“Today you’re going to eat art,” says Federico Valdez, a chef at the School of Mexican Cuisine who is so passionate about food that he has the word “Queso” (Cheese) tattooed on his forearm. “Today,” Valdez continues, “you’re going to eat history.” What unfolds in a sunlit dining room filled with Mexican flowers, books, and artifacts is a three-course feast inspired by Frida Kahlo—her life, her art, and her loves, including her first lesbian affair.
The starter, inspired by her childhood fascination with revolution, is a lightly spiced Mexican take on pirozhki, a Russian favorite. The main dish—served with pulque, an agave-based drink Kahlo loved—taps into her rebellious spirit. “It’s called Frida Against the World,” says Valdez, as we’re presented with a giant stuffed chili sitting in a nutty, bean-based sauce similar to what was eaten at Kahlo’s wedding to Diego Rivera, then the world’s most famous artist, now often overshadowed by her.
When she found Rivera in bed with her sister, she said: “I’m going to get all my furniture and leave. I hate you.” “I wanted this to be hot and horny,” says Valdez, explaining that halved figs were added to reference Kahlo’s sexuality. “Her first love, with a female teacher, happened at a time when Mexico wasn’t so open. I wanted to include all that spicy gossip. I’m not a big fan of playing it safe.”
I’m in Mexico City with a Tate delegation just as the huge jacaranda trees are blooming purple and violet across its parks and boulevards—to follow in Kahlo’s footsteps ahead of “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” a show of more than 30 of her works at Tate Modern in London that seems destined to be a summer blockbuster, adding even more fuel to Fridamania.
One work, “Self Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,” was painted in 1940 after her painful divorce from Rivera. A spider monkey, similar to one he gave her as a gift, pulls on her thorn necklace, drawing blood. The two soon remarried, with Kahlo inscribing the clocks in their house with the years of their separation and reunion.
“The exhibition is like a movie,” says Tobias Ostrander, its curator. “Frida is the star, but it’s also about her life, her people, her impact.” Charting Kahlo’s rise from unknown painter to global phenomenon, the show will also examine merchandise (expect a Kahlo Barbie) and gauge her influence on later artists.
Also on display will be many of the artist’s treasured possessions, including her brilliantly patterned Tehuana dresses. Graciela Iturbide’s ghostly photographs of her crutches, custom-made medical corsets, and prosthetic leg will also be featured. These were taken 50 years after Kahlo’s death, when all her belongings were finally freed from the bathroom where Rivera had ordered them locked away.
This took place at Casa Azul, the house in Coyoacán (The Place of the Coyote Owners) where Kahlo was born and spent most of her 47 years. It’s now a beautiful, captivating museum with smooth exterior walls painted a gorgeous blue. These border shiny red concrete paths that wind through fountains and lush gardens bursting with palm, yucca, cactus, and bougainvillea. Off in a corner, seen through trees, a maroon pyramid with yellow steps displays on its ledges Rivera and Kahlo’s pre-Hispanic, Aztec, and Toltec artifacts.
“We don’t know exactly where the blue came from,” says Perla Labarthe Álvarez, the museum director. “But in her diary, Frida expressed what the color meant to her: purity, electricity, and love. Because of her health—she had surgery all her life, more than 30 times—”She spent a lot of time at home, so it had to be a comfortable place where she could rest. Many of her still lifes were painted in the garden. She called her home “A Place Full of Places.” That description fits perfectly. This is an incredibly evocative location, even aside from the fact that Trotsky lived here for two years with his wife and had a brief affair with Kahlo.
[Image: ‘A place full of places’ … Kahlo’s kitchen and garden at Casa Azul; her bed with its overhead mirror; and the easel adapted so she could paint lying on her back or in her wheelchair. Composite: Bob Schalkwijk/Andrew Gilchrist]
Tours start in the living room, which features a large pyramid-style fireplace designed by Rivera. As an old photo shows, it was once flanked by two of his eerie Judas dolls—papier-mâché devils stuffed with fireworks and set alight during festivals. Across from it is Kahlo’s captivating portrait of her beloved photographer father, painted 15 years after his death. His eyes are as mesmerizing as hers.
On the walls, photos and texts detail the polio Kahlo contracted at age six, which left her with one shorter leg, and the trolley-bus crash at 18 that impaled her on an iron handrail. This accident caused her pain for much of her life and left her unable to have children. She could never paint that accident, even though her work was often deeply painful and personal. Most of these pieces were created at Casa Azul, upstairs in her studio, where visitors can see the easel adapted so she could paint while lying on her back or sitting in her wheelchair.
[Image: ‘One kick and it could take the house down’ … Kahlo’s custom boot and her ashes in an urn. Composite: Courtesy Andrew Gilchrist]
In the next room is the four-poster single bed where her mother placed an overhead mirror. This gave Kahlo, who was often confined to bed, both a distraction and a subject. “I paint myself,” she once said, “because I am so often alone and I am the subject I know best.”
