When Kahlo returned from France to Mexico after many months abroad, she found Rivera was romantically involved with another woman, and she left their home in Mexico City’s San Ángel neighborhood for Casa Azul. By late 1939 they agreed to divorce, prompting one of her largest canvases—The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait with a European Frida and a Mexican Frida whose exposed hearts are connected by an artery as they hold hands. When Kahlo’s health suffered after the divorce, Rivera reached out to Kahlo’s physician, Eloesser, for advice, and he suggested they reconcile as companions. The pair remarried in San Francisco in December 1940.
Kahlo remained mostly in Mexico City after that. Her work was shown in group exhibitions in Mexico and the United States in the 1940s, including “Twentieth Century Portraits” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 and “Exhibition by 31 Women”at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1943. In 1943 she took a teaching position at Mexico City’s School of Painting and Sculpture (commonly known as “La Esmeralda”), moving classes to the Casa Azul when her health declined.
The second of Kahlo’s solo exhibitions during her lifetime took place in the summer of 1953 in Mexico City at Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. Already in poor health by then, Kahlo was delivered to the opening night festivities on a stretcher and then placed in her four-poster bed, which had been brought to the gallery. “The show became more a court affair than a normal opening,” wrote critic Anita Brenner in her review of the show for the summer 1953 issue of ARTnews. “As a result, critics tended to react in a hostile way, as if they resented the atmosphere of incense and awe. Actually Frida, who has been extremely ill, is extraordinarily courageous about continuing her work under conditions that might have destroyed anybody with less admirable toughness.” The same year, Kahlo’s right leg was amputated below the knee.
Kahlo died at the Casa Azul at age 47 on July 13, 1954, due either to pulmonary embolism or possibly to suicide. Her casket was installed in the rotunda of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where prominent mourners such as former president Lázaro Cárdenas paid their respects.
Her last painting was a still life of watermelons on which she inscribed the words Viva la Vida (“long live life”), now on permanent display at the Casa Azul, which became a museum just four years after her death. Now a sort of pilgrimage site for those clamoring to see the house where Kahlo was born, raised, and died, it includes the artist’s personal collection of folk art, photos, her famous four-poster bed, her pigments and brushes next to the easel gifted to her by Nelson Rockefeller—and even the urn holding her ashes.
“I am not sick. I am broken,” Kahlo once wrote in her diary. “But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
