Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair is a 1940 oil-on-canvas painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 40 by 28 cm, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

It was her first self-portrait after her divorce from Diego Rivera in late 1939, made at a moment when she had resolved to support herself by selling her own work. Casting off the embroidered Tehuana dresses and flowers of her earlier self-images, she shows herself seated in a loose-fitting man's suit, one earring and heeled shoes remaining, an androgynous figure that recalls the family photographs in which she had dressed as a man.

She sits on a yellow chair against an empty, clouded background, her hair cut short, a pair of scissors open in her hand. Locks of hair lie strewn across the floor and a severed braid rests beside the chair. Across the top of the canvas run the musical notes and lyrics of a popular Mexican song: 'Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair; now that you are without hair, I don't love you anymore.' The Museum of Modern Art reads the picture as carrying both the violence of separation and a newfound autonomy.

The painting entered MoMA in 1943 as a gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Kaufmann and the museum's director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had admired it during a trip through Mexico the previous summer, when they were buying works for the collection, and Barr wrote to Kaufmann praising the 'small self-portrait of Frida sitting in a chair with close cropped hair.'