AUTORRETRATO EN MINIATURA
signed Mara and dedicated Para Bartoli con amor on the reverse
oil on thin panel with tin border
2 by 1 5/8 in.
5 by 4.2 cm
Painted in 1946.
ESTIMATE 800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
PROVENANCE
José Bartoli, New York (gift of the artist)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Art, November 20, 2000, lot 11, illustrated
in color
EXHIBITION
London, Tate Modern, Frida Kahlo, June 9-October 9, 2005
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Frida Kahlo, October 27, 2007-January 20, 2008;
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 20-May 18, 2008; San Francisco,
San Francisco Museum of Art, June 16-September 28, 2008, no. 65, p. 211, illustrated
in color
LITERATURE
Hayden Herrera, Frida, A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, 1983, p. 370
Martha Zamora, El Pincel de la Angustia, Mexico City, 1987, p. 385
Helga Pringnitz-Poda, Salomon Grimberg and Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahlo, Das
Gesamtwerl, Frankfurt, 1988, p. 160, no. 114, illustrated in color, p. 257
Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo, The Paintings, New York, 1991, p. 116, illustrated in
color, p. 242, 254
Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo, New York, 2007, no. 65, p. 211, illustrated in color
CATALOGUE NOTE
Frida Kahlo's oval Autorretrato en miniatura is the smallest painting she ever made. It is
also one of her most powerful. The power does not come, as it does in her portraits of
herself injured or in tears, from the urgency with which she presents her predicament.
Rather it comes from the force of her presence. Within this tiny oval she has packed a
charge of energy that brings to mind the Surrealist poet André Breton's description of
her art as "a ribbon around a bomb."
Dressed fit to kill in a red Tehuana blouse, ornate silver earrings and an exotic
necklace, Frida looks ready to take on the world. Her sartorial choices had complex
motives. When she married the muralist Diego Rivera in 1929 she began to dress in
native Mexican costumes, in part to please her husband, in part to assert her Mexican
identity and her allegiance to la raza, and in part to hide her slight limp cause by a
childhood bout with polio and a bus accident at the age of eighteen. No less important,
she loved the sensation her picturesque clothes made as she played beauty to Rivera's
beast.
Frida's long black hair, braided and pinned to her head, is topped by an outlandish
bunch of poppy-like flowers with dark centers. The flowers are arranged so that they
look visceral. In the top center of the miniature Autorretrato en miniatura red petals
come together to form a dark crevasse that suggests female genitals. In Kahlo's work
such fleshy flowers could signify pain or joy. In the case of the miniature, I believe they
stand for passion. The way Kahlo painted the flowers out onto the picture's frame
makes her presence immediate and palpable. She bursts out of the picture and into our
space.
That is where she wanted to be; unlike paintings in which Kahlo confronts the viewer
(and her own self) with her sufferings, this tiny self-portrait had a happy purpose. It was
Fig. 2
Photograph that Frida Kahlo sent
to José Bartoli
almost certainly made as a gift for a friend, but not necessarily for the friend, artist José
Bartoli, to whom she finally gave it. Her self-portrait was a substitute Frida that placed
her close to someone she loved. In that way it recalls the oval photographic portraits of
the Victorian era, especially to photographs which were inserted in lockets. Kahlo's
photographer father must sometimes have taken such portraits and, as his assistant,
Kahlo must have learned to retouch them.
Some time in the mid-1940s Frida Kahlo gave this miniature Autorretrato en miniatura
to her lover, Catalonian artist Jose Bartoli (1910-1995) who lived in Mexico from 1942
to 1946. Bartoli was handsome, intelligent, humorous, and passionately political. His
voice was deep and soft; he is remembered as having been exceptionally gentle but at
the same time strong. He was also a great story-teller with a dramatic past about which
to recount tales. Having fought in the Spanish Civil War, he fled from Spain in 1939,
and then suffered horrors in prisons and in concentration and refugee camps in France
and Germany. After escaping to South Africa in 1942 when he was thirty-two he made
his way to Mexico. In the following year, along with the Mexican painter Alberto
Gironella and other friends, he began to put out the magazine Mundo en México. In
1944 he published Campos de concentración (concentration camps), a group of
drawings he made secretly in the French and German camps and that document the
cruelties to which he had born witness.
Exactly when her love affair with Bartoli began is not known. They definitely were
involved with each other in 1946 and the relationship had probably gone on for at least
a year before that. It is said that they talked about running away together and going to
Paris, but their mutual friend Ella Wolfe warned Frida that she would be miserable, for
the real love of her life was Rivera.
Among Kahlo's twenty or so letters to Bartoli is a love letter dated "August 29." She did
not give the year. After the day and month she wrote: "our first afternoon alone," which
