Thinking About Death

Thinking About Death (Pensando en la muerte) is a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, painted in 1943 in oil on canvas mounted on masonite; it belongs to the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City. Kahlo shows her head and shoulders nearly frontal among large veined leaves and crossing branches; on her forehead sits a small roundel containing a skull and crossed bones against a miniature landscape.

The roundel — a picture within the picture rather than a wound or a tattoo — has been described as a face within a face: while her own features look out impassively, the skull introduces death as the explicit object of her thought. The vegetation that presses close around her can read as shelter or obstruction, and scholars have placed the image variously within a pre-Hispanic life-and-death cycle — Andrea Kettenmann invokes the goddess Coatlicue, the prints of José Guadalupe Posada and Day of the Dead imagery — and within the European vanitas tradition.

The picture dates from the years when Kahlo was teaching at the La Esmeralda art school and later, as her health allowed, at the Casa Azul with the students who called themselves Los Fridos; it measures 44.5 by 37 centimetres. No statement by Kahlo fixes the emblem's meaning — fear, defiance, resignation or irony all remain possible readings of a face that refuses to explain itself.