Renoir painting, hidden from public for 100 years, sold for $2 million at auction. https://ift.tt/irdNA8E

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s L’enfant et ses jouets – Gabrielle et le fils de l’artiste, Jean (The Child and His Toys – Gabrielle and the artist’s son, Jean) (ca. 1890–95) sold for €1.8 million ($2 million) at Drouot auction house in Paris on November 25th. This is the first time this work has been seen in 100 years.

L’enfant et ses jouets – Gabrielle et le fils de l’artiste, Jean depicts Renoir’s son Jean playing with toys with his maid Gabrielle. The painting, which was made sometime before 1910, was gifted to the French painter Jeanne Baudot, a student of the French Impressionist.

Baudot held on to the work, eventually passing it down to her adopted son and heir, Jean Griot, who, until his death in 2011, displayed the painting in his home.

Gabrielle Renard, the nanny to the Renoir children, appeared in nearly 200 of Renoir’s paintings, including The Artist’s Family (1896) and Gabrielle with Rose (1911). She was hired by Renoir’s wife, Aline Charigot, in 1886 and cared for the children, including Jean, for more than 30 years.

Jean Renoir was born in 1894, growing up to become a renowned film director. His films included The Grand Illusion (193) and The Rules of the Game (1939), which earned him a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975. The filmmaker died at 84 in 1979.

Renoir painted another portrait of Jean and Gabrielle in 1895–96. That painting, Gabrielle et Jean, is housed at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. There is another similar portrait held in the National Gallery of Art’s collection in Washington, D.C., also titled Child with Toys - Gabrielle and the Artist’s Son, Jean (1895–96).

Renoir’s current auction record was set by Au Moulin de la Galette (1876) at Sotheby’s New York in 1990, when it sold for $78.1 million.

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4 Reasons November’s New York Auctions Point to a Stronger Art Market https://ift.tt/F15ILcQ

The news from last week’s major New York auction is that the art market has certainly turned a corner. All the signs from the London and Paris October sales weeks had been positive, and now the U.S. market has delivered a very healthy total of $2.2 billion in art sales over five days.

Not only were these figures handsomely up by 77% year over year, but there were many other reasons for a positive long-term outlook for the art market. The top end saw numerous knockout prices, and many established collectors returned to buy. Several artists’ values were reassessed, the middle market continued to strengthen, and price speculation for contemporary artists has contracted.

Here are four key takeaways from a week of historic auction sales.

1. The top end of the art market is robust, and buyers are returning

Knockout prices always raise the spirits in these major sales weeks: In an art market particularly reliant on confidence at present, these outperformances are key.

What did we see? Over 25 works sold for more than $10 million, and they performed well against their benchmarks almost without exception. Among them were several clear landmarks. Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer (ca. 1914–16) from the Leonard A. Lauder collection sale, made the second-highest price in auction history at $236.36 million. Notably, five bidders competed for the work.

The high price for the Klimt, which set a new auction record for the artist and a modern artwork, is critical for market confidence. Still, professionals in the know were even happier to see the participation of Asian collectors, major American underbidding, and a Middle Eastern buyer.

Such global bidding has been missing at the top of the market for a while now. Tellingly, a disappointed Asian underbidder for the Lederer portrait went on to buy one of the Klimt landscapes that sold for an eight-figure sum a few lots later.

Reengaging these major players at the top of the market is key. It brings stronger prices, renewed confidence, and inspires a new generation of collectors to compete in the salesroom.

The roster of over 25 major works that sold very well is also impressive and reassuring because of the high levels of competition and prices achieved.

These prices come on the back of equally impressive results for major works sold earlier in the season in Europe, such as Pablo Picasso’s Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (Dora Maar) (1943), which achieved €32.01 million ($37.15 million) at Lucien Paris, Hôtel Drouot in October.

Interestingly, irrevocable bids—offers submitted before a sale that cannot be withdrawn—which have often been seen to be the crutch of a weak market, have now become indicators of confidence in quality. The majority of the top works in New York had “backing bids” to kick off their sales, and it is striking how many of these elicited strong competition as a result.

In a previously fragile market, these secured bids are creating significant buyer confidence.

3. Rampant speculation in the market is waning

The art market has also seen several significant corrections over this season. In Europe last month, we witnessed a retreat from the speculative hunt for works by emerging artists at prices far above what their market or career stage would normally justify.

There was something of a “return to order” as collectors competed for and consistently paid the highest prices for artists with established reputations. This continued in New York.

