Suicide of Dorothy Hale. Dorothy Hale
had been the wife of Gardiner Hale, a well-to-do American portrait painter
who had died in a crash during the 1930s. Without her husband to support
her, Dorothy Hale ran into financial difficulties that she was unable to
solve. On the morning of October 21, 1938, she committed suicide by throwing
herself out the window of her suite in the Hampshire House building.
Clare Booth Luce, publisher of the magazine "Vanity Fair" and friend to both Dorothy Hale and Frida Kahlo, commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of Dorothy, for the sake of Dorothy's mother.
She was shocked when she saw the finished piece. The painting depicts Dorothy's fall, first showing her as a tiny figure against the backdrop of the Hampshire House, then as a larger shape tumbling through the clouds and, finally, as a bloody corpse on the ground. The frame of the picture was decorated with trickles of blood.
The publisher's first impulse was to have the painting destroyed, but she was persuaded by friends to keep it.