in 1907, spent much of her life and died a half-century ago at 47. Cats prowl the Casa Azul’s cool, damp courtyard, scampering across the miniature Aztec-style pyramid that Rivera built there. A few feet away, a tape loop of Rivera’s daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marin, can be heard rattling off stories about the old house’s famous occupants.

Phillips too has childhood memories of the Casa Azul and the formidable artist who lived there, though they’re not the sort of fond reminiscences that spawned the worldwide ‘80s art craze known as “Fridamania.” “I just remember a lady that was disagreeable, dirty, smelled bad and was in bad humor,” he says of Kahlo. “I just remember saying hello. But I was only 13.”

Though it’s still early in the day, the colonial-style Casa Azul (Blue House) is already swarming with tourists, who are climbing the stairs and strolling the garden paths once trod by the likes of Leon Trotsky and Andre Breton.

Not long ago, these cultural pilgrims would’ve been paying homage at a rather shabby-genteel monument to Kahlo’s genius. For many years, the Casa Azul was seen as a financially undernourished, spottily managed institution in desperate need of a patch-up and a good paint job. Its crumbling walls and skimpy collection of mostly minor artworks by Kahlo and Rivera angered and embarrassed Mexico’s arts intelligentsia, while leaving some foreign visitors decidedly underwhelmed.

The main culprit in this state of affairs, some critics charged, was Dolores Olmedo, who’d been entrusted with the Casa Azul and its contents by a cancer-stricken Rivera shortly before his death in 1957. A year later, the house was converted into a museum dedicated to the life and work of Kahlo, who posthumously became an art-world star -- in the words of critic and essayist Elena Poniatowska, “one of the most extraordinary idols that Mexico has given, after the Virgin of Guadalupe.” Or, as the Mexican actress Jesusa Rodriguez put it more caustically a few weeks ago, “a species of Third World Barbie.”

Though she later took credit for popularizing Kahlo’s work, Olmedo never concealed her personal distaste for Kahlo or her view of Kahlo’s artistry compared with that of her husband. “Frida never was and never will be the equal of Diego,” she told The Times in 1993. As museum director and president for life of Rivera’s trust, Olmedo ran the Casa Azul on her own terms. And though the museum attracts about 350,000 visitors annually to this city’s elegant Coyoacan district and is considered a must-stop for Fridamaniacs, Olmedo’s critics allege that her personal animus toward Kahlo led to the building’s neglect, a charge that Olmedo rebutted until her death at 94 in July 2002.

Making the situation even more awkward, in September 1994, Olmedo opened her own, eponymous museum in the city’s southern Xochimilco neighborhood, about a 30-minute car trip from the Casa Azul. Though much less well known than the Casa Azul, the Museo Dolores Olmedo -- housed in one of Olmedo’s former homes, a meticulously landscaped 16th century estate complete with roaming peacocks and Mexican hairless dogs -- boasts by far the better art collection. Its holdings include not only about two dozen works by Kahlo but also Olmedo’s 900-piece collection of pre-Columbian art and her private trove of 145 works by Rivera. A dazzling array of paintings, drawings and lithographs covering virtually every phase of his prolific career, it is the world’s single most comprehensive collection of Rivera’s work.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Phillips insists that Olmedo and Rivera never were lovers, only “very, very close friends. And I’m not scared of my mother having lovers, because I’m sure she had quite a few.” But their friendship was close enough to have driven a wedge between Olmedo and Kahlo, who had reason to be wary of her philandering husband. The friendship also caused a rift between Rivera and Phillips’ father, a British American writer and painter who had a falling out after Olmedo posed nude for the artist. “My mother had a lot of men friends but not women friends,” Phillips says. “She was an icon in her own right.”

Yet if not for Olmedo, several of Kahlo’s greatest paintings might still be out of public view. Cash-poor and facing prostate cancer, Rivera persuaded his loyal benefactor to buy back many of Kahlo’s works from another collector, Eduardo Murillo. Olmedo did, and eventually the works ended up in her museum. She also was generous in lending her collection of Kahlo paintings for outside exhibitions, including a March 1987 show at Plaza de la Raza in L.A.’s Lincoln Park. “My mother has loaned her collection around the world,” Phillips says. “The Frida collection has spent more time outside the house than it is in the house.”

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A warming trend

Even so, during Dolores Olmedo’s lifetime, the Casa Azul and the Museo Dolores Olmedo barely acknowledged each other’s existence. There’s still no shuttle service connecting them, a problem that Phillips pledges to correct. Each museum also requires a separate admission ticket of 30 pesos, about $3.