The only living artists who truly outperformed last week were those of great merit. Three perfect examples were Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646) (2007), which achieved $7.15 million against an estimate of $4–6 million; Cecily Brown’s High Society (1997), which sold at $9.81 million, a new record for the artist; and Amy Sherald, whose striking A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic (2017) fetched $4.1 million. Sherald is certainly an artist with an ever-strengthening reputation and a following to match.

3. Artwork prices are starting to readjust to collector demand

This auction season has also seen several notable artists whose values are being reassessed, aligning demand with long-term interest and promoting more sustainable, informed collecting.

Fernand Léger, for some time oddly out of favor, had a tremendous week, with four works from the 1910s and 1920s selling well with strong bidding competition. His works may still be beneath the artist’s auction values of a decade ago, but his return to popularity is a significant indicator.

Similarly, Henri Matisse is back in high demand. His Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre) (1937) sold for more than twice its low estimate at $32.26 million after a fierce chase between a major New York dealer and a private American collector represented by an agent in the room.

The same American buyer pursued Marc Chagall’s Le songe du Roi David (1966) to a princely $26.51 million, heralding the resurgence of the artist’s prices across the board in recent years. Also very satisfying to see was the depth of bidding and consistently strong prices for Agnes Martin and Alexander Calder, two titans of the 20th century.

On the flip side, prices for works by some major artists saw their values challenged and several struggled to meet expectations. These include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the German Expressionists; Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque and the Fauves; American post-war abstract artists, such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella; and certain living artists, such as Christopher Wool and Maurizio Cattelan. Even Lucian Freud's prices are being adjusted.

All of these are likely to appear regularly at auction with more conservative estimates: expect their prices to find new levels accordingly.

There may be great buys to be had for astute collectors in these areas in the auction seasons ahead. Experience may play an increasingly important role as collectors try to assess these nuances in the coming years.

4. Auction houses are taking a smarter approach to the current market

Looking at the season overall, there is no question that both Sotheby’s and Christie’s got their strategies right.

The single-owner collections were beautifully presented with catalogues distributed well before the sales. The houses looked for reassuring third-party bids for the top lots, negotiated reserves as low as 70% of a lot’s value to improve sold rates and to allow markets to rebalance. They also withdrew fewer lots to provide a more transparent view of markets and generally made the whole auction experience more entertaining and engaging.

Sotheby’s new Breuer Building space is a huge improvement on their previous York Avenue headquarters, and the new salesroom seems tailored for their auctioneers. The evening sales, with the advantage of high-quality material, were significantly more enjoyable than we have seen for two years.

Great quality at good price levels has encouraged buyers back into the salesrooms and undoubtedly helped the market turn a corner. The challenge ahead for the auction houses will be to create the same atmosphere and selling rates with mixed-property sales without the wow-factor of masterpieces from great single-owner collections such as Lauder, Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis, Elaine Wynn, and Cindy and Jay Pritzker.

But perhaps most importantly, the global art market saw a return to order this season. If not fully recovered, it is most certainly back on its feet.

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Lost Michelangelo Sistine Chapel drawing, estimated at $2 million, to go on sale at Christie’s. https://ift.tt/pCLtSO2

A newly identified early 16th-century drawing by Michelangelo linked to the Sistine Chapel ceiling is heading to auction for the first time. The study, long held in private hands and previously unknown to scholars, offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s working process. It will be auctioned at Christie’s New York on February 5, 2026, carrying an estimate of $1.5 million–$2 million.

The small red chalk sheet, titled Study for the right foot of The Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1511-12), is one of “about 10” surviving Michelangelo drawings still in private ownership, according to the auction house. This is the only study connected to the Sistine Chapel to come to market. The sheet was recently authenticated following months of research by specialists at Christie’s and external authentication specialists. The drawing is being consigned to auction by a West Coast private collection, whose family has held the work since the late 1700s, according to Artnet News.

Michelangelo produced thousands of drawings over his lifetime, though only roughly 600 survive. Most remaining sheets—including nearly all known studies for the Sistine Chapel—are held in public collections. The rediscovered drawing dates to around 1511–12, during the four years in which the artist worked bay by bay across the 530-square-meter vault in the Vatican.

This drawing depicts a study of the right foot of the Libyan Sibyl, one of the major figures painted on the east end of the ceiling. It captures the pressure exerted by the Sibyl’s toes on the ground, and there is a subtle pentimenti along the heel, suggesting the artist altered the pose.

