Frida Kahlo artwork beats Latin American Artist price record

Late Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo’s final self-portraits, “Diego y yo” broke several art market records when it sold for $34.9 million, the highest price ever realized for artwork by a Latin American artist at auction.

“Diego y yo” is an intense self-portrait of the artist with an image of her husband and fellow Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, painted onto her forehead as tears stream down her cheeks and her long hair encircles her neck, almost in a chokehold.

It is one of the last of the signature portraits Kahlo painted of herself throughout her career, auction house Sotheby’s said, and was completed in 1949 when Rivera was having an affair with Mexican film actress María Félix, a friend of Kahlo’s.

The $34.9 million final price tag makes “Diego y yo” the most expensive work by a Latin American artist ever sold at auction, beating out the previous record-holder Rivera himself, whose painting “The Rivals” sold for nearly $10 million in 2018.

Kahlo’s self-portrait is also the second-most expensive artwork by a female artist, after American painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which fetched $44.4 million in 2014.

“Diego y yo” also marks a new artist record, with the final price being more than four higher than the previously most expensive painting by Kahlo, “Dos desnudos en el bosque (La tierra misma)” that sold for $8 million in2016.

The last time “Diego y yo” went to auction in 1990, it sold for $1.4 million in a historic auction that made Kahlo the first Latin American artist to sell a work for seven-figures at auction, according to Sotheby’s.

Kahlo is one of the most recognizable female painters of all time. Though she died in 1954, her work surged in popularity decades later along with the advent of the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Forbes/ Stephanie Ingbian