Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair – Hardcover

In 1940, in the wake of a divorce from her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo turned to self-portraiture to express her deepest emotional and psychological impulses, and completed a painting inscribed with the lyrics of a popular song: “Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you’re without it, I no longer love you.”

In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo’s usual saturated palette is supplanted by moody hues, her Tehuana dress by a man’s suit, and her plaited hair by shorn locks that appear to wriggle up from the floor and around her chair, strangely alive. Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo’s: intensely felt, dreamlike, and displaying an array of influences and references that encompass both popular culture and details from the artist’s private life.

In this richly illustrated volume, art historian Jodi Roberts illuminates this celebrated painting from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in the context of the Mexican Revolution, the Surrealist tradition, and Kahlo’s own changing artistic identity. 64pp; 45 illus.