User:Smr1955/sandbox

Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird was painted after her divorce from muralist Diego Rivera and the end of her relationship with her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray in 1940. Muray bought the portrait shortly after it was painted, and it is currently part of the Nickolas Muray collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Visual Analysis
This rather small painting (approximately 16” x 24”), shows Kahlo in a frontal position and directly confronting the viewer’s gaze from the canvas. Her bold eyebrows hold the emphasis on her face, as a thorn necklace strangles her throat, trailing down her chest like the roots of a tree. A small black hummingbird with its wings outstretched hangs like a pendant from her throat. She wears a simple white blouse that contrasts with the tan tone of her skin. She is surrounded by insects and animals, setting the scene of a lush, but suffocatingly dense jungle. A monkey sits behind her right shoulder, its eyes focused on its hands, tugging at the thorn necklace, causing Kahlo to bleed. Above her head, two dragonflies float in mid-air, above two butterfly clips nesting in the elaborate hairstyle that crowns her head. A black panther with striking ice blue eyes peers over her left shoulder.

Her style could be described as decorative, intimate, dream-like, naive, and eccentric. The colors of the portrait are striking, with a variety of green tones - from Granny Smith apples to fresh cut grass - contrasting against her bright white blouse and the black animals. While the foliage creates the illusion of a lush jungle scene, the portrait itself is remarkably flat and static, with each element competing on the same plane. The placement of the creatures also seems incredibly staged, suggesting that Kahlo is not painting attempting to conjure a real scene, but instead might be arranging symbolic elements to communicate a feeling or idea.

About Frida
Kahlo was a Mexican painter active between 1925 and 1954. She began painting while bedridden due to a bus accident that left her seriously disabled. Most of her work consists of self-portraits, which deal directly with her struggle with medical issues, infertility, and her troubled marriage to Rivera. Painting self-portraits was therapeutic, allowing Kahlo to create a separate Frida on which to project her anguish and pain. Scholars have interpreted her self portraits as a way for Kahlo to reclaim her body from medical issues and gender conformity. In particular, scholars have interpreted her self-portraits in the context of the tradition of male European artists using the female body as the subject of their paintings and an object of desire. Kahlo, using her own image, reclaims this use from the patriarchal tradition. The autobiographical details of her fascinating life found in these works as well as her characteristic brows, elaborate hair, and vibrant Mexican clothing has made her a popular figure in Mexico and the United States.

Kahlo was a big supporter of the Mexican Revolution, so much so that she attempted to change her birth date to correspond with the beginning of the Revolution in 1910. At the onset of this movement, a so-called “cult of Mexican femininity” gained popularity, which Jolie Olcott describes as “selflessness, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, an erasure of self and the negation of one’s outward existence.” In rejection of this limited conception of femininity, Kahlo fashioned herself as a Mexican counterpart to the flappers of the United States and Europe in the 1920s. Later, inspired by Rivera’s concept of Mexicanidad, a passionate identification with Mexican pre-Hispanic indigenous roots, she donned the identity of the Tehuana woman. The Tehuana had a great deal of equality with their male Zapotec counterparts and represented strength, sensuality, and exoticism.

Symbolism
Kahlo’s identification with indigenous Mexican culture greatly affected her painting aesthetic. By using powerful iconography from indigenous Mexican culture, Kahlo situates herself in a tradition of rebellion against colonial forces and male rule. The dead hummingbird which hangs around her neck is considered a good luck charm for falling in love in Mexican folklore. An alternate interpretation is that the hummingbird pendant is a symbol of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war. Meanwhile, the black panther is symbolic of bad luck and death and the monkey is a symbol of evil. The natural landscape, which normally symbolizes fertility, contrasts with the deathly imagery in the foreground. Rivera gave Kahlo a spider monkey as a gift, thus suggesting that it could be a symbol of Rivera, especially since he inflicts pain upon Kahlo by tugging the thorn necklace hard enough to make her bleed. Alternately, the thorn necklace could allude to Christ’s crown of thorns, thus likening herself to a Christian martyr, and representing the pain and anguish she felt after her failed romantic relationships. In line with this interpretation, the butterflies and dragonflies could symbolize her resurrection.