Skip to main content

Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

No first trip to Mexico City is complete without a visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum. Located in the village-turned-borough of Coyoacán south of the city's center, it requires a short trip-within-a-trip to get there. But even for travelers who know nothing of Kahlo's art, it's worth the effort — especially since they'll come away knowing quite a bit about not just Kahlo's art and life but the culturally rich place and time she inhabited. For the building occupied by the Frida Kahlo Museum was, in fact, the home in which the artist was born and spent most of her life, making her one of Coyoacán's many notable residents. (Others include writer Octavio Paz, iconic comic actor Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno, and actress-singer Dolores del Río.)

Though I've long wanted to return to the Blue House, as the Frida Kahlo Museum is colloquially known, I somehow haven't made it back again on any of my subsequent trips to Mexico City. And given the state of world travel at the moment, I doubt I'll get the chance to make another visit any time soon.

Fortunately, the Museum has become virtually explorable online, with 360-degree views of all its rooms as well as its grounds. Even virtually, writes Vogue's Manon Garrigues, "Frida’s spirit can be felt everywhere. In her atelier are carefully arranged pigments facing her easel, while in the kitchen, which once welcomed the couple’s friends to the house, including their renowned neighbor, Trotsky, who lived next door with his wife, are playful ceramics."

For those with compatible headsets, all of this is also viewable in WebVR mode —  even Kahlo's bedroom, where "an urn in the form of her face lies on her bed, holding her ashes. Beside is the mirror in which Frida, bedridden, observed herself to paint her famous self-portraits, such as The Two Fridas and Frida y la cesarea, now on display in the villa."

The home-turned-museum's ten rooms display a great deal of Kahlo's art, of course, but also works by her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, as well as the couple's clothing and personal effects. You'll find paintings by other artists of Kahlo's day like Paul Klee and José María Velasco, and also handcrafted items from other regions of Mexico. The only thing missing in the virtual Frida Kahlo Museum experience is the requisite cafe de olla enjoyed afterward, back out on the streets of Coyoacán. Enter the virtual tour here.

via Messy Nessy

Related Content:

A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

Watch Moving Short Films of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

Artists Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico: Vintage Footage from 1938

Discover Frida Kahlo’s Wildly-Illustrated Diary: It Chronicled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/31um2lu
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more