“Standing in front of this drawing, one can grasp the full power of Michelangelo’s creative force; we can almost feel the physical energy with which he rendered the form of the foot, pressing the red chalk vigorously onto the paper,” said Giada Damen, a specialist in Christie’s old master drawings department, in a statement.

There is a related study at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that contains multiple studies for the same figure, including a male studio model whose pose was adapted for the Sibyl’s twisting form. That sheet also includes preliminary drawings of the left foot.

Original works by Michelangelo rarely come up for sale at auction. The artist’s record auction price, for A nude man (after Masaccio) and two figures behind him, sold for $23.16 million at Christie’s in 2022.

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All the Art You Need to See During Miami Art Week 2025 https://ift.tt/h3eSnEq

Since 2001, Art Basel Miami Beach has set the stage for a bold glittering collision of culture during the first week of December each year. And it’s still, arguably, the biggest annual art week in the U.S.

Indeed, as Art Basel lands in Miami Beach, the whole city erupts with Miami Art Week: art fairs, museum openings, fashion events, DJ sets, crypto conferences, and every brand activation imaginable.

The NFL, for instance, is setting up an art x football pop-up show in Wynwood. Meanwhile, Sukeban, the Japanese women’s wrestling league, will host a championship fight at the Miami Beach Bandshell.

Even if you’re just focused on the art (like us), you’re spoiled for choice. The beachside fairs pull you east; the museums and galleries on the mainland pull you west. And in the other direction: You can even dive out into the ocean and see REEFLINE, an underwater public sculpture park and hybrid reef.

It’s an exciting abundance, though choosing where to spend your time can be a challenge. The key is not to overdo it, so you can enjoy the art—and appreciate that you’re in a balmy beachside city in December. So here’s a focused selection of 10 key art destinations for Miami Art Week 2025.

You can also save this Google Maps list to your phone, with everything below (and more) to help you navigate on the ground.

1. Art Basel Miami Beach

South Beach | Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Ctr Dr, Miami Beach

The reason for the season, Art Basel Miami Beach brings together the full spectrum of the modern and contemporary art market with more than 280 galleries from around the world. If you haven’t been, it can feel overwhelming—it’s huge. I recommend grabbing a map and heading to a few key sections: Nova, which highlights innovative work made in the past three years; Positions, where you’ll find strong emerging artists and smaller galleries; and Meridians, home to large-scale installations.

As you move toward the center of the fair, you’ll run into the major galleries showing the big names. Give yourself a couple of hours to wander—and take a break for a bite or a beverage when you need it.

2. ICA Miami

Miami Design District | 61 NE 41st Street, Miami

ICA Miami’s Art Week exhibitions always draw a crowd, and one or more typically end up being the most talked-about show of the week. This year, the museum presents five solo exhibitions: Richard Hunt, Joyce Pensato, Andreas Schulze, Masaomi Yasunaga, and Igshaan Adams. The ICA isn’t a giant space, so the shows tend to feel intimate and thoughtful.

I’m especially excited for Igshaan Adams, whose intricate tapestries and cloudlike, suspended sculptures are mesmerizing to experience; and Masaomi Yasunaga, whose incredible ceramic forms—made through a process that combines glaze with minerals, metals, glass powder, and more—look as though they’ve arrived from outer space or prehistoric time.

3. Untitled Art, Miami Beach

South Beach | Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach

Set right on the Miami Beach sands, art fair Untitled Art takes place within a crisp white tent where sunshine pours in—I’ve genuinely seen people wear sunglasses inside, for good reason. The fair spans a wide range of emerging and mid-career work. I’m especially excited to see the Artist Spotlight section of solo presentations curated by artist Petra Cortright, and the Nest section for innovative emerging artists curated by London gallerist Jonny Tanna.

Untitled always has a full slate of live events, so you might walk in on dancers around Nicole Cherubini’s site-specific ceramic benches, or artist Kite’s performance inspired by Lakota cosmology and dreams. And after your visit, step out onto the beach and dip your toes in the ocean—it feels wrong to come to Miami and not at least touch the water.

4. The Rubell Museum

Allapattah | 1100 NW 23rd Street, Miami

The Rubells, a major collecting family, have made their museum a must-see during Miami Art Week. Each year they unveil highlights from their renowned collection alongside brand-new works from the annual artist-in-residence—this year, it’s painter Joanna van Son. The museum also presents a survey of American sculptor Thomas Houseago, a commission by Seung Ah Paik, and solo presentations by contemporary names Lorenzo Amos, Joseph Geagan, Rita Letendre, Yu Nishimura, and Ser Serpas.

