Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

An accessible and in-depth study of Frida Kahlo, one of the most beloved artists in MoMA's collection .

Though the Surrealists adopted Frida Kahlo as one of their own, the painter maintained that she did 'not know if my paintings are Surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the most frank expression of myself.' She produced numerous self-portraits, each one an articulation of different facets of herself and her eventful life. Kahlo painted Self- Portrait with Cropped Hair in the wake of a particularly tumultuous time, just months after she divorced her famous husband, Mexican Muralist painter Diego Rivera. He had always admired her long, dark hair, which, as she indicates in the tresses littering the painting, she had cut off after their split. She also shows herself in an oversized suit resembling the ones that Rivera wore. Through such emotionally and symbolically charged details, Kahlo expresses her feelings about her relationship with Rivera while also asserting her sense of self as an independent artist

“Roberts posits this work as one through which Kahlo challenged a constellation of assumptions about both her work and her person: the exoticizing and fetishization of her paintings and appearance; her relationship to both her husband Diego Rivera and to the other male giants of Mexican painting at the time... confrontational in its uniqueness, but also equally resolutely Kahlo in the ways in which her work consistently raised "questions about the intersection of our private experiences with the expectations of a broader social realism."”

--Jerrold Shiroma "ARLIS/NA Reviews"

Kahlo's iconic gender-bending self portrait Neutral hues, an ill-fitting man's suit and wiggling locks of cut hair supplant Frida Kahlo's (1907-54) usual lively color palette, indigenous Mexican dress and long plaits in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo's. In the wake of a divorce from artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turns to her favorite genre, self-portraiture, to express her deepest emotional and psychological urges. Inscribed with the lyrics of a popular song that translate as "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you're without it I no longer love you," the work oscillates between evocations of a popular culture shared by many and unflinching forays into the private sphere. Curator Jodi Roberts' essay, too, moves between the public and the private as it situates Kahlo's painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution's legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artist's own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity.

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