Frida Kahlo may have spent much of her life lying in bed in pain but she has recently been making the art world sit up and take notice.
One of the Mexican artist’s paintings is expected to set a record at auction in New York November, details have emerged of a series of extraordinary multimillion-pound private sales.
Sotheby’s, which is selling her 1940 self-portrait El Sueño (La Cama) — which translates as The Dream (The Bed) — has given it an estimate of up to $60 million.
That would make it the expensive work by a female artist sold at auction, breaking the $44.4 million record set in 2014 by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed / White Flower No 1.
Kahlo’s painting will be sold by Sotheby’s in New York November
ELLIOTT FRANKS
Demand for Kahlo’s paintings has grown enormously in the past two decades. With the supply restricted by Mexico’s refusal to let them leave the country, they are snapped up fast when they appear on the private market.
Julian Dawes, a vice-chairman of Sotheby’s, said he knew of “three or four” private sales of Kahlo’s paintings for “in excess of $50 million”.
He also confirmed that a Kahlo self-portrait had been sold on the private market for more than $130 million in the past five years. It seems to confirm speculation that Me and My Parrot (1941) had been privately sold for that sum to an Asian collector.
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The record sale price for one of Kahlo’s works was set four years ago when Diego y yo (1949) — a self-portrait with her husband’s face in the middle of her forehead — was bought for $35 million.
Dawes said “a fundamentally rare energy and mood” entered the market when they appeared.
“But they have always been scarce,” he said. “There just has not been any major oil painting [to appear] outside of Mexico.
“Any Frida Kahlo that is in Mexico by law cannot leave so the number of Fridas is quite small, the number of self-portraits even smaller, and the number that are not in museum collections infinitesimally smaller.”
Kahlo, who died in 1954 aged 47, was relatively unknown in her lifetime but has since become a national icon in Mexico and popular around the world. Twenty years ago Tate Modern held the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to Kahlo’s work, saying that she was “now regarded as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century”.
In its description of El Sueño (La Cama), Sotheby’s said it was “a work of profound intimacy and symbolic power … painted during a year of intense personal trauma and creative renewal”.
It was painted the same year her former lover, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, was assassinated in Mexico City and “in the turbulent aftermath of her divorce, and eventual remarriage, to Diego Rivera”. Kahlo spent much of her life in chronic pain after a childhood bout of polio, a bus crash and a number of operations on her spine.
Kahlo with her husband, Diego Rivera, the renowned Mexican muralist
EVERETT/SHUTTERSTOCK
It has emerged for sale at a time when interest is growing in other pioneering female surrealists including the British-born Leonora Carrington and the Americans Dorothea Tanning and Kay Sage.
Dawes said other female artists were “shattering” personal records, some works being sold for as much as, for example, a Salvador Dalí.
Prices in general are still modest compared with those of male surrealists, such as Rene Magritte whose L’Empire des lumières was sold for $121 million at Christie’s last year, not to mention the male impressionists, cubists, abstract expressionists and old masters.
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Dawes cited last year’s $28 million sale of Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert — $25 million more than her previous record — which he said was “maybe the best painting she ever made”.
He suggested that other female artists who could break existing records included O’Keeffe and Joan Mitchell, an abstract expressionist whose work Iva 1973 was recently donated to Tate Modern.
“It takes time and appreciation but many of them will get there,” Dawes said. “If we ever find another Carrington I think it has potential. There are old masters even. Impressionists like Berthe Morisot or Eva Gonzalès.
“The ones you could buy for those price points are largely in museum collections, but you never know.”