![]() ![]() About the auction record he set, Argentinean collector and venture capitalist Eduardo Costantini states firmly, “There is a correlation between the painting’s price and its quality.”Īnd riding the wave of what Sotheby’s director of Latin-American painting, August Uribe, calls “a thrilling, historical sale,” next month Abrams is releasing with great fanfare what may be the publishing coup of the season: a facsimile edition of Frida Kahlo’s diary, an intimate, enigmatic written and pictorial record of the last and most lurid decade of the artist’s tortured life. This is the highest price ever paid for a Latin-American work of art, and the second-highest amount for a woman artist (Mary Cassatt holds the record). Salomón Grimberg, by IBM from the Galería de Arte Mexicano for around $400) sold at Sotheby’s for $3.2 million. This May her 1942 Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot (acquired in 1947, reports Kahlo expert Dr. Just when Frida fever seemed on the verge of cooling down, the public’s attention has once again been riveted by her-1995 is turning out to be yet another annus mirabilis in the Frida chronicles. Everyone pulls out that one piece that means something special to them.” (Though she has also been the subject of at least three documentaries and one Mexican art film, the world still awaits the movies promised by Madonna and Luis “ La Bamba” Valdez.) Says art dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who as founder of Sotheby’s Latin-American department presided over the first auction of a Kahlo painting, in 1977 (it went for $19,000-$1,000 below the low estimate), “Frida has been carved up into little pieces. The most concrete measure of Frida’s nail-digging grip on the popular imagination is the number of publications on her: 87 and counting. In fact, a whole cross section of marginalized groups-lesbians, gays, feminists, the handicapped, Chicanos, Communists (she professed Trotskyism and, later, Stalinism), hypochondriacs, substance abusers, and even Jews (despite her indigenous Mexican identity, she was in fact half Jewish and only one-quarter Indian)-have discovered in her a politically correct heroine. She fits well with the odd, androgynous hormonal chemistry of our particular epoch.” Kahlo, incidentally, is more a figure for the age of Madonna than the era of Marilyn Monroe. Her constant remaking of her identity, her construction of a theater of the self are exactly what preoccupy such contemporary artists as Cindy Sherman or Kiki Smith and, on a more popular level, Madonna-who, of course, collects her work. Kirk Varnedoe, a chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art (which is exhibiting two of its three Kahlos in a summer show of women’s art), reflects on the Frida Phenomenon: “She clicks with today’s sensibilities-her psycho-obsessive concern with herself, her creation of a personal alternative world carry a voltage. Says Hayden Herrera, author of the groundbreaking 1983 biography Frida, “Her paintings demand-fiercely-that you look at her.” Every day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 1931 double portrait of newlyweds Frida and Diego Rivera draws a worshipful horde, as reverent as the devotees gathered daily before the Louvre’s Mona Lisa. What Elvis Presley is to good old boys, Judy Garland to a generation of homosexuals, and Maria Callas to opera fanatics, Frida is to masses of late-20th-century idol seekers. ![]() Half a century after her death, Kahlo, around whom a whole industry has sprung up like a garden on a grave site, grows more alive with each passing decade. ![]() Frida’s postmortem chuckle-a last laugh if there ever was one-is echoing still. One observer recalled that, deformed by the phantasmagoric, flickering shadows, her lips appeared to break into a grin just as the doors closed shut. Her ignited hair blazed around her head like an infernal halo. The sudden blast of heat from the open incinerator doors blew the bejeweled, elaborately coiffed body bolt up-right. As frenzied mourners watched the earthly remains of Frida Kahlo roll away into the crematory, the artist, known in her day for her macabre sense of mischief, played one last ghoulish trick on her audience. ![]()
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