{"id":274533,"date":"2025-11-21T00:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T00:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/274533\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T00:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T00:50:07","slug":"the-frida-kahlo-scandal-fridamania-could-reach-new-heights-today-but-where-are-her-missing-masterpieces-frida-kahlo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/274533\/","title":{"rendered":"The Frida Kahlo scandal: Fridamania could reach new heights today \u2013 but where are her \u2018missing\u2019 masterpieces? | Frida Kahlo"},"content":{"rendered":"

This may well be Frida Kahlo\u2019s biggest year yet. There\u2019s the recent opening of a museum in Mexico City celebrating her life and work. There\u2019s the Art Institute in Chicago exhibiting her work for the first time. And then, in Shenzhen, there\u2019s the show that marked her Chinese debut. All this \u201cFridamania\u201d tucks in between last year\u2019s big screen documentary Frida<\/a> and next year\u2019s exhibitions in London and the US.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, to cap it all, a Sotheby\u2019s auction in New York today is almost certain to make Kahlo a record-breaker. Her 1940 painting The Dream (The Bed) is forecast to fetch between $40-$60m, which would dwarf the previous record for a female artist, set in 2014 by Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s Jimson Weed\/White Flower No 1, which sold for $44.4m<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost enough confetti to obscure a report published in April by Hilda Trujillo Soto, who served as a deputy director and then director from 2002 to 2020 at Casa Azul, as the Frida Kahlo<\/a> museum in Mexico is known. Concluding her own independent five-year investigation after leaving the museum, Trujillo Soto alleged the disappearance of two oil paintings and eight drawings between the museum\u2019s 1957 and 2011 inventories, as well as at least six pages extracted from Kahlo\u2019s illustrated diary. Summing up these \u201ccrimes against the property of the nation\u201d, Trujillo Soto declared: \u201cAs a Mexican society, we are owed an explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the allegedly missing works, 1952\u2019s Congress of the Peoples for Peace, was sold by New York\u2019s Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art<\/a> gallery for $2.66m at auction in 2020. According to Wayback Machine\u2019s online archives, the gallery was also offering Kahlo\u2019s other allegedly stolen painting, 1954\u2019s Self-Portrait Inside a Sunflower, with provenance listed only as \u201cprivate collection, Dallas\u201d. The gallery did not respond to interview requests about this.<\/p>\n

All but worshipped in Mexico \u2026 Frida Kahlo in 1944. Photograph: Bettmann\/Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n

Trujillo Soto\u2019s broader conclusions were supported by Helga Prignitz-Poda, a Berlin-based Kahlo expert. \u201cMany things have disappeared from Casa Azul,\u201d she told journalists in response to Trujillo Soto\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrida painted her reality \u2013 even when it was uncomfortable,\u201d Trujillo Soto told me. \u201cI wrote mine. Discomfort and all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahlo is all but worshipped in Mexico<\/a>, her work fiercely protected, ostensibly, by patrimony laws. She is to Mexico what Turner is to Britain or Michelangelo is to Italy. Yet rather than investigating Trujillo Soto\u2019s catalogue of missing works \u2013 if only to discredit it \u2013 the government has stonewalled the issue. All three chiefs of the Ministry of Culture\u2019s Transparency Unit opted against transparency, deferring completely to representatives at the state-run Bank of Mexico, which manages Kahlo\u2019s trust. Those bank officials did not reply to our interview requests.<\/p>\n

The trust, though, has accused Trujillo Soto of holding a grudge. In a statement it said that she \u201cnever filed a formal complaint\u201d and added: \u201cOn the contrary, their contract was terminated after irregularities were detected in their administration and for having benefited third parties with the assets under their care\u201d, an accusation she in turn denies.<\/p>\n

The day after Trujillo Soto\u2019s claims, Inbal, the agency tasked with protecting and promoting Mexican art as heritage, said it \u201chas not granted any permission for definitive exports of works by [Kahlo]\u201d. But it did not otherwise comment on possible foreign sales of the museum\u2019s inventory.<\/p>\n

Congress of the Peoples for Peace, at a Sotheby\u2019s preview in 2020. Photograph: Cindy Ord\/Getty Images,<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a strategy of silence,\u201d said Trujillo Soto of the Ministry of Culture. \u201cIf I were a man, my report would be seen as an analysis. But I am a woman, so Mexican machismo decides that what I say is gossip instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement, Casa Azul called Trujillo Soto\u2019s allegations \u201cunfounded, erroneous and [lacking] verifiable evidence\u201d but did not amplify their position with evidence of their own. Asked to put concerns to rest by demonstrating that the missing works are still part of the museum\u2019s inventory, Perla Labarthe, the museum\u2019s current director, was unresponsive.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that after my death,\u201d Kahlo said, \u201cI am going to be the biggest piece of shit in the world.\u201d Casa Azul increasingly seems like ground zero for Kahlo\u2019s shitstorm. In fairness, the government and the museum already openly defy the last will of Diego Rivera, the muralist who married, divorced and remarried Kahlo before she widowed him. That will ordered \u201cunder no circumstances or pretext may the objects belonging to the heritage be removed from the premises\u201d.<\/p>\n

