Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

Frida Kahlo

1940

An oil-on-canvas self-portrait in which Frida Kahlo, newly shorn, sits in a man’s suit to stage a deliberate reworking of her appearance and identity after a personal rupture.

What strikes you is her calm, unflinching gaze framed by a cropped haircut and a tailored suit, the bright yellow chair and red floor littered with long dark locks of hair, and the small handwritten musical line and lyric above that turn a private act into a theatrical statement.

By turning the cutting of her hair and a change of dress into a public self-portrait, Kahlo challenged gendered expectations and expanded self-portraiture’s capacity to make intimate psychological and political experience visible in modern art.

Palette

Art Terms

Self-portrait Investigating identity Modern art Surrealism Oil paint Painting Figurative Feminist art

Exhibitions

Techniques of Painting

1941

How Modern Artists Paint People

1942

Mexican Art

1978

The Nude: Thirty 20th-Century Drawings

1970