Frida Kahlo - Perfil Maya, Self-portrait 1943

As it happens with most of the great painters who generate the history of modern Latin
Self Portrait with Monkey It was made in the early 1940s or so, when Frida Kahlo, having
gained international fame through exhibitions in New York and Paris, was trying to
accelerate her production in order to make a living from painting.
The work follows a standard compositional format used in portraits and self-portraits of
the early 1920s: the subject, seen from the waist or chest up, occupies a narrow space
between the picture plane and a wall with a Mayan profile.
In most of these self-portraits, Kahlo's position only varies slightly; here, he appears to
turn slightly to his right: if this is a mirror image, he actually rotates to the left and turns
his eyes to look forward; but it is more likely that the artist painted the portraits of her
from photographs.
Her clothing, her hairstyle, and the accompanying jumpsuit, as well as the background,
all deserve careful analysis, as they connect the work to other related paintings, but also
distinguish it from similar compositions.
Kahlo's self-portrait is executed with rigorously controlled brushstrokes – except on the
Monkey's fur, typical of the paintings he completed at the height of his career. The direct
and frontal presentation of the character follows a model partly inspired by popular
portraits of the 19th century, a type that Kahlo and Rivera collected and exhibited in their
family home in Coyoacán, which both artists shared at the time. But Kahlo's work is not
exactly naive provincial, nor was it considered that way by her dealers, critics and
collectors. In fact, his painting is deeply and consciously linked to a broader history of art,
which ranges from Mannerism to Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity, and includes
Surrealism, to which he adhered despite public statements to the contrary (due more to
André Breton's political loyalties rather than his aesthetic ideas).
Costume elements derive from pre-Columbian and European sources, and are
emblematic of mestizaje or cultural mixing. Although here in subtle form, they form
part of his much more theatrical and (occasionally) extravagant style of attire, which was
both political - in that it claimed a nationalist identity based on indigenous culture - and
personal - in that it erased the German-Hungarian heritage of his father in favor of his
mother's Oaxacan roots.