Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair

Neutral hues, an ill-fitting mans suit and wiggling locks of cut hair supplant Frida Kahlos (190754) usual lively color palette, indigenous Mexican dress and long plaits in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlos. 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 youre 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 Kahlos painting in the context of the Mexican Revolutions legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artists own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity.