These photographs of Frida Kahlo were taken by the German-born French photographer Gisèle Freund, who spent time with Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico between about 1950 and 1953. They show the painter at home in the Casa Azul, her family house in Coyoacán, Mexico City: painting at her easel, feeding ducks in the courtyard, walking in the garden with her dogs, and resting in the bed where she spent much of her last years. Many are in colour, which was still unusual for portraits at the time, and most stayed in archives for decades before being published in 2015.
Who was Gisèle Freund?
Freund was born in Berlin in 1908 and studied sociology before fleeing Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933. She became one of the great portraitists of the 20th century, photographing writers and artists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Henri Matisse, and pioneering colour portraiture in the late 1930s. During the Second World War she escaped occupied France and settled in Buenos Aires.
In 1950 a series of photographs of Eva Perón that she shot for Life caused a diplomatic row, and she had to leave Argentina with her negatives. She went to Mexico, where she became friends with Rivera and Kahlo as well as the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. She had planned a short visit; according to later accounts, she stayed around two years and was given unusually close access to the couple's daily life. She returned permanently to Paris in 1953 and died there in 2000.
Frida Kahlo between 1950 and 1953
Kahlo was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán. A bus crash in 1925 left her with severe injuries, including a spine broken in several places, and she lived with pain for the rest of her life. In 1950 she spent most of the year at the ABC Hospital in Mexico City, where a bone graft on her spine led to an infection and several further operations. Afterwards she was largely confined to the Casa Azul and used a wheelchair and crutches.
Freund's pictures cover exactly this period. They do not show a woman defined by illness: she is working, smoking, laughing with her dogs and dressing with great care. Paintings she completed in these years include Portrait of My Father and Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, both of which appear on her easel in these photographs. Kahlo died at the Casa Azul on 13 July 1954, aged 47, about a year after Freund left Mexico.
At the easel and with her doctor
Kahlo seated in a richly embroidered blouse with a red rebozo (shawl) over her lap, rings on her fingers and a cigarette in hand. On the wall behind her is a painted portrait of a moustached man, apparently her father, the photographer Guillermo Kahlo, whom she painted in 1951. Freund was one of the first photographers to shoot Kahlo extensively in colour. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo in her wheelchair at the easel, with her surgeon Dr Juan Farill standing beside her, photographed in 1951. On the easel is the work that became Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, painted after the long series of spinal operations she underwent in 1950. A print of this photograph is held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
A colour view of Kahlo at work, brush in hand, in front of the portrait of her father. Her palette rests on her lap and her painting materials sit on the desk beside her. The finished Portrait of My Father (1951) carries an inscription honouring him. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
A black-and-white close-up of Kahlo painting the face of her father. The detail of her braided hair, earrings and patterned blouse shows how Freund paid attention to the way Kahlo dressed even while she worked. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
The courtyard, the garden and the dogs
Kahlo, in a long white skirt and red shawl, scattering food for ducks in a pond in the courtyard of the Casa Azul. Stone sculptures line the water's edge, part of the large collection of pre-Hispanic objects she and Diego Rivera kept at the house. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo standing in the garden of the Casa Azul among cacti, agaves and dark volcanic stone. The garden, with its lush planting against the cobalt walls, was one of her favourite places and appears in many of Freund's frames. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo in a white skirt with four of her hairless Xoloitzcuintli dogs at her feet. The Xolo is an ancient Mexican breed, and the dogs appear in several of her paintings. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo in a long white skirt and shawl in the garden, with a Xoloitzcuintli dog standing among the volcanic rocks in front of her. Freund often framed her subject at a distance, making the house and garden as important as the person. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo in the courtyard beside the stepped display Rivera built to show pre-Hispanic sculpture at the Casa Azul. Idols and carved stones crowd the shelves behind her, part of a collection that reflected the couple's passion for Mexico's ancient cultures. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Portraits beside pre-Hispanic sculpture
Kahlo with one hand on her hip beside a pre-Hispanic stone figure, wearing a Tehuana-style blouse and a floral skirt, her hair braided with ribbons and heavy earrings at her ears. The traditional dress of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec became central to her public image and to her sense of Mexican identity. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo smoking beside the same carved stone figure seen in the colour picture. The pairing of living face and ancient sculpture is a deliberate echo of how she presented herself as rooted in Mexico's pre-Columbian past. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
A close black-and-white portrait among tall plants, arms folded under a rebozo, rings on several fingers. The direct, level gaze is the same one that looks out of her self-portraits. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Rest and home life
Kahlo reclining against a woven blanket in an embroidered blouse and patterned skirt. By this time she spent long periods resting, yet she still dressed carefully every day, a habit Freund's pictures record again and again. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo seated in her bedroom with a polka-dot skirt spread around her, beside the four-poster bed in which she spent much of her final years. The room, with its folk art and family photographs, is preserved today in the Museo Frida Kahlo. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Kahlo lying in her canopy bed, surrounded by framed pictures, a lamp and a tall stack of books. She often worked from bed during periods of illness, and in April 1953 she even attended the opening of her first solo exhibition in Mexico in her bed, arriving by ambulance. Photo: Gisèle Freund.
Where to see the photographs and the house today
Most of Freund's Mexican negatives sat in archives until they were rediscovered in a box at IMEC, the French Institute for the Memory of Contemporary Publishing. In 2015 the publisher Abrams released Frida Kahlo: The Gisèle Freund Photographs, with text by Gérard de Cortanze and more than 100 images, and prints from the series have since appeared in exhibitions in Europe and the Americas.
The Casa Azul itself opened as the Museo Frida Kahlo in 1958. Visitors can still walk through the courtyard, the garden and the bedroom seen in these pictures, and her ashes rest there in a pre-Columbian urn. Seen alongside her own self-portraits, Freund's photographs offer a second view of the same person: one painted from the inside, one recorded by a friend with a camera.
Sources: Wikipedia: Frida Kahlo; Wikipedia: Gisèle Freund; Remezcla: Some of the last photos taken of Frida Kahlo before her death; Centre Pompidou: Gisèle Freund, Frida Kahlo et son médecin Juan Farill, 1951. All photographs: Gisèle Freund.
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