The Frida Kahlo family tree, from Pforzheim and Oaxaca to the Casa Azul

On the German side of the Frida Kahlo family tree stand Jakob Heinrich Kahlo, a jeweller of Pforzheim in Baden, and his wife Henriette Kaufmann.⁴ Their son Carl Wilhelm was born at Pforzheim on 26 October 1871.^1,4

On the Mexican side stand Antonio Calderón, a photographer of Indigenous ancestry, and Isabel González.¹ Frida Kahlo said her father was Jewish, and the Jewish Museum wrote of her German Jewish roots in 2003, but German genealogists found in 2006 that his family was Lutheran.^2,3

Wilhelm Kahlo came to Mexico with his father’s money, at nineteen in 1890 by the museum’s chronology and in 1891 by Wikipedia, and took the name Guillermo.^1,4 He married María Cardeña, whose full name was María de los Dolores Eleuteria Clotilde Cardeña Espino, in August 1893 by the English article and in 1895 by the Spanish one.^4,5

They had three daughters. María Luisa was born in 1894 and Margarita in 1896. María died on 24 October 1897 at the birth of the third, Asunción Emma, who lived a few days.⁵ That night Guillermo asked Antonio Calderón for the hand of his daughter Matilde, and after the wedding the two elder girls were sent to a convent to be raised.⁴

Guillermo made his name photographing the government’s buildings and churches, and he died at Coyoacán on 14 April 1941.^4,1

Matilde Calderón y González was born on 5 July 1874 in Mexico City, by the chronology of the Museo Frida Kahlo. Wikipedia gives 1876 and places her birth in Oaxaca.^1,3 She married Guillermo in the Catholic Church on 21 February 1898 and by civil law six years later.^1,5

In 1904 Guillermo built a house on a plot of 800 square metres in Coyoacán, the house later known as the Casa Azul.¹ The couple had four daughters and a son, also called Guillermo, who died in 1906, the year before Frida was born.⁵ Matilde died on 15 September 1932, at 58, after an operation on her gallbladder.¹

The four sisters at the heart of the Frida Kahlo family tree are Matilde, born in 1899, Adriana, born in 1902, Frida, born at Coyoacán on 6 July 1907, and Cristina, born on 7 June 1908.^1,6 Frida later gave her year of birth as 1910, but the civil register records 1907.³

At six Frida caught polio, which left her right leg short and thin. On 17 September 1925 the bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar, and she spent about a month in the Red Cross hospital.¹

Diego Rivera was born at Guanajuato on 8 December 1886. Before Frida he married Angelina Beloff in 1911 and Guadalupe Marín in 1922, the mother of his daughters Ruth and Guadalupe.⁷

Frida married Rivera at the town hall of Coyoacán on 21 August 1929, against her mother’s wishes.^1,3 The same year he paid off the mortgage on the Casa Azul and put the house in Frida’s name.¹ They divorced on 6 November 1939 and married again in San Francisco on 8 December 1940.¹ Frida died at Coyoacán on 13 July 1954, at 47. Rivera married Emma Hurtado in 1955 and died at Mexico City on 24 November 1957.^3,7

In 1936 Frida Kahlo painted her own family tree, “My Grandparents, My Parents, and I”, with her grandparents, her parents and herself.¹ The Jewish Museum in New York built an exhibition around it in 2003.² It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, and its record at MoMA shows it.

A second version of 1949, “My Family”, was left unfinished.¹ Both are still in copyright, so this page shows neither, and this Frida Kahlo family tree follows the same three generations from records.