Self-Portrait with Loose Hair

Self-Portrait with Loose Hair (Autorretrato con el pelo suelto), also called Self-Portrait with Unbound Hair, is a 1947 oil-on-masonite painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 61 by 45 cm, in a private collection.

In most of Kahlo's portraits her hair is bound up; here it hangs untied in a dark mass that consumes the right side of the small canvas. She wears a traditional Mexican blouse with gold embroidery against a grey stone-like background, a leafy branch beside her head. A tattered scroll along the bottom carries her own inscription in Spanish: 'Here I painted myself, Frida Kahlo, with my reflection in the mirror. I am 37 years old and this is July, 1947. In Coyoacán, Mexico, the place where I was born.' She was in fact about to turn 40.

Scholar Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, writing on hair as a marker of indigenous feminine identity, saw in the unbound hair a gesture of 'nonconformity and disobedience to societal norms'.

The picture belonged to Louise Noun, the Des Moines feminist, collector and philanthropist, who called it her favorite work. To endow the Iowa Women's Archives she had helped to found, Noun consigned it to Christie's in New York, where on 15 May 1991 it sold for 1.65 million dollars — at the time the highest auction price for a Latin American artist, surpassing the 1.43 million paid the previous year for Kahlo's Diego y yo — and netted 1.5 million for the Archives' endowment. The buyer was reported as a Mexican private collector, Margara Garza-Sada of Monterrey.