But today, under Phillips’ direction, the museums are acting like sister institutions. This summer, they’re taking turns hosting “Frida: Viva la Vida,” which consists of 26 works taken from the Museo Dolores Olmedo. Among the masterpieces on view through Sept. 14 is the stunning 1944 self-portrait “La Columna Rota” (The Broken Column), a wrenching depiction of a teary-eyed, spike-impaled Frida whose split-open body alludes to the spine-shattering bus accident she suffered at 18.

“We wanted to make a vision of Frida that’s different, now that Frida’s an icon of women’s liberation and she’s been seen as liberal in a very conservative and enclosed society,” Phillips says of the exhibition. An accompanying photography show at the Museo Dolores Olmedo traces important moments in the artist’s life, including a haunting picture taken by Kahlo’s father shortly after her mother’s death.

Phillips says he is planning to hire archivists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico to begin the monumental task of cataloging 26,000 letters, photographs, drawings, articles and other material belonging to Kahlo and Rivera that have been sitting in sealed boxes since Rivera’s death.

“Diego asked my mother not to open them for 15 years. And my mother decided not to open them at all!” Phillips says. The archived material “will give us more things to show, and we can do rotating exhibitions.”

The museums also are promoting a series of workshops, movie screenings, conferences and plays being staged this year by several of Mexico’s leading cultural institutions to commemorate Kahlo’s death. Mercedes Iturbe, director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, which is hosting a small Kahlo exhibition of its own this summer, agrees that there is more cooperation today than in the past between Casa Azul and the Dolores Olmedo museum. She also believes, now that Fridamania has receded, it will be easier for the art world and the Mexican people to begin reassessing Kahlo’s true legacy.

“Frida was without doubt a very important artist, a woman with a very uncommon life and with a very interesting personality, and that which we have to rescue finally is her painting, but not with this exaggerated and excessive vision that has been done through Fridamania,” says Iturbe.

Perhaps most significant, the Casa Azul finally has received a much-needed $150,000 restoration, returning several areas of the home to their appearance when Kahlo and Rivera lived there. Though the nine-room house was previously restored in the mid-1990s, this time the process has followed much stricter guidelines, Phillips says.

For example, over the years the casa’s famous indigo coloring, which Frida had applied in 1941 as a tribute to her German Jewish father, Guillermo Kahlo, had faded. “When they repainted it [before] they didn’t repaint it the right color,” Phillips says. “They said, ‘It’s blue,’ so they painted it royal blue instead of azul anil, which is a natural color.” Windows removed from the house in the 1980s also have been replaced, a reflecting pool has been added and a large section of flooring has been replaced and repainted an opaque yellow shade that was popular in the 1950s

Other rooms of the house, including the studio that Rivera built for Kahlo, have been restored with the aid of period photographs to reflect their original furnishings: bookcases, mirrors, a framed group portrait of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and a 1930s medical chart depicting a fetus (a recurrent image in the work of the artist, who was bereft over her own inability to have children). Kahlo’s ashes lie in an urn at one side of the bed where she died; her prosthetic leg is nearby. Rivera’s downstairs room still has the cot where he slept when he would visit his estranged wife from his other home in nearby San Angel. “Everything is exactly the way it was when she died,” Phillips says.

As director of the museums as well as the Museo Anahuacalli Diego Rivera, which houses Rivera’s personal collection of antiquities, Phillips now practices shuttle diplomacy, splitting his time and tending to his various staffs. He says that about 20 people work at the Casa Azul and 120 at the Museo Dolores Olmedo, which serves as administrative headquarters for both facilities. Showing visitors around the Museo Dolores Olmedo, where he lived briefly as a boy, he pauses before a Rivera portrait of his mother wearing an enigmatic smile and a traditional Oaxacan peasant woman’s garb. “My mother used to say she was born in Oaxaca, and she wasn’t; she was born in Mexico [City],” Phillips says in a tone of amused affection. “But my mother lied a lot about her age and where she was born.

“My mother was a very passionate woman, and she believed in what she believed in,” he continues. “She believed in Diego Rivera, and we have 145 Diego Riveras.”

Along with the 26 Kahlos on display through this month, that appears sufficient for this year’s anniversary.

But when it comes to Kahlo and Rivera, the global appetite still seems boundless. Phillips is already looking ahead. “We want to be ready for 2007,” he says enthusiastically. “That’s the centenary of Frida’s birth and it’s the 50th anniversary of Diego’s death.”