The Suicide of Dorothy Hale

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (El suicidio de Dorothy Hale) is an oil-on-masonite painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, completed in 1939, measuring 60.4 by 48.6 cm in its painted frame, and held by the Phoenix Art Museum.

Dorothy Hale was an American socialite and aspiring actress who, in the early morning of 21 October 1938, threw herself from the window of her apartment at Hampshire House on Central Park South in New York. Her close friend Clare Boothe Luce, an admirer of Kahlo, commissioned the painter to make a recuerdo — a remembrance portrait — for 400 dollars, expecting a conventional, idealized memorial of their mutual friend.

What Kahlo delivered in August 1939, after the picture had been shown in Paris that March, was instead a graphic narrative in the manner of a Mexican retablo: Hale appears once falling through the clouds beneath the tower, and again lying dead on the pavement in the black velvet dress she had worn that night, still wearing the corsage of small yellow roses given to her by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. An inscription band along the bottom records the place, date and hour of the death and originally named Luce as the commissioner. Luce was so shocked by the picture that she nearly fainted and considered destroying it; instead she had Noguchi paint out her own name in the legend and left the crated canvas with the Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield.

Crowninshield's heirs returned the painting to Luce decades later, and she gave it anonymously to the Phoenix Art Museum, which retains ownership. The museum reports that it is the work most frequently requested for loan in its entire collection.