Controversy has arisen over the new Casa Kahlo Museum (Casa Roja Museo), Mexico City
02 December 2025
Inaugurated last September in Mexico City, in competition with the famous Casa Azul, Casa Roja would preserve Frida's family memories. Located in the same neighbourhood of Mexico City and just a few houses away, the new Casa Kahlo Museum, known to everyone as Casa Roja (“red house”), is in fact two blocks away from Casa Azul, which is open to the public under the name Frida Kahlo Museum.
The Red House belongs to two of Frida's relatives, her great-granddaughter Mara Romeo, 72, and her daughter Mara de Anda, 46, who act as guides during the visit. A panel at the entrance invites visitors to visit the house, “home of the Kahlo family for four generations”. However, according to Anne Vigna, correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, this is a philologically dubious operation, with many unclear points.
Cristina Kahlo, Frida's only sister to have had children (including Isolda, Mara Romeo's mother), did indeed live in the house, but contrary to what is claimed by the “two Maras”, as the owners are known in their neighbourhood, Frida's parents never lived there. And Frida herself, who certainly knew the house well, would have visited it less often than people would have us believe due to her poor health, probably staying there for only a few weeks.
It seems that in Mexico, specialists in the artist's work did not want to openly criticise the opening of the Casa Kahlo Museum so as not to antagonise the owners, but they abandoned their restraint when a decorative fresco inside the house, only recently discovered because it was covered by several layers of paint, was attributed to the artist. Both German art historian Helga Prignitz-Poda and biographer Luis-Martín Lozano, specialists in Frida's work, denied to Le Monde that it could be a fresco by her.
There are other inaccuracies, including the fact that a cave is described as Frida's “refuge”, when in fact she obviously had enormous difficulty walking down stairs due to her illness, and and there are also some invented quotes.
Read an extract by Le Monde article (in French).
Info about the Casa Kahlo Museum at the link below.
