Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait Promised to LACMA

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Curly Hair, 1935.  Promised gift of an anonymous donor. © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A tiny, much-admired painting by Frida Kahlo, the Self-Portrait with Curly Hair, has been promised to LACMA. Though the gift has not been announced, the LACMA store recently began selling posters of the Kahlo, credited to an anonymous donor in honor of the museum's 50th anniversary. (Yes, that's 10 years ago. The Kahlo was not among the gifts announced or exhibited at the time.)

The oil-on-tin painting, only 7-1/4 by 5-3/4 inches, is well known to scholars. The small format and metal support were an homage to Mexican folk retablos (devotional paintings) and portraiture. Both Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera admired the jewel-like portraits of Hemenegildo Bustos (1832-1907), which were often executed on copper. 

Hermenegildo Bustos, Self-Portrait, 1891. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City

In 1934 Kahlo discovered that Rivera was having affair with her sister Cristina. Rivera asked for a divorce; Kahlo contemplated suicide, then had an affair of her own with Ignacio Aguirre, a muralist and printmaker. Kahlo put her art career on pause, producing just two paintings in 1935. One is the gruesome A Few Small Nips, showing a woman butchered by a lover. Although the biographical element is inescapable, it's based on a lurid true crime story. The frame is daubed with painted blood.

Frida Kahlo, A Few Small Nips, 1935. Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City

The other 1935 painting is Self-Portrait with Curly Hair. Kahlo cut off the long hair that Rivera admired and discarded the traditional Tehuana dress. She defiantly sports a permanent wave. Emphasizing her trademark unibrow to the verge of caricature, it is nonetheless one of the artist's most captivating self-presentations.

Hayden Herrara wrote of the painting: "Although her eyes retain their challenging glint, they now have a sad knowing-ness, as if she had just forced herself to stop crying, and was looking in the mirror as a way of steadying her emotions. Perhaps the slow, painstaking process of laying down stroke after stroke and depicting her willfully composed features on the metal panel was a way of finding calm. Yet this self-portrait gives us not just Frida the heroic sufferer. The woman depicted here is also the feisty, flirtatious, fun-loving twenty-eight-year-old whose beauty and ribald speech charmed the sculptor Isamu Noguchi who became her lover the year she painted this portrait.… Self-Portrait with Curly Hair is a testimonial to Frida Kahlo's strength."

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940. Museum of Modern Art

For while Kahlo and Rivera agreed to an open marriage. That ended in a 1940 divorce, followed by a remarriage. Shortly after the divorce, Kahlo (again) cut her hair and documented the transformation in a painting. The Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, now at MoMA, shows the artist seated, dressed in a man's suit (Rivera's?), with hair clippings littering the room. The music at top is a Mexican folk song that translates: "Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don't love you anymore."

Kahlo gave Self-Portrait with Curly Hair to Ella Wolfe, a friend who co-founded the Communist Party USA and later became an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan. Wolfe kept the painting in her Palo Alto dining room until her death at the age of 103. Christie's auctioned the portrait for $1.35 million in 2003. 

Frida Kahlo, Weeping Coconuts, 1951. LACMA

Despite Kahlo's popularity and the city's deep connections to Mexico, Los Angeles had no painting by the artist until 2004, when dealers Bernard and Edith Lewin bequeathed a single Kahlo painting, the late still life Weeping Coconuts, to LACMA as part of a massive collection of Latin American modernism. The gift also included Diego Rivera's only independent portrait of Kahlo, likely painted the same fraught year (1935) as her Self-Portrait with Curly Hair. The Rivera painting's date was established only recently through the detective work of L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight. 

Diego Rivera, Portrait of Frida Kahlo, about 1935. LACMA

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, 1940. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

In 2021 the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art acquired a spectacular Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser. Approximately life sized, that painting dates from 1940, a peak year for the self-portraits. 

In a city of galaxy-size egos, the anonymous pledge of an iconic painting to a public museum is a rare commodity. Diminutive as it is, Self-Portrait with Curly Hair seems destined to become one of the best-known objects in the LACMA collection, providing a nexus between Latin America, Surrealism, and Feminism. Between LACMA and the Lucas, Los Angeles is on track to rival the Kahlo holdings at the Museum of Modern Art (3 paintings) and the Harry Ransom Center, Austin (2 paintings). 

A 2022 Getty challenge based on Self-Portrait with Curly Hair