The house of sunshine and pain.

• Author: Butler, Ron
• Position: Frida Kahlo Museum

When the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City finally reopened - after being closed for nearly two years for repairs and remodelling - there was cause for celebration as well as for controversy.

The museum - Kahlo's lifelong residence, which she shared with husband Diego Rivera - was long a neglected gem among Mexico City museums. The recent surge in popularity of Kahlo's work and fascination with her life suddenly brought huge crowds to the museum's doors. The general run-down condition of the building, heightened by the wear and tear of a growing number of visitors, proved an embarrassment to museum officials. Because the roof leaked badly, some fifty original Kahlo works on display had to be moved for safekeeping to the Dolores Olmedo Foundation's new Diego Rivera Museum in nearby Xochimilco.

Olmedo, who had been a close friend and confidante of Rivera as well as his most ardent collector, is the lifetime director of the Frida Kahlo Museum. However, when the renovation was extended to nearly two years (the spectacular Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park took only nineteen months to construct from scratch), Kahlo fans accused Olmedo of intentionally delaying the reopening out of lack of interest for the project or, perhaps, jealousy - charges she has ardently denied.

Olmedo has pointed to walls and ceilings that had to be replaced and floors that required fixing, as well as the painting of the museum's exterior and interior and installation of new lights and a security system. "It's an old house. It was falling down," she has said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Located in the residential section of Coyoacan, on Londres and Allende streets, the museum immediately sweeps visitors into Kahlo's presence, which is everywhere. Painted a starting cobalt blue trimmed in red, the house is preserved much as it was during the periods when Kahlo and Rivera lived there, from their marriage in 1929 to her death in 1954. Its interior is filled with personal possessions and folk art; carved Indian masks; brightly colored calaveras, or papier-mache skeletons; retablos, or small votive painting; and pre-Columbian statuary. A large unmarked Mayan urn contains Kahlo's ashes, behind glass now, beneath a death mask. The exhibitions, museum officials note, have remained much the same - photographs, love letters, an address book opened to the New York phone number of a friend, financial ledgers, the four-poster bed in which Kahlo was born, a...