It’s always a fascinating window into what these influential collectors are paying attention to now—and the scale and range of the presentations never fail to impress. It also happens to be a great place to experience a Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Room” without waiting in a massive line.

If you’re keen to see more private collection spaces, check out the Margulies Collection and El Espacio 23.

5. NADA Miami

Downtown Miami | Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Avenue, Miami

At the Miami fair of the New Art Dealers Association, you’ll find strong emerging work—especially painting—and galleries that specialize in championing early-career artists. Younger spaces with momentum show in the cozy NADA Projects section, while the main aisles are anchored by veterans with sharp eyes for future art stars. All this makes NADA Miami a go-to for exciting discoveries—and for work at price points that appeal to both new and seasoned collectors.

There’s also a nice, grassy patio with picnic tables outside (and for some reason, there are often chickens running around), a good spot to sit for lunch or meet up with friends.

6. Design Miami

South Beach | Pride Park, 1809 Meridian Ave, Miami Beach

Just beyond the Miami Beach Convention Center, Design Miami pitches its tent each year—yet it’s hardly overshadowed by Art Basel next door. The Miami-born design fair (now a hit in Paris, too) always delivers a visual feast of contemporary and historical designs from top international dealers.

This year is especially exciting as Design Miami celebrates its 20th anniversary. While the 2025 theme, “Make. Believe.,” promises plenty of whimsy and wonder, the fair also debuts Design Miami 2.0—a special project led by the influential curator Glenn Adamson featuring work by eight leading contemporary designers.

For design lovers: I also recommend a stop at The Future Perfect’s dazzling new Miami outpost, Villa Paula, located in Little Haiti.

7. Es Devlin’s Library of Us at Faena Beach

Mid-Beach | Faena Hotel Miami Beach, 3201 Collins Ave, Miami Beach

Acclaimed artist and designer Es Devlin and the Faena Hotel bring a thoughtful public installation-slash-open-air reading room to Miami Beach with Library of Us (2025). This 50-foot-tall revolving library resembles a giant sundial planted directly in the sands of Faena Beach. Devlin has filled the structure with 2,500 books that have inspired her. Passersby can pull a book from the shelves and sit and read along a circular ring of seats that rotates with the piece. Once the week is up, the books will be donated to local schools and libraries.

8. Pérez Art Museum Miami

Downtown Miami | 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is always a rewarding stop during Art Week. The Herzog & de Meuron building—draped in hanging gardens and perched on Biscayne Bay—is one of the city’s most striking museum settings. And there’s always a show worth visiting there.

This year, I’m eager to see Miami-born artist Woody De Othello’s first solo museum show in his hometown, “coming forth by day.” The exhibition brings together new mosaics and ceramic-and-bronze sculptures that continue his signature approach of channeling human qualities and emotions into everyday objects. Here, he expands his interests into spiritual themes, particularly in the way the show is installed, with walls washed in bright red-orange clay and soft hints of herbal fragrance that fill the air.

9. Spinello Projects

Little River | 2930 NW 7th Avenue, Miami

Lovers under the Blue Cypress, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Spinello Projects has been a fixture of Miami’s art scene for two decades, known for championing emerging voices and local talent with a program that’s consistently bold and forward looking.

To mark the gallery’s 20th anniversary, founder Anthony Spinello is presenting a special exhibition with works from his personal collection. The show features 15 artists who have been central to the gallery’s trajectory—many Miami-based, including Farley Aguilar, Esaí Alfredo, Reginald O’Neal, Marlon Portales, and Agustina Woodgate—pairing early works with more recent examples. Beyond reflecting on the gallery and the artists it has supported, the exhibition offers a view into Miami’s art community. It’s a meaningful look at the esteemed gallerist’s vision and taste, as well as the broader creative landscape he’s helped shape.

10. Marquez Art Projects

Allapattah | 2395 NW 21st Terrace, Miami, FL 33142

The nonprofit foundation Marquez Art Projects (MAP) is known for giving emerging artists space to debut ambitious solo exhibitions. This year, MAP presents Kat Lyons’s solo debut at a U.S. institution. In her show of paintings, titled “Full Earth,” Lyons turns to Florida’s landscape—especially the Everglades—creating vivid scenes populated by crocodiles, volcanic terrain, and Florida’s wild macaques. The works explore how the natural environment can be a record of memory and change. Drawing on lived experience and wide-ranging research (from scientific to art historical), Lyons brings animals, plants, and the land into scenes that feel both grounded in natural history and deeply uncanny.

