My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) is a 1936 oil-and-tempera-on-zinc painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 30.7 by 34.5 cm, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In it Kahlo reimagines what a family tree might look like. Her parents appear at the center in their wedding clothes; above them at the left, superimposed over the mountains and cacti of Mexico, are her maternal grandparents, of mixed Indigenous and Spanish descent, while at the right her German paternal grandparents float over the Atlantic Ocean that her father crossed to reach Mexico. On the patio of the blue-painted Casa Azul where she was born stands Kahlo herself as a nude child, holding a red ribbon that links her to her ancestors; she is also present as a fetus attached to her mother's body, with a sperm, an ovum and a pollinated flower below.

Kahlo painted the work a year after Nazi Germany enacted the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, which forbade interracial marriage and classified ancestry with genealogical charts. Her own celebration of a mixed German-Mexican bloodline has been read as a direct rebuttal of such racial ideology. It was also the first of her portraits to treat the family and its genealogy, a theme she returned to late in life.

The painting appeared in Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938 under the title My Family, where the psychiatrist Allan Roos bought it; Roos and B. Mathieu Roos gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1976.