Frida Kahlo’s Portrait of Dorothy Hale “El Suicidio de Dorothy Hale”

In the early morning hours of October 21, 1938, actress Dorothy Hale was found dead on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, the Hampshire House, on Central Park South in New York City. Her death was quickly ruled a suicide. Twelve days later, socialite and playwright, Clare Boothe Luce, met famed surrealist Frida Kahlo at the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Frida Kahlo was asking questions about the apparent suicide when Luce spontaneously surprised the crowd at the Julien Levy Gallery and hired Kahlo to paint a portrait of Dorothy Hale as a gift for her grieving mother. After much deliberation, Kahlo painted one of her most famous paintings, “El Suicidio de Dorothy Hale”. But it was not a beautiful portrait of Hale as Luce had anticipated. Instead, the painting depicted the actual death sequence of Dorothy Hale falling in stages from her apartment window and landing on the sidewalk. Initially, Luce wanted the painting destroyed. Instead, she had sections of the canvas painted over and then placed it in storage for several decades before donating it anonymously to the Phoenix Art Museum.

​

When author and art curator Myra Bairstow became fascinated with Frida Kahloʼs famous painting, she began a captivating journey that unexpectedly lasted over a decade. Her research of “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” led her to find many inaccuracies in the story left behind by Clare Luce. She also discover that Harry Hopkins, President Franklin Rooseveltʼs top advisor, supervised the press coverage of Haleʼs death with the assistance of key White House officials. Myra was invited to lecture on her findings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when the painting was included in the exhibition “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. Myra is currently working on a documentary about Dorothy Hale that will explore how the influence of power and politics erased Dorothy’s life and almost destroyed one of Kahlo’s masterpieces.