'Created amid high drama': The animals that symbolise pain and passion in a Frida Kahlo self-portrait

A hummingbird, a spider monkey, a black cat and dragonflies – what the animal imagery in an iconic 1940 painting tells us about the artist's trauma, resilience and defiant desire.

"Fridamania" is in full force. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's superstardom was sealed after her death (in 1954, aged 47), and she remains an unmistakably present cultural figure today. Her imagery – bold, sensuous, immediate yet fabulously intricate – inspires modern artists and activists, and adorns copious merchandise.

Kahlo's tumultuous life story – including her catastrophic injury, lifelong disability, her rocky marriage to painter Diego Rivera, and her many affairs with men and women – is evident in her powerful self-portraits. Her art helped revolutionise the genre: transforming the self-portrait from formal pose to fluid expression, revealing unapologetic beauty, raw trauma and defiant desires.

Of the 55 self-portraits she painted, a significant majority also feature animals – a lifelong love of the artist. The lead image of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, Frida: The Making of an Icon, is an arresting 1940 masterwork, Untitled Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.

Within this powerful painting there is a wealth of information about Kahlo and her life, and by exploring its nuanced animal imagery it's possible to unlock the artist's most intimate vulnerabilities, strengths and passions. At the same time, the portrait is a glimpse into the important role that her own beloved creatures played in her life.

The painting's dense, verdant foliage backdrop seems to emit a tropical heat; the lush green leaves contrast with the darker hues of the animals around Kahlo, though these, too, are astonishingly detailed – the cat's glinting eyes and arched back with raised fur, the monkey's look of engrossed mischief. We are up close and personal with Kahlo herself: her cheeks and lips flushed; the trickles of darkening blood seeping down her collar; her expression stoical in her suffering.

This particular painting was created amid high drama. Kahlo had just divorced Rivera (they would remarry later that year), and her long-standing affair with US photographer Nickolas Muray was also ending.

She is depicted as the central figure in a scene that is densely loaded with symbolism. Around her neck, Kahlo wears a hummingbird (a creature traditionally associated with freedom, as well as the Aztec god of war, seemingly lifeless here); at her right shoulder, her pet monkey (gifted to her by Rivera) toys with her thorny necklace, drawing blood; at her left looms a portentous black cat.

"The way that she stares at the viewer directly: not confrontationally, but without any resistance or reticence, is quite striking," Tate Modern curator Tobias Ostrander tells the BBC. "There's also a folklore reference to the hummingbird itself: a tradition of wearing a hummingbird as a talisman, to get a lost love back." He also points out that the hummingbird's shape echoes that of Kahlo's distinctive "monobrow": "it's bringing this dialogue between that object and her own face." 

Ostrander says, "She lived........

© BBC