Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair
Jodi Roberts
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 lively and saturated palette is supplanted by neutral hues, her Tehuana dress by an ill-fitting man’s suit, and her plaited hair by strangely sentient locks that wriggle up from the floor and around her chair. Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo’s, containing an array of influences and references that encompass both popular culture and details from the artist’s private life. In this richly illustrated volume, which includes a wide range of the artist’s self-portraits and other related images, curator Jodi Roberts situates the painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution, the Surrealist tradition, and Kahlo’s ongoing construction of her artistic identity.
Jodi Roberts is the Executive Director of the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (MarinMOCA).
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