Internal lyrical motives in Frida Kahlo’s ’Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair’

On view through September 12, 2026, the MoMA blockbuster Frida and Diego: The Last Dream showcases works by two titans of twentieth-century art, equally known for their passionate but tumultuous relationship. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, features a set design by Jon Bausor, who designed the opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, scheduled to open May 14 in New York. One of the central works of art in the MoMA show is Kahlo’s iconic “Self-Portrait witih Cropped Hair,” painted in 1940 in the wake of the artist couple’s infamous divorce. It is a painting unlike any other by Kahlo, and it is the subject of a new, expanded hardcover edition of Jodi Roberts’ classic study, Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair—featuring 40 reproductions, including the artist’s most celebrated self-portraits, additional illustrations and photographs—and a die-cut front cover. “Her self-portraiture, the genre she favored above all others, seems to divulge the subjective experience of an artist keenly attuned to her deepest psychological urges and core emotional truths,” Roberts writes. “Kahlo insisted that her paintings flowed from an interior source: ‘My work consisted of eliminating everything that did not come from the internal lyrical motives that impelled me to paint.’”

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