A Frida Kahlo self-portrait smashes records at auction : NPR
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s “Diego y yo” set a new auction document for artwork by a Latin American artist, offering for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening.
Tolga Akmen/AFP by using Getty Pictures
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Tolga Akmen/AFP by using Getty Photos
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s “Diego y yo” established a new auction record for artwork by a Latin American artist, marketing for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s on Tuesday night.
Tolga Akmen/AFP by way of Getty Photos
Frida Kahlo’s “Diego y yo,” a painting of herself with her husband’s image on her brow, sold for $34.9 million in a Sotheby’s auction Tuesday night time. The artwork seller explained it as “the previous of her good self-portraits.”
It really is the most income ever paid out at auction for a work by a Latin American artist. The price is also far more than triple the best sum beforehand paid for a Kahlo function in an auction.
It can be not the initially time “Diego y yo” has made heritage: when the portray sold for $1.4 million in 1990, Kahlo became the initial Latin American artist to surpass the $1 million mark at auction.
Kahlo developed the portray in 1949, 20 yrs soon after she initial married the painter Diego Rivera. It marked a time when the Mexican artist was at the top of her capabilities, and also when her wellbeing was declining: Kahlo experienced quite a few surgical procedures on her spine in 1949, and she started a 9-month hospital remain. When she emerged, she often relied on a wheelchair.
In “Diego y yo,” Kahlo depicts herself with three tears flowing from her eyes, with her husband superimposed previously mentioned her famed eyebrows.
“She has such a strong gaze. She just stares at you, and she just cuts through,” said Sotheby’s Anna Di Stasi, director of Latin American artwork. “And people a few tears rolling down her check are just the most powerful tears I have ever witnessed in the record of art.”
By 1949, Kahlo and Rivera experienced reconciled numerous of their variations in the turbulent romantic relationship, for the duration of which both of those of the artists engaged in a number of affairs. But the painting is greatly seen as Kahlo’s expression of suffering more than Rivera’s affair with her pal, the actress María Félix — Rivera painted a portrait of a hardly clothed Félix in that exact same calendar year.
“This entirely destroys her,” Di Stasi mentioned of Kahlo’s predicament.
With a last sale price tag approaching $35 million, “Diego y yo” obliterates the past auction file for a Latin American piece of artwork that was set by Rivera’s painting “The Rivals.”
Kahlo’s partner painted “The Rivals” a couple several years just after they married it fetched a $9.8 million cost at a Christie’s auction in 2018.
“You could connect with tonight’s final result the greatest revenge, but in actuality it is the greatest validation of Kahlo’s amazing expertise and world appeal,” Di Stasi said in a news release about the sale.
The file for the highest price tag ever paid at auction for a piece by a woman artist is held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold at Sotheby’s a couple yrs ago for additional than $44 million.