Museums sometimes engage in deaccession, the act of selling art to pay for costs, debts, renovations, or just to pad pockets. It can go unreported to cover humility or humiliation. Unauthorised deaccession is probably the most bureaucratic euphemism for theft.<\/p>\n

Interpol officials declined to discuss the matter but law enforcement agents familiar with the details \u2013 who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly \u2013 said the Mexican government has not yet sought Interpol\u2019s assistance, and Interpol can only act at the request of its member governments.<\/p>\n

Similarly, \u201cthe museum has not registered any losses with us,\u201d said Julian Radcliffe, chair of the London-based Art Loss Register, which has flagged four disputed Kahlos in circulation, \u201cbut that is not surprising since museums are reluctant to admit to missing items, and, of course, there are many more losses due to internal theft by museum curators from stock or storage than by external robbery of items on display\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kahlo\u2019s Self-Portrait Inside a Sunflower, 1954. Photograph: Markus Schreiber\/AP<\/p>\n

Robert Wittman, a retired senior investigator at the FBI\u2019s Art Crime Team, expressed surprise that the Mexican government was not sounding more alarms \u2013 especially given that the country\u2019s previous presidency prioritised art repatriation with strong success. \u201cMexico should do their due diligence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Reluctance to report missing art can be a matter of institutional embarrassment or outright corruption, says Christopher Marinello<\/a>, an art lawyer who founded Art Recovery International. Even among the standard chaos and drama of art theft, he added, \u201cMexico is a whole other problem. We have worked on cases and struggled to obtain police reports only to discover that members of the local police force were the main suspects in committing the theft.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 2015 Sotheby\u2019s Institute of Art analysis<\/a> of Mexican patrimony laws and their impact on the art market found that work by artists on the patrimony list was suppressed in Mexico to at least half its worldwide value. Mexican auction houses have complained to legislators that patrimony restrictions cause as much as a 30% dampening of business, as buyers see their private ownership as an obtrusive de facto shared custody with the government.<\/p>\n

So Casa Azul\u2019s lack of investigation is further vexing amid abundant motives and suspects for art theft. Mexican auction houses, buyers, curators, gallerists and police all have vested interests in patrimony\u2019s underground market. Meanwhile, it\u2019s not just Interpol that can\u2019t act alone. Neither can art market observers.<\/p>\n

\u2018If I were a man, my report would be seen as an analysis\u2019 \u2026 Hilda Trujillo Soto poses for a photograph at Casa Azul in 2020. Photograph: Carlos Jasso\/Reuters<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as we know, there have not been any formal or legal accusations substantiating claims of stolen works,\u201d says Ra\u00fal Zorrilla, the CEO at Kurimanzutto, one of the most-respected galleries in Mexico City \u2013 which avoids all secondary markets, including Kahlo\u2019s, in favour of living artists. \u201cWe prefer to anchor any discussion in the frameworks of law, provenance verification, and institutional process rather than speculation.\u201d Earlier this week in New York, Christie\u2019s auctioned a minor Kahlo. It sold for just $7.2m, perhaps because it is small and not a self-portrait (it\u2019s a painting of knickknacks in a shop window in Detroit). Yet $7.2m is still a huge sum. In 2021, Kahlo\u2019s 1949 self-portrait Diego and I sold for $34.9m, more than quadrupling the previous $8m high for a Kahlo sale and also breaking the broader record for Latin American art that had been held since 2018 by a $9.76m painting by Rivera.<\/p>\n

Such blockbuster auctions may be as dangerous to Kahlo\u2019s legacy as any theft. \u201cThe criminal element doesn\u2019t have much imagination,\u201d says Noah Charney, a Cambridge University doctoral candidate studying the history of art theft. \u201cThey steal what they\u2019ve recently read about as having high value.\u201d And not only thieves. Collectively, he said, we share \u201ca subconscious understanding that if this artist is worth stealing, they must be very good\u201d.<\/p>\n

At her first exhibition \u2013 in New York in 1938 \u2013 Kahlo happily sold 12 of 25 works. In her life, she was praised by the art legends of her day: Kandinsky, Mir\u00f3, Picasso. The surrealist Andr\u00e9 Breton called her art \u201ca ribbon around a bomb\u201d. Unimpressed, she called them all \u201cartistic bitches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahlo\u2019s ideals \u2013 of communism, feminism, hedonism, intimacy, magic, queerness, romance, truth and trust \u2013 ached to stir uncertainty in audiences. Now, more than 70 years after her death, the art market is reckoning with Kahlo uncertainties that are of its own making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This may well be Frida Kahlo\u2019s biggest year yet. There\u2019s the recent opening of a museum in Mexico…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-274533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}