The Frame

The Frame (Le cadre) is a 1938 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo — oil painted on a thin aluminium plate — set behind a Mexican folk-art painted-glass frame; it belongs to the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Kahlo bought the reverse-painted glass, decorated with birds and flowers, at a market in Santa Catarina Juquila, Oaxaca; such artisanal frames were made to hold mirrors, photographs or religious images, and she fitted her likeness to its opening.

The work is a composite object. The portrait itself measures only 28.5 by 20.7 centimetres, or 32 by 24 centimetres within the painted glass and wood surround, which the museum treats as a dissociable ensemble. Kahlo contributed the face; an unidentified craftsman had already painted the brilliant flowers and birds that give the piece its name and its devotional, ex-voto-like character.

The Frame appeared in Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, and the following year she showed it in Paris in Mexique, the exhibition organised by André Breton at the Galerie Renou et Colle. It was the only picture she sold there: bought by the French state in 1939 for the national modern collection, it is often described as the first work by a twentieth-century Mexican artist to enter a major international museum — an acquisition made through the Musée du Jeu de Paume before reaching its present home at the Centre Pompidou. On her death in 1954 the New York Times reported that she was 'said to have been the first woman artist to sell a picture to the Louvre.'