The clothes, as well as the corsets and jewelry, were discovered in 2003 in a bathroom at the Casa Azul, where she was born, worked, suffered and died in 1954, age 47. The couple undertook an expansion of the French-style house in the 1940s, ordering an Aztec-inspired extension from Juan O’Gorman (better known for his astounding mosaics at Mexico City’s main university) and decorating it with indigenous stone statuary, papier-mâché figurines, painted gourds and a healthy mix of pets. A rare film here shows the lush gardens that would inspire the dense, Rousseauesque vegetation in this show’s most trademark Kahlo: “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (1943), featuring a quartet of primates who join the artist in a staring contest.

Countless visitors, perhaps already following her on an Instagram account with nearly a million subscribers, will come to this show because of self-portraits like this one. I hope they also spend time with the even more powerful artworks in the same room: a dozen retablos, or votive paintings on metal by anonymous Mexicans, similar to hundreds of paintings Kahlo lived with in the Casa Azul.

These little devotional works depict sudden violence and racking illness, but also divine intercession; one gives thanks to the Virgin of Talpa for freeing a child from prison, another praises the Holy Trinity for sparing the life of a man crushed by a car. Each is a little masterpiece of suffering and redemption, made with a wrenching, openhearted economy. These artists knew, and Kahlo and Rivera knew when they collected them, that art has a much higher vocation than myth or merchandise.

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Through May 12 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.