Frida Kahlo’s ‘Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird’ (1940)

Favourite purchase from my trip to London this summer: Frida Kahlo’s ‘Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird’ (1940)

 

The poster I purchased from Tate, London framed at my home in Dublin

There is something about this painting that keeps drawing me towards it, even though it is steeped in pain and tragedy. Perhaps it is the colors. Or perhaps it is the way Frida holds her head high, her eyes looking straight ahead, even while surrounded by symbols of suffering. She looks so peaceful and composed even when life was reaching its hardest point.

I studied more about Frida recently and, for a while, I was completely hooked on her. So, I was especially happy that I got to see ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ at Tate Modern this summer. The exhibition explores not just Frida the artist, but the many versions of Frida she created and the complicated woman behind the icon.

Books of reference

Nickolas Muray

Nick and Frida

The painting was made in 1940, shortly after both Frida’s divorce from Diego Rivera and the end of her decade-long, on and off affair with the photographer Nickolas Muray. Frida and Diego remarried later that same year. Frida had told Nick that this painting was for him and gave it to him once she completed the painting. It remained in his New York home for more than two decades.

Nick was not simply a man who appeared in Frida’s life for a moment. Their relationship was passionate and complicated, and even after their affair ended, they remained friends until her death. What makes this painting even more special to me is knowing how deeply Frida felt about Nick. In her letters, she wrote to him with extraordinary tenderness, telling him that she adored him and had never loved anyone in quite the same way. And in her writings around the time of her divorce, she identified her love for Nick as one of the principal reasons she left Diego. 

Knowing the importance of Nick in Frida’s life and that this painting passed directly from Frida into Nick’s hands makes this poster feel even more special to me.

The spider Monkey

Diego Rivera had gifted Frida a spider monkey, which appears beside her in the portrait. To me, it almost feels like another quiet expression of a relationship she could never quite let go of.

Frida and Diego remarried in 1940, despite everything that had happened between them, including his affair with her own sister. What I found particularly interesting was that Frida reportedly set a few conditions before agreeing to marry Diego again, one of them was that she wouldn’t take any money from Diego and would share the household expenses equally. I really loved that even though it was little late, she finally decided to not depend on a man financially.

Another one of the conditions she put forward was that they would not have sex, as she felt she had developed a psychological barrier that prevented her from doing so. All of which was accepted by Diego.

It made me wonder about the nature of their relationship after everything they had been through and, more broadly, about how platonic love can exist between two people who had once shared such an intense and passionate relationship. For someone as expressive, sensual and emotionally intense as Frida, the idea of continuing to love someone while no longer being physically intimate with them feels both fascinating and difficult to understand.

One of the hardest lessons in life, I think, is learning to let go of what hurts us.

But who are we to judge?

I say that knowing how difficult letting go can be. I have held on to my own bloodline even when it was hurting me from the inside out.

Perhaps that is why I find Frida so compelling. She is so much more than one decision, or any single choice she made in her life. She was complicated, wounded, passionate, resilient and unapologetically herself. Frida wasn't simply choosing between a “good” relationship and a “bad” one. She was deeply attached to two very different people(Nick and Diego), and her own writings show just how conflicted she was.

And this portrait is full of little symbols.

The butterflies, the dragonfly-like flowers, the black cat, the monkey, the thorns and the hummingbird have all been interpreted in different ways. As symbols of love, death, hope, suffering, resurrection, Mexican culture and Frida’s own relationships and identity. There is no single agreed-upon meaning for everything in the painting, which is perhaps what makes it so fascinating.

 

The hummingbird

Tate describes it as a ‘dead hummingbird’, hanging from the thorn necklace like a pendant.

But when I look at it, I see a living hummingbird. Perhaps that is simply my own interpretation, but I prefer it that way.

Hummingbirds in Mexican folk traditions have been associated with love and luck, and I like to imagine that Frida saw something hopeful in it perhaps even the luck of having met Nick. I know that is my reading of the painting rather than something we can say with certainty about Frida’s intention.

 

This rather small oil on canvas painting, measuring approximately 24 by 18 inches (61 × 46 cm), is now part of the Nickolas Muray Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The thorn necklace

To me, it is the life she adorned herself with even when it was hurting her.

Beauty and pain existing together.

She lived with an extraordinary amount of physical pain. She had polio as a child, and at eighteen she was severely injured in a devastating bus accident that left her with lifelong injuries. Her health deteriorated over the years, and she underwent numerous surgeries and endured painful medical experiences, including a miscarriage and later the amputation of her right leg.

She died in 1954, at just 47.

The black cat & The Butterflies

This was the exact reason I deliberately hid this purchase from my Amma. I am quite certain she would notice the cat before anything else and immediately demand that I throw the poster away. In her eyes, it would do nothing but invite bad luck.

The butterflies, the resurrection, the life, the love, and all the intricate layers of symbolism? I am pretty sure those would go completely unnoticed.

Amma's superstitious instincts would instantly clash with Kahlo’s deliberate artistic choices. In this self portrait of Frida Kahlo, the black cat perched on Frida's left shoulder is a complex omen. While it aligns perfectly with my Amma's fears as a universal symbol of bad luck and impending doom, Kahlo used it to mirror her own internal reality. Painted shortly after her painful divorce from Diego Rivera, the crouching cat symbolizes her profound grief, sense of betrayal, and the looming shadow of death. Tragically, while the delicate butterflies hovering above Frida’s head signify hope and spiritual rebirth, the sinister posture of the black cat suggests that misfortune is never far behind. A tense duality that my Amma would likely refuse to invite into our home.

I was initially fascinated by all the animals in the painting. Frida herself kept a collection of exotic animals at Casa Azul, her famous Blue House in Mexico City, which I very much hope to visit someday. The spider monkey in this portrait was one of the animals connected to her home and her relationship with Diego.

I had initially assumed that the monkeys must have been deeply spiritual or personal symbols for her. Spider monkeys appear repeatedly in Frida’s self-portraits; eight of her 55 self-portraits feature them and she kept them as pets at Casa Azul. But the more I learned, the more I realised that Frida’s paintings were not created in some isolated artistic bubble; she also had to make a living from her work, and the circumstances in which she painted mattered too especially after her divorce in 1939. I like that this challenged my initial assumption that every recurring image in her paintings must have had a deeply symbolic meaning. I like discovering things that challenge the romantic story I have created in my own head.

Maybe that is also why I love this painting.

There is so much happening beneath the surface although it is a straightforward piece of Art.

Love. Pain. Betrayal. Beauty. Mortality. Resilience. Desire. And, depending on how you see it, perhaps even a little bit of luck.

And perhaps that says something about why we connect with art in the first place. The artist creates it, but somewhere along the way, it becomes ours too.