Along with her corsets, she customized her orthopedic footwear, turning one stepped-up mid-calf red boot into a work of art. Embroidered with Mexican patterns and adorned with a blue ribbon, the chunky laced boot now stands proudly in its own case. It looks incredibly alive, as if it could knock down the whole house with one kick. Meanwhile, on a dresser, Kahlo’s ashes sit in a delightfully playful ancient urn. Shaped like a toad with cartoon-like arms and legs, it nods to her affectionate nickname for Rivera. A sign reads, “You found me torn apart, and you took me back full and complete.”
Across the courtyard, you can see Kahlo’s crutches and corsets, one decorated with a hammer and sickle. She painted herself in these corsets, too. In Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, a 1954 work hanging nearby, the corset has become her skin, her bare breasts. She is strangling a bald eagle wearing an Uncle Sam hat, while Marx’s enormous hands reach out to cradle her. As always, her penetrating, all-seeing eyes stare out beneath that monobrow.
[Image: Throttling Uncle Sam … Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. Photograph: Artium/Alamy]
The most stunning work at Casa Azul, however, is the last painting she ever completed, finished eight days before her death in 1954. Titled Viva la Vida, or Long Live Life, it shows several sun-drenched watermelons, Mexico’s unofficial national fruit. In some places, their flesh is as red as blood. One watermelon is cut in half in a crisscross pattern, echoing the Vs of the title, which appears in big black letters on another slice. It feels as if the fruit itself—life itself—is speaking to you, urging you: Live, live.
What you take away from Casa Azul is an almost overwhelming sense of both Kahlo’s talent and her resilience. This is especially true as you walk the neighboring streets she skipped along as a child, wearing her sailor’s blouse and hat, on her way to school with her friend.Later, people would call what she planted a bomb. It was actually a firecracker—though powerful enough to blow out some windows. No one was hurt, and unlike some others, Kahlo wasn’t expelled.
There’s a nearby park now named after her, with a pyramid by a fountain and life-size bronze statues of Rivera and Kahlo. She’s walking ahead, purposeful, her head half-turned, while he follows happily behind her, smiling gently and clearly in awe of this woman, despite all his affairs. The bar they liked, La Guadalupana, is still there—a shrine to bullfighting, with bulls’ heads on the walls, along with paintings and posters of fighters. It might be more appealing if you’ve had, as Rivera and Kahlo sometimes did, “a tequila or 10.”
Downtown, the streets aren’t so calm. Some are blocked off, and barriers have been placed around national monuments. These were put up after a recent march of 180,000 women, furious about the rates of femicide in Mexico. About 2,500 women are murdered each year, but less than a third are classified as femicides, even though evidence suggests they should be. Fewer than a quarter of femicides lead to punishment.
Would Kahlo have painted this outrage if she were alive today? She already did. In 1935’s Unos Cuantos Piquetitos, or A Few Small Nips, Kahlo recreated a story from the newspaper that made her furious. A woman lies slashed and naked on a blood-soaked bed, murdered by her husband, who holds a knife and later dismissed his crime to the police with the words in the title. At first, she included the children, who witnessed the whole horror, but it was too brutal, so they were removed.
Kahlo also painted in a studio across town, in the bohemian neighborhood of San Ángel. It’s a beautiful, boxy, three-story building painted that signature blue. A rooftop bridge connects it to Rivera’s much larger workspace—a white-and-ochre structure where he often worked 15-hour days.
Built along modernist Le Corbusier lines and now part of a museum, these studios caused a sensation when they first appeared. They’re unadorned constructivist creations sitting among the elaborate homes of San Ángel, still surrounded by a superb fence of tall, perfectly spaced cactus poles. This was a way for both artists to bring Mexico and nature into their workplaces.
Rivera’s studio is magnificent, overflowing with ceramics and artifacts from his folk-art collection, all arranged alongside paintings and paint pots. There’s almost a party vibe: death masks grin from chairs, Judas dolls leer conspiratorially around the windows, and chorus lines of strangely joyful skeletal figures dance wildly across the walls above. It feels fitting—the parties here were legendary, attended by presidents, revolutionaries, and exiles, as well as Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin.
Over the bridge, above the bath in Kahlo’s studio toilet, you can see a copy of What the Water Gave Me, her 1938 painting of her feet as she bathed. Elements drift on the water, symbolizing events in her life—from exotic plants to nude figures on a bed to an erupting volcano. There’s not much else to see in her studio; Kahlo packed everything up and left after catching Rivera in bed with her sister. According to the museum guide, she told him: “I am going to get all my furniture and get out of here because I hate you.”
What the Water Gave Me is the favorite Kahlo painting of Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, writer of…The Ribbon and the Bomb is a book about how the artist’s relevance continues to grow. The title comes from French surrealist André Breton’s description of Kahlo’s work as “a ribbon around a bomb.” But Mac Gregor thinks “maybe there’s no ribbon, only bombs,” and those bombs are still exploding beyond her own time, as new generations—mostly women—see themselves, their bodies, their sexuality, and their struggles reflected in her masterpieces.
