An auction in New York today is almost certain to make the celebrated artist a record-breaker. But, overshadowing what could be a $60m sale, are questions about works that have allegedly disappeared
T
his may well be Frida Kahlo’s biggest year yet. There’s the recent opening of a museum in Mexico City celebrating her life and work. There’s the Art Institute in Chicago exhibiting her work for the first time. And then, in Shenzhen, there’s the show that marked her Chinese debut. All this “Fridamania” tucks in between last year’s big screen documentary Frida and next year’s exhibitions in London and the US.
What’s more, to cap it all, a Sotheby’s 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’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, which sold for $44.4m.
It’s 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 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’s 1957 and 2011 inventories, as well as at least six pages extracted from Kahlo’s illustrated diary. Summing up these “crimes against the property of the nation”, Trujillo Soto declared: “As a Mexican society, we are owed an explanation.”
