Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot

"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 and self-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 that sometimes reaches the edges. This self- portrait is executed with rigorously controlled brushstrokes, typical of the paintings she completed at the peak of her career. The direct, frontal presentation of the character follows a model inspired in part by popular nineteenth-century portraiture, a type that Kahlo and Rivera collected and displayed in their family home in Coyoacán, which the artists shared at the time. Yet, Kahlo’s work is not exactly a naïve complacency in such format, since it is deeply and consciously linked to a broader art history, from mannerism to the Neue Sachlichkeit—or new objectivity—and even surrealism, with which she was related despite her statements expressing the contrary.