Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

(Paperback)

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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

Reviews

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"