Der Selbstmord der Dorothy Hale

In October 1938 a New York socialite named Dorothy Hale, out of money and out of luck, jumped from a high window of her Manhattan apartment building. A close friend, the writer and editor Clare Boothe Luce, commissioned Frida Kahlo to paint a remembrance of her, expecting a tasteful portrait to give the dead woman's grieving mother. What arrived in 1939 horrified her. Kahlo had painted the suicide itself, Hale falling through the air in stages and lying broken on the ground below, her name lettered across the bottom as if on a Mexican votive tablet. Luce thought of destroying it, then had a sculptor friend paint her own name out of the inscription and put the picture into storage. She gave it away anonymously years later, and it now hangs in Phoenix.