Frida Kahlo 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird' 1940 Art Exhibition Poster

Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait, painted in oil on masonite shortly after her divorce from Diego Rivera and the end of her affair with photographer Nickolas Muray. The thorns draw blood from her neck; a dead hummingbird hangs from them like a pendant. A spider monkey and a black cat sit behind her shoulders against dense tropical foliage. The painting belongs to a concentrated period of self-portraiture that followed Kahlo's return to Mexico from New York and Paris. Muray bought this work directly from the artist and it now belongs to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Of approximately 200 paintings Kahlo produced in her lifetime, around 55 are self-portraits. This one is among the most symbolically layered: the thorn necklace carries echoes of Christ's crown of thorns, the hummingbird is a Mexican folk symbol of luck in love (here shown dead), and the monkey - one of several pet spider monkeys Kahlo kept at the Casa Azul - tugs at the thorns, tightening them. Kahlo was known within Surrealist circles during her lifetime, having exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938 and in a group exhibition organised by André Breton in Paris in 1939. But her wider international reputation grew slowly after her death in 1954, gathering momentum through the 1970s before the major retrospectives and publications of the 1980s brought her work to a broad public audience. Our poster places the painting in a late 1970s Parisian commercial gallery context, using Galerie Fontaine - a fictional gallery in the 15th arrondissement - with French-language text and the split opening hours typical of smaller Parisian dealers of the period.