Frida Kahlo | Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

About Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird by Frida Kahlo

Kahlo painted this in 1940, one of the worst years of her life. She and Diego Rivera had divorced in late 1939 after a decade of infidelity on both sides, her health was collapsing, and her affair with the exiled Leon Trotsky had ended badly. She painted her way through it, as she generally did — of her roughly 143 paintings, about 55 are self-portraits.

She looks straight out, entirely composed. Around her throat is a necklace of thorns, pulled tight enough to draw thin threads of blood down her neck, and hanging from it is a dead black hummingbird with its wings spread. A black cat crouches at her left shoulder. On her right sits a spider monkey — a real pet, and a gift from Rivera — whose small hand is tugging the thorn necklace tighter.

Every element carries weight. In Mexican folk tradition, dead hummingbirds were used in charms to bring love; a black one signalled the opposite. The thorns are the crown of thorns. The butterflies in her hair are resurrection. And the face at the centre of all of it registers nothing at all.

Own a hand-painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace

The smallest marks in this painting are the ones that carry it. The blood on her throat is a handful of fine red threads, drawn with a brush of a few hairs, each one only a fraction of a millimetre wide where the thorn enters the skin. They are what turn a decorative necklace into an instrument. At any reproduction size those threads are on the edge of what a printing process can resolve — they either thicken into blunt red marks or drop out altogether, and the painting loses its sting. Drawn by hand with a fine brush in oils, they stay threads, and the necklace does what Kahlo made it to do.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is a modest upright portrait and reads well at intimate scale.
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