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Alma Allen selected for U.S. pavilion at Venice Biennale 2026. https://ift.tt/FmWlvxX

Sculptor Alma Allen will officially represent the United States at the 61st Venice Biennale, the U.S State Department announced on November 24th. The Utah-born, Mexico-based artist will present some 30 sculptures in “Call Me the Breeze,” curated by Jeffrey Uslip, a former chief curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The announcement confirms rumors that have circulated since earlier this month, when Robert Lazzarini’s winning proposal for the U.S. pavilion was withdrawn. The historic 43-day government shutdown delayed the announcement of a replacement.

In an interview with the New York Times, Allen said that he did not apply to represent the United States; instead, Uslip solicited the artist’s involvement in October. In the same interview, Allen claimed his galleries—Mendes Wood DM and Olney Gleason—urged him to decline the Venice Biennale commission, and severed ties with him after he accepted it.

Allen’s commissioning institution is the American Arts Conservancy, a Florida-based nonprofit founded just this year. Typically,accredited museums work with artists and curators to develop proposals for the U.S. pavilion, which are then reviewed and selected by the National Endownment for the Arts. Commissioning institutions are responsible for organizing the exhibitions and raising funds to support production costs, only a small portion of which are covered by the State Department

This year, the NEA did not participate in the selection process, citing staffing and scheduling issues. This left the selection in the hands of the State Department.

In its announcement, the State Department said Allen will exhibit works underscoring his “alchemical transformation of matter and explore the concept of ‘elevation.’” The statement also claims that the selection is part of the Trump administration’s broader push to “showcase American excellence.”

Allen is an atypical choice to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, widely considered to be the world’s most prestigious exhibition The artist is less well-known than artists who have previously been granted the honor, and has a relatively sparse exhibition history. The 55-year-old artist has only had two solo museum shows in his career: at Mexico’s Museo Anahuacalli in 2023 and Belgium’s Van Buuren Museum & Gardens in 2021.

Other artists who have represented the United States at the Venice Biennale include Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauschenberg, Simone Leigh, and Jeffrey Gibson.

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MoMA PS1 to commemorate its 50th anniversary with a New York–focused show in 2026. https://ift.tt/luJkgcT

MoMA PS1 will mark its 50th anniversary with a new edition of “Greater New York,” organized by its entire curatorial team for the first time. The quinquennial survey will foreground artists living and working in the New York City area, presenting new commissions, performances, and recent works.

“‘Greater New York’ forms the backbone of MoMA PS1’s commitment to New York’s vibrant community of artists, and responds to urgent issues in real time, as expressed by all of the creative voices in our region,” said Connie Butler, director of MoMA PS1, in a press release.

The 2026 edition of “Greater New York,” founded in 2000, will bring together some 50 early- and mid-career artists, tracing how daily life in New York City shapes their artwork. The exhibition is led by Butler and the institution’s chief curator, Ruba Katrib. Associate curators Jody Graf and Elena Ketelsen González, assistant curator Kari Rittenbach, curatorial assistant Sheldon Gooch, and curatorial coordinator Andrea Sánchez will also be part of the organizing team.

“It’s always striking to see how artists manage to produce in New York—a city that is defined by its creative communities, yet increasingly difficult to live in because of astronomical costs,” Katrib told Artsy. New York’s rising prices has been a major talking point in the city in recent months, amplified by the recent mayoral election win by Zohran Mamdani, who ran on a platform of affordability.

Butler joined MoMA PS1 in 2023 after serving as chief curator at the Hammer Museum, where she oversaw major exhibitions such as “Made in L.A.” in 2014 and Mark Bradford’s retrospective in 2015. Previously, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art. Katrib has led the museum’s curatorial program since 2018, most recently organizing “The Gatherers,” a group exhibition, earlier this year.

The full artist list for the sixth edition of “Greater New York” has yet to be released. The exhibition will run from April 16, 2026, through August 17, 2026.“There is a remarkable sense of optimism among so many of the artists we’ve met,” Katrib told Artsy. “They persist, they build, and they continue to articulate their visions of the world. That tension is also present in much of the work we’re looking at; there is a pull between precarity and potential. It is often expressed not through grand gestures, but through an attention to margins, to subtlety, and to the layered, lived textures of New York itself.”

