The date the reference works agree on
Cristina Kahlo y Calderón was born on 7 June 1908 in Coyoacán and died there on 8 February 1964. That is the span in the English Wikipedia article (checked 2026-10-29). She was 55. The same article gives her resting place as the Panteón Inglés, in the Miguel Hidalgo borough of Mexico City, and lists the other name Christina Kahlo Pinedo.
Frida Kahlo had died on 13 July 1954. Cristina outlived her sister by a little under ten years. The paintings and murals that show Cristina, including Frida's 1928 Portrait of Cristina, My Sister and Diego Rivera's figures of her in Mexico City, are the subject of Cristina Kahlo: the sister in four Kahlo and Rivera artworks. This page is only the death record.
What Wikipedia leaves out, and what the family told BBC Mundo
The Wikipedia article used here stops at the date, the place, and the cemetery. It does not say what illness she had, and it does not describe a deathbed. A cause of death copied from an unsourced biography would be a guess.
BBC Mundo did ask the family. In an interview republished by El Deber, granddaughter Cristina Kahlo Alcalá described a memory from when she was three or four: her grandmother bare from the waist up, a blue blanket, a man in a white coat, and a black cross painted on Cristina's back. Her mother told her the memory was real, that the man was a radiologist who came to the house, and that the cross marked the area for the X-rays. The article then states that Cristina died of lung cancer ("Cristina murió de cáncer de pulmón").
That is a family account reported by a newsroom, not a death certificate quoted on the page. It is also the only cause this page will repeat, and it will repeat it as the granddaughter's report. The black cross is a treatment mark in that story, not a symbol Frida painted.
Where she was in those last years
The same BBC Mundo interview places the radiologist visit at home, not in a hospital ward the article names. After Frida's death, Cristina Kahlo Alcalá's side of the family remembers Cristina in her own house in Coyoacán, near the Casa Azul, still close enough that the granddaughters' memories are of drawers of pencils, a garden, and dogs, alongside the medical visit.
Kahlo Alcalá also told BBC Mundo that her grandmother looked after Frida at several points, including the last years, and that the sisters took part in the hospital trips and the meals after the 1925 bus crash. That caregiving is biography. It does not change the 8 February 1964 date.
Diego Rivera, who had painted Cristina and had an affair with her in the 1930s, died on 24 November 1957. He is buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons, a different grave from the Panteón Inglés. His mural commission and the Rockefeller Center destruction are on the Diego Rivera page. Cristina's affair with him is already told, with the pictures, on the sister page linked above.
What this does not settle about the paintings
A death date does not locate a canvas. Frida's Portrait of Cristina, My Sister (1928) and the Rivera murals that include Cristina still have to be checked on the holding institution's own page, which is the work of the sister article, not of an obituary.
Frida's catalogue is a separate problem. Taschen's complete-paintings volume and the disputes over works that try to join that short list are on Frida Kahlo's paintings. Cristina sat for some of the documented pictures. Her death in 1964 does not add a painting to that list, and it does not authenticate one.
