A self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was sold at an auction in New York on Tuesday for $34.9 million (30.9 million euros). That is a record amount for a painting by the painter and also the highest amount ever paid for a work of art by a Latin American artist. The buyer is unknown, international news agencies report.
The 1949 work ‘Diego y yo’ (Diego and I) is a self-portrait of Kahlo with a smaller portrait of her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, on her forehead, above her iconic continuous eyebrow. Rivera’s image has a third eye, which represents the torment he inflicts on his wife. Kahlo herself appears to be crying from her dark eyes in the portrait.
In life, Rivera was more famous than his wife. Kahlo became disabled after a traffic accident in her youth and as a result spent much of her life in bed. She made about 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. In her often colorful and gruesome self-portraits, she incorporated radical events from her life: the accident, her husband’s adultery, a miscarriage. After her death in 1954, she became internationally known and since the 1970s, Kahlo has also been seen as a free-spirited feminist icon.
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