Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky

Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, also called Between the Curtains, is a 1937 oil-on-masonite painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, held by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the only Kahlo in the permanent collection of a Washington museum.

In January 1937 the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova arrived in Mexico after Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera persuaded the government of Lázaro Cárdenas to grant them asylum; the couple settled in Kahlo's family home, the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. Kahlo and Trotsky began a brief affair that ended by July of that year. On 7 November 1937 — Trotsky's birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution — she presented him with this portrait, which he hung in his study.

Kahlo shows herself standing full-length on a stage-like space between parted white curtains, a format drawn from the Mexican retablo devotional paintings she collected. She wears a version of the Tehuantepec dress she favored — embroidered skirt, fringed shawl, flowers and red yarn in her braided hair — and holds a bouquet and a letter reading, in Spanish, 'To Leon Trotsky with great affection, I dedicate this painting November 7, 1937. Frida Kahlo. In San Angel. Mexico.' The sheet measures 30 by 24 inches (about 76 by 61 cm).

When Trotsky was assassinated in 1940, Kahlo reportedly wanted to destroy the painting; the visiting American writer Clare Boothe Luce persuaded her to spare it and acquired it herself. Luce gave it in 1988 to Wilhelmina Holladay, co-founder of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where it has become one of the most popular works. André Breton had praised the portrait after seeing it in Trotsky's study, and because Kahlo destroyed other records of the affair, it remains the principal physical testimony of the episode.