An iconic self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, to date the most expensive Latin American painting in history, is on display for the first time in a quarter-century at a Buenos Aires museum whose founder put it there acquired.
“Diego y yo” (Diego and I), directed by Frida Kahlo 1949, had been acquired in November for 34.9 million dollars at auction in New York, for the “Collection Eduardo F. Costantini”, the company director and Argentine collector, founder of the Museum of Latin American Arts (Malba) in Buenos Aires.
The painting will be from Friday the main attraction of the exhibition “Tercer Ojo” (Third Eye), where Eduardo Costantini will present his private collection, also with works by the Cuban Wifredo Lam, the Mexicans Miguel Covarrubias and Rosa Rolanda, the Brazilian Vicente do Rego Monteiro.
“Diego y yo”, an oil on hardboard, presents the intense gaze characteristic of Kahlo’s self-portraits. On her forehead appears the face of her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, above Kahlo’s black eyes from which flow a few tears. Rivera had at the time approached a famous Mexican actress, the source of the uneasiness that Kahlo expresses in the painting.
“For me, Frida is a unique artist. She has a dramatic life that she recounts without shame, in a spontaneous and open way. I believe that is precisely what people like regarding her,” Eduardo Costantini said on Wednesday this icon of feminism who died in 1954 at the age of 47.
The Malba exhibition, presented to the press on Wednesday, offers more than 240 works, many of which had not been exhibited in public for nearly thirty years. This is the case of “Diego y yo”, since 1998, underlined Eduardo Costantini.
Selling for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s, “Diego y yo”, previously in the hands of a collector, had become by far the most expensive Latin American painting in history, surpassing Diego’s record Rivera, for a painting (“Los Rivales”, 1931) sold for 9.76 million USD at auction in 2018.
