Self-Portrait with Stalin

Self-Portrait with Stalin is a 1954 oil-on-masonite painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 59 by 39 cm, in the collection of the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico City — the Casa Azul where she lived and died.

In the last years of her life Kahlo gave some of her work an explicitly political dimension, painting subjects meant to serve the Communist Party. In this portrait she depicts herself seated at the right of the composition, wrapped in a red shawl, before a much larger portrait of Joseph Stalin standing on an easel, while a yellow-green globe floats in the upper right. Stalin had died the year before, in 1953, and commentators have read the picture as a votive image in which Kahlo casts the Soviet leader in the role of a savior, much as she had cast her surgeon in the Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Dr. Farill.

The handling is noticeably looser than in her earlier, meticulously detailed paintings, a change generally attributed to the strong medication she was taking in this period of failing health.

It was among the last works Kahlo made before her death in July 1954. The Casa Azul also holds a separate, unfinished portrait of Stalin in oil and pencil, a distinct composition without the figure of the artist herself, as well as a graphite drawing preparatory to this self-portrait.