In Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Frida Kahlo painted a necklace of thorns pressing into her throat and a dead hummingbird, a Mexican love charm, hanging from it. Made in 1940, the picture is usually read as her pain over Diego Rivera, the muralist she had divorced at the end of 1939 and would marry again in December 1940.
Kahlo stands before large green leaves and looks straight out of the canvas. A spider monkey pulls at the thorns behind one shoulder, and a black cat crouches behind the other. The canvas is small, about 24 by 18 inches, and belongs to the Harry Ransom Center, a museum and archive at the University of Texas in Austin.
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That reading puts Rivera at the center of the picture. The man who kept it for the rest of his life was someone else.
Nickolas Muray was a Hungarian-born photographer in New York, and for a time he was Kahlo's lover. Their affair ended in 1939. Soon afterward the portrait was his. Accounts differ on how: one says Muray bought it to help Kahlo through a difficult financial period, another that she gave it to him directly.
Either way, it hung in the living room of his New York apartment, in a simple wooden frame, until he died in 1965. The marriage reading leaves that out.
The two relationships that ended in 1939
Kahlo and Rivera had married in 1929, and the marriage had already broken once. In 1934 Rivera had an affair with her sister Cristina.
In 1939 she traveled to France and then to New York, and Muray was among her lovers that year. By the end of the year she and Rivera were divorced.
Kahlo was left heartbroken and lonely. In 1940 she traveled without Rivera to San Francisco to see Dr. Leo Eloesser, a doctor who had treated her before. That year she painted a dead hummingbird hanging from the thorns, the kind of bird still sold in Mexican markets.
What You'll Discover
What a dead bird promises in Mexico.
What the monkey and cat are doing.
Whose suffering the thorns recall.
What the marriage became.