A PEEK INTO FRIDA KAHLO'S FAMILY HOME

Frida Kahlo's singular image still circulates on 500-peso banknotes in Mexico. Travellers at the airport in Mexico City can buy a fragrance that borrows her name.

- Elda Cantu

Elsewhere, the painter's visage - her striking eyebrows, her piercing stare - adorns tote bags, crew socks, insulated tumblers and more.

Seventy-one years after her death, Kahlo remains arguably the most recognisable woman in Mexico, rivalled perhaps only by the Virgin of Guadalupe.

And every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to a pair of neighbourhoods in Mexico City to visit Casa Azul, the bright blue home where she was born and had died, and the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, where she lived and worked with her husband, painter Diego Rivera.

Now, Kahlo devotees have a new pilgrimage site to visit in Mexico City: Museo Casa Kahlo, also known as the red house, where the artist's parents lived starting in 1930.

Just three blocks from Casa Azul, the new museum centres on the artist's family and her origins. It is intended to be a prequel of sorts, adding intimate context and texture to what might otherwise feel like a well-known tale.

"We have always wanted to tell these stories from the family's side," said Ms Frida Hentschel Romeo, 35, a great-granddaughter of one of the artist's sisters.

For years, Kahlo's descendants have oscillated between protecting and promoting the legacy of the marvellously defiant painter, who died in 1954 at 47.