Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot by Frida Kahlo

Autorretrato con chango y loro was painted in the beginning of the nineteen-forties, when Frida Kahlo, after gaining international fame through exhibitions in New York and Paris, was trying to speed up her production in order to make a living from painting.

The work follows a standard compositional format used in portraits since the early nineteen-twenties: the subject, seen from the waist or chest up, occupies a narrow space between the picture plane and a wall of vegetation.

Two hair braids are intertwined with thick green wool yarn, tied up together and rolled up on the upper part of her head, as the typical fashion of native women from Central and South Mexico.

Kahlo is wearing a short "huipil" with yellow machine-sewn embroidery, a traditional garment used by women from the isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Spider monkeys and different varieties of parrots were part of a large and constantly changing collection of animals in Kahlo's Coyoacán home.

It is unclear what exactly animals meant to the artist: beloved pets, funny alter egos, hyperactive contrasts to her calm gaze, or surrogates for absent children.

Kahlo’s work is not a naïve complacency in classical painting: it is deeply and consciously linked to a broader art history, from mannerism to the German New Objectivity and even surrealism, with which she was related despite her statements expressing the contrary.

Kahlo and her pets are arranged in front of a set of brownish plants; the closely intertwined shapes closely resemble the dried inflorescences of bromeliads (such as Tillandsia cyanea), perhaps cut from her garden or purchased at the market for one of her paintings.