Famous Artist Homes You Can Still Visit.
To enter into an artist’s home is indisputably the most personal and sacred way to connect with their work, even if there is none on view. While exploring their catalogue raisonné or taking in a career retrospective exhibition can help illuminate common themes or patterns in their body of work, it could never compare to stepping inside the place where they laid their head at night. Many artists foundations these days are careful to preserve or restore the homes and studios where these creatives lived, and for good reason—what better way to understand how they lived, either at birth or later in life? If we’re lucky, these abodes have been preserved to reflect the time period in which the artist lived and worked and give context clues about how that environment reflects in their work: Were they rich or poor, did they work by oil lamp or en plein air? Below, we’ve gathered 11 of the world’s most famous artists homes that you can still visit today, while providing instructions on how to get there. AD Mag
Georgia O’ Keeffe, Abiquiu, New Mexico
Though many Georgia O’Keeffe fans are most likely familiar with Ghost Ranch, the artist’s summer retreat that is featured often in her paintings was in Abiquiú, a valley in northern New Mexico, where she felt most at home
The abode, whose Native American– and Spanish Colonial–style architecture reflects the natural surroundings, was built circa 1744, but had fallen into disarray when O’Keeffe purchased it in 1945. For the next four years she oversaw its extensive restoration, which turned the home into a peaceful sanctuary and retreat where she could draw inspiration and fill it with her personal treasures, like rocks and bones found in nature
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston, East Sussex, UK
Charleston, the 17th-century farmhouse home belonging to painters Vanessa Bell (d. 1961) and Duncan Grant (d. 1978), was more than a home, it was also a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s greatest creative minds to meet and exchange ideas
Bell and Grant adorned every inch of the home, covering furniture, ceramics, textiles and every surface imaginable with paint. Italian fresco and Postimpressionist paintings were their great inspiration, and when it wasn’t paint, it was the textiles they designed themselves.
Frida Kahlo, Mexico City
The famed Casa Azul in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood, a cobalt blue jewel box inside-and-out that’s accented in red and forest green, captures the magnificent Frida Kahlo’s essence.
It was here that she was born, lived, worked, spent time with her husband Diego Rivera, and later died in 1954. The home has been turned into a museum that preserves and exhibits artworks and artifacts from Kahlo’s life: her clothing, photographs, jewelry, wheelchair, and other possessions, as well as the furniture and dwellings that her and Rivera shared together. The home and museum is plenty filled with artworks by both artists, as well as pieces by other Mexican folk artists.
Joan Miro, Mont Roig del Camp, Spain
A sprawling estate complete with a handsome farmhouse, wine cellar, henhouse, fields, farmyard, studio, and chapel, it’s easy to see why artist Joan Miró spent his summers at Mas Miró, his family’s carob farm in Spain.
The buildings, dating back between the 18th to 20th centuries, are still surrounded by some original vegetation, including the majestic eucalyptus trees. Miró’s studio, with its dramatic Catalan vaulted ceilings and rich clay-brick-tiled ceiling and floor, has been left intact, even with some of the artist’s sketches on the walls.