NEW YORK – Tears flow down Frida Kahlo’s face and the Mexican painter’s self-portrait “Diego and I” flies to 34.9 million dollars, smashing two previous records: the one for the most expensive painting by the artist after ” Two Nudes in a Forest “, beaten by Christie’s in 2016 for 8 million dollars, and the one for the work of a Latin American artist hitherto held by” The Rivals “by Diego Rivera, the husband of Kahlo, who in this painting portrays her in a medallion in the center of her forehead. Completed about five years before her death in 1954 and offered by Sotheby’s in New York, the oil painting is one of Kahlo’s final self-portraits and an example of that disturbing intimacy that convinced collectors and experts to point to her as one of the figures. most representative in the artistic panorama of the twentieth century.
The self-portrait, on which an anonymous man had irrevocably committed $ 30 million before the auction even started, opens a window on the turbulent marriage with the muralist, portrayed by Frida in the center of the forehead as a metaphorical third eye above her real ones. from which tears flow. That year Diego had embarked on a relationship with the actress Maria Felix: “The painting expresses anguish and pain, but tonight’s is not only the height of revenge: it is also the confirmation of the extraordinary talent and global charm exercised by Frida “, said Anna Di Stasi, the Sotheby’s specialist for Latin American art who picked up the winning bet over the phone. A spokesman for the auction house identified the buyer Eduardo F. Costantini, the founder of Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires), who assigned it to his private collection.
Frida Kahlo and Rivera had married twice, first in 1928 and then in 1940: he was already a famous 36-year-old painter when she, an art student still a teenager, had her eye on him. “I have had two major accidents in my life: the first when a bus hit me, the other accident was Diego,” she wrote of the stormy report. The affair with Felix became a public scandal and in the newspapers of the time it was said that Diego wanted to marry his lover once he was divorced from Frida: “I love Frida but my presence is bad for her health”, said the muralist . As for Frida, she publicly joked about it, but in the self-portrait “Diego and I” her emotions are there for all to see: with her braid usually well knotted loose on her shoulders that almost seems to want to strangle her and her gaze veiled by tears like that of a Madonna of the seven sorrows.
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Source From: Ansa
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