Frida Kahlo self-portrait beats sale record set by cheating husband

It is one of Frida Kahlo’s last self-portraits and represents the artist’s vulnerability and emotional turmoil over her husband Diego Rivera’s adultery.

Seven decades later, in a unique twist of fate, the painting has sold for almost $35m – making it the most expensive Latin American work of art to be sold at auction and beating the previous record held by Rivera himself.

Diego y yo (Diego and Me, 1949), which sold at Sotheby’s auction house in New York on Tuesday for $34.9m (£25m), shows Rivera in the centre of Kahlo’s forehead.

The oil painting has always fascinated art lovers with its depiction of the couple’s tumultuous relationship. Rivera is interpreted to illustrate Kahlo’s third eye, to symbolise the degree to which he occupied her consciousness.

Anna Di Stasi, the director of Latin American Art at Sotheby’s, called the sale “the ultimate revenge” and a validation of Kahlo’s talent.

“Painted in the same year her beloved Diego embarked on an affair with her friend, the Mexican golden age actress Maria Félix, this powerful portrait is the painted articulation of her anguish and sorrow,” Di Stasi said.

“You could call tonight’s result the ultimate revenge, but in fact it is the ultimate validation of Kahlo’s extraordinary talent and global appeal.

“Diego y yo is so much more than a beautifully painted portrait. It’s a painted summary of all of Kahlo’s passion and pain, a tour de force of the raw emotive power of the artist at the peak of her abilities.”

Kahlo and Rivera were married twice before Kahlo died aged 47 in 1954. She has become one of the best-known artists of the 20th century, but when she first set eyes on Rivera in 1922, Kahlo was a 15-year-old art student while he was a 36-year-old world-famous mural artist. She was instantly fascinated by him, and the pair married in 1928.

Kahlo once wrote in a notebook: “I suffered two great accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down … the other accident is Diego.”

It was a striking comparison between her husband and the bus accident that nearly killed her at 18 and left her with horrific injuries including a broken spinal column.

Rivera’s affair with Félix became a public scandal, with newspapers reporting that he planned to marry her as soon as he could divorce Kahlo. He was quoted as saying: “I adore Frida, but I think my presence is very bad for her health.”

Though Kahlo made jokes about the affair and suggested she did not mind, the depth of her feeling is evident in Diego y yo, in which her normally tightly braided hair is loose, almost strangling her, her cheeks flushed and her gaze tearful – evocative of Madonna of the Sorrows. The painting last sold at Sotheby’s for $1.4m in 1990.

The auction house identified the painting’s buyer as Eduardo F Costantini, the founder of a museum in Buenos Aires. It was purchased for his private collection.

Previously, the record for most expensive Latin American work of art sold at auction was held by Rivera for his painting Los Rivales, which was sold for $9.76m in 2018.

At Tuesday’s sale, a painting by the French artist Pierre Soulages broke a record for his work by reaching $20.2m. Peinture, which had spent more than 30 years in a private collection, corresponds to the red period of the century-old French artist.

Soulages’ work was the subject of a heated battle between several bidders, some of them in the Sotheby’s auction room and others on the phone, and greatly exceeded the artist’s previous record of €9.6m set in Paris in 2019.

Art experts commend the rich iconography and emotional intensity of Kahlo’s work, which mixed violence with vulnerability and often broke gender stereotypes. The artist’s lifestyle, including her drinking and drug use, have inspired countless books and films.