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Why Frida Kahlo Continues to Dominate the Art Market https://ift.tt/UAC5Q8p

Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait, El sueño (La cama), sold last night, November 20th, at Sotheby’s New York for $54.66 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a woman artist ever sold at auction and the most valuable Latin American piece in history. The lot was the star of Exquisite Corpus, a private collection of more than 80 works that captured the breadth, depth, and daring of Surrealism. Presented at the auction house’s new Breuer Building headquarters, El sueño (La cama) had been auctioned in 1980 for $51,000.

The sale of the work opened at $22 million and quickly rose with bidders in the room and on the phone. It hammered down in just four minutes for $47 million, bringing the final price with fees to $54.66 million. With this result, Kahlo broke her previous record of $34.9 million achieved in 2021 by Diego y yo (1949). The previous record for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower N 1 (1932), sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014 (if adjusted for inflation, the price for this work would be $60.5 million).

The symbolism behind Frida Kahlo’s defining self-portrait

In El sueño (La cama), Kahlo appears reclining on a floating bed wrapped in vines, while a skeleton crowned with flowers holds a bouquet covered in dynamite above the canopy. Created shortly after her divorce from the artist Diego Rivera and only months after the assassination of her lover, Leon Trotsky, the work returns to one of the central motifs in her iconography: the bed as a space of pain, convalescence, and creation. Kahlo spent long periods bedridden due to an illness she had as a child and from the aftermath of a bus accident that nearly killed her at age 18. The presence of the calaca (or skeleton), a key figure in the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration, reaffirms the artist’s engagement with the inevitability of death as expressed through Mexican tradition.

“I never painted dreams. I paint my own reality,” Kahlo (1907–1954) once wrote. Many Surrealist artists, including André Breton, tried to place her within their movement, but she rejected that label from the outset. In a letter written after meeting members of the movement in Paris in 1939, she dismissed them as “a bunch of crazy bastards.”

As with so many female artists of her time, the true significance of Kahlo’s work was not recognized during her life. For decades, she was known primarily as Rivera’s wife, and the monetary value of her work was nowhere near what it is today. In 1939, for example, she wrote in a letter describing her astonishment when the actor Edward G. Robinson purchased four of her paintings for $200 each after she exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, one of the few gallery shows she had during her lifetime.

Her reevaluation began in the 1980s with the publication of historian Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography. Herrera’s research found that the painter’s feminist significance first took shape within the Chicano community, where migrant women living along the U.S. border saw in Kahlo a figure they could identify with. Chicano feminism then embraced her as a standard-bearer of the movement. The influential nonprofit Galería de la Raza, founded in San Francisco in 1970 and dedicated to promoting Chicano and Latino art and culture, was among the first to champion Frida outside Mexico. Many major artists from Judy Chicago to Julian Schnabel would also go on to pay tribute to both her work and figure.

Frida Kahlo’s rise from overlooked artist to global icon

La venadita (little deer), 1946
Frida Kahlo
MCA Chicago

Since that formative period of re-recognition, Kahlo has ascended to become a global cultural force. Her biography, aesthetics, activism, pain, and vitality formed a visual language that fascinated entire generations. “The market sometimes responds to trends, to things that become fashionable, but Frida Kahlo is the exception. She has remained in demand since the 1980s. She transcends any trend,” Anna Di Stasi, senior vice president at Sotheby’s, told Artsy. In her view, “Kahlo’s work is a testimony to her biography, a very Mexican exercise in introspection that also dialogues with contemporary discourses on the body, gender, and identity. These connections activate the desire of collectors.”

Her auction records, she added, “open the field for many other Latin American artists.”

One of the places where this impact can be seen is Malba in Buenos Aires; its artistic director, Rodrigo Moura, emphasizes both Kahlo’s pictorial power and symbolic relevance. On display are Diego y yo (1949) and Autorretrato con chango y loro (1942), works that the collector Eduardo Costantini, the museum’s founder, acquired in 2021 and 1995, respectively. The latter is one of the collection’s highlights and cost $3.2 million when it was purchased 30 years ago.

“Frida is a tremendous painter, and curiously, little is said about that. She is also a symbol of Latin culture, a figure who embodies difference and brings discussions of gender and identity to the forefront,” Moura told Artsy. The visibility generated by her records, he said, “opens doors and increases interest in the art of the region.”

A new Frida Kahlo museum in Mexico City

The painter’s magnetism also found a new chapter with the opening of the Museo Casa Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico City, located just a few minutes’ walk from the famous Casa Azul. The space, opened in September, is dedicated to her formative years and the intimate life she shared with her family, especially her bond with her father, Guillermo