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Course: The Museum of Modern Art > Unit 1
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"Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair" by Frida Kahlo, 1940 | MoMA Education
A MoMA educator discusses how she teaches "Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair" by Frida Kahlo, 1940. Visit MoMA Learning for more teaching and learning resources. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.
Want to join the conversation?
- Who was she married to that had so much fame and so much success?(5 votes)
- Frida was married to Diego Rivera, another famous artist from Mexico. Here's a painting Frida made of them together. http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/Frida-and-Diego-large.html(4 votes)
- How do artists draw themselves? Do they use mirror?(4 votes)
- They use a mirror because it is easier to look at themselves and not have someone else do it for them but it depends on the picture itself.(2 votes)
- What is the stuff on the ground?(2 votes)
- At1:03the curator mentions that it is hair that the woman cut off.(3 votes)
- Who was she married to that had so much fame and so much success?(1 vote)
- Frida was married to Diego Rivera, a famous painter.(4 votes)
- this is one of my ultimate favorite paintings of all time. its so beautiful and shows a greater message.(1 vote)
- What does the song at the top mean?(1 vote)
- This picture has a very nice mood to it. The artist is brilliant. Most of the time I get my pictures from www.yahoo.com(1 vote)
Video transcript
- My name is Jackie Delamatre. I'm a School Programs Educator here at the Museum of Modern Art. And this piece is by Frida Kahlo. It's called Self-Portrait
with Cropped Hair. I really like to teach
from this object because to me, the conversations
here really unfold like a story, a series of observations that lead into further interpretations until at the end, we're
delving into this whole area of feminism, what is beauty, of a question of a woman's
place in the world. What usually happens is they're noticing who is this person. They're starting to
think about the clothing. They're thinking about the hair. They're thinking about
the facial structure. They're thinking about
the earring they can see. And their main questions
to themselves are, "Is this a woman or is this a man?" And then we start to see and
notice the hair on the ground. And then they start to see
the scissors and they say, "Actually, maybe this is a
woman who cut-off her hair." But not only is it a woman
who cut-off her hair, it's a woman who's wearing a suit, so then it brings up another question: "Why is she wanting to look like a man?" That's usually how they phrase it. Then, what it comes to is the top. There are musical notes there and they're in Spanish. And it says, "Look, "if I loved you, it was
because of your hair. "But now that you are without hair, "I don't love you anymore." One reason that I think this
piece is really relevant, really exciting to students, is the fact that this is something that they're dealing with in their
social lives all the time. People are not necessarily
just going to like them for what's on the inside and
feeling the unfairness of that, the injustice of it. So, in this case, not
only the injustice of somebody having said, "I only
loved you for your hair," but also the injustice of what it was like to be a
woman artist at that time, to be married to somebody who had so much fame and so much
success as a male artist, and really having to wait posthumously to get the fame and the
love and the respect that Frida Kahlo now has
and I think really deserves.