Frida Kahlo's 'Diego y yo' sells for record-breaking $34.9 million at Sotheby's auction
Wyatte Grantham-Philips
A self-portrait by world-renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $34.9 million at a Sotheby's New York auction late Tuesday, marking the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of Latin American art.
Completed in 1949, "Diego y yo" (Diego and I) was one of Kahlo's final self-portraits before her death in 1954 at the age of 47. Scholars say that "Diego y yo" reflects Kahlo's turbulent second marriage with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose three-eyed face sits on Kahlo's forehead in the oil painting – right above her two, teary eyes and flushed cheeks.
"Diego y yo" was acquired by the Eduardo F. Costantini Collection. Sotheby's identified Costantini as founder of Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. The auction house did not reveal the seller.
The painting was last auctioned in 1990 for $1.4 million. According to the New York Times, Tuesday's sale set a new high for the most expensive artwork sold by a Latin American artist – surpassing a benchmark set in 2018 by one of Rivera's paintings, which sold at auction for $9.76 million (the equivalent of $10.75 million today, accounting for inflation).
“Frida is now on the wish list of collectors who collect great masterpieces of modern art," Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s chairman and worldwide head of global fine art sales, told the outlet.
Sotheby's emphasizes that Kahlo's "most recurrent genre" was her self portrait – which is underlined by how iconic the image of her face continues to be today – from the artist's red lips and thick unibrow, to rich, dark hair often adorned with flowers or braids. According to the auction house, a third of Kahlo's artwork are self-portraits.
Some suggest that Kahlo painted "Diego y yo" in response to Rivera's affair with Mexican actress Maria Felix, who was a close friend of Kahlo's. Publicly, Kahlo joked about the affair. Still, the painting arguably communicates a great deal of pain.
Video:Frida Kahlo's private letters with Diego Rivera exhibited in Mexico
While detailing the history of both Kahlo and "Diego y yo," Sotheby's quotes some of Kahlo's words describing her relationship with Rivera: "Probably some people expect of me a very personal, 'feminine,' anecdotal, diverting portrait [of Rivera], full of complaints…Perhaps they hope to hear from me laments about ‘how much one suffers’ living with a man like Diego. But I do not believe that the banks of a river suffer for letting the water run, or that the earth suffers because it rains, or the atom suffers discharging its energy…for me everything has a natural compensation. Within my difficult and obscure role of ally of an extraordinary being, I have the same reward as a green dot within a quantity of red: I have the reward of 'equilibrium.'"