“There’s the bomb of her illness,” says Mac Gregor, as we have lunch at the beautiful San Ángel Inn, a former Carmelite monastery across from the studios, famous for its gardens and margaritas. “She’s vulnerable, yet she’s strong and erotic—not what you’d expect from someone so ill. And she was so ahead of her time, making the personal political, living on her own terms, playing with gender roles, and cutting her hair. Then there are the bombs of femicide and abortion, including her own.” This was mainly to protect her damaged pelvis. “Frida painted things people didn’t talk about. Even with her illness—one year she only managed one work—she created such beauty.”
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‘The parties were legendary’ … Judas dolls, paintings, skeletons, and death masks at Rivera’s studio. Photograph: Courtesy Andrew Gilchrist
Clearly delighted, Mac Gregor adds: “Frida is now more important than Diego Rivera, which is strange because she became the artist she was because of him. He was a macho Mexican womanizer, but he loved and supported her. And the essays he wrote about her work are amazing, talking about her depictions of the interior and exterior. He said she would become the most important artist in Mexico.” Kahlo didn’t stop there. When The Dream (The Bed) sold for $54.7 million in 2025, it set a new world record for a female artist.
The Tate is lucky to have any of her works at all, given how proud and protective Mexicans are of Kahlo, especially with the World Cup just starting in their country. I saw this firsthand at the Museo de Arte Moderno. You can take your time in front of a María Izquierdo, for example, but if you stare too long at a Kahlo, you’ll soon feel other visitors pressuring you to move on.
This happened to me twice: first in front of The Two Fridas, where she explores her mixed heritage, dressing one self in European clothes and the other in Mexican; and second at Self-Portrait with Monkeys (see above), where Kahlo, with a faint mustache, is shown with four of the creatures she kept as pets. They are often seen as representing the four students, nicknamed Los Fridos, who stayed with her even as her health made teaching harder. Kahlo also said the monkeys in her work symbolized the children she couldn’t have.
No visit to Mexico City is complete without a trip south to the floating gardens and canals of Xochimilco, for a ride on one of the 500 colorful, gondola-like boats that travel its busy waterways. Kahlo loved coming here with her family to these canals, which were built by the Aztecs. There’s a famous photo of her face hovering over the water, looking calm as she dips her arm in up to the elbow.
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A song for £10 … the Axolotls board Rosamaria. Photograph: Courtesy Andrew Gilchrist
“Every boat has a female name,” says the captain of our boat, Rosamaria, “because they are like flowers.” As we set off, smaller, faster boats speed by, carrying vendors of pulque and tacos. Before long, we’re being chased by two very loud mariachi bands—one called the Pintorescos (the Picturesques), and the other the Axolotls, named after the tiny, endangered, and ridiculously cute salamander species native to these waters. The Axolotls win, boarding our boat in seconds and performing for £10 a song. First, Cielito Lindo (Lovely Sweet One), with its rousing singalong chorus, and then…Of course, La Bamba.
As the Axolotls speed away in a blur of strings, brass, and tight trousers, peace returns. We drift along as the afternoon sun beats down fiercely. I let my arm dangle into the cool water, just like Kahlo did, and remember something Federico Valdez said as he revealed the final course of his feast—a rice-pudding-like dish in a watermelon sauce, washed down with a liquor made from Chihuahua apples.
“This dessert is going to blow your mind,” he said, as a picture of Kahlo’s funeral appeared on the screen behind him. “Frida died—but she didn’t pass away. She was like a rocket. She just went up and up.”
Frida: The Making of an Icon is at Tate Modern, London, from 25 June to 3 January. This trip was provided by Tate and Journey Latin America.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on your description written in a natural conversational tone
General Questions
Q What is Frida Kahlo Against the World
A It sounds like a specific dish you ate or created during your trip to Mexico City Based on your description its likely a spicy bold and perhaps sensual or indulgent mealmaybe something with chiles chocolate or a rich sauce that feels very Frida
Q Why is the dish named after Frida Kahlo
A Frida was known for her passionate unapologetic and fiery personality Naming a dish that is hot and horny after her is a playful way to honor her spiritintense colorful and full of life
Q What does Fridamania mean
A Fridamania is the term for the intense global fascination with Frida Kahlo It includes her art her style her politics and her personal story Your week in Mexico City was likely filled with visiting her museums eating at Fridathemed spots and soaking in her cultural influence
Practical Travel Questions
Q Where can I find Frida Kahlo Against the World in Mexico City
A That specific name sounds like a special or personal creation It might be a dish at a trendy restaurant in the Coyoacán neighborhood or a limitedtime menu item Ask at local spots that celebrate Mexican cuisine with a modern artistic twist
Q What are the best Fridathemed restaurants in Mexico City
A For the full Fridamania experience try Casa de Frida El Cardenal or any restaurant in Roma Norte that offers alta cocina with indigenous ingredients Many places serve dishes inspired by her love of mole chiles and fresh produce
Q Is the dish very spicy
