Her value is not in her stupendous auction prices, but in her hard-won road to artistic greatness
A late self-portrait by Frida Kahlo sold this week at a New York auction house for $34.9m. That makes her the most expensive Latin American artist ever, eclipsing her husband, Diego Rivera, whose reputation, as well as his prices, once outshone hers. Kahlo, nearly 70 years after her death aged 47, has become one of the most famous self-depicted faces in art. Her visage, with its confrontational gaze and famous monobrow, is as recognisable as that of Rembrandt or Warhol.
Kahlo was a great artist. Not that auction prices are the measure of quality; rather, at this mind-bending level, they reflect an artist’s scarcity and desirability to a slender tranche of the global super-rich. (The painting, Diego and I, has been bought by the Argentinian businessman and collector Eduardo Costantini.) But the rise of her prices from the tens of thousands of dollars in the 1980s to the tens of millions now also reflects Kahlo’s assimilation from the narrow channels of art history into the broad river of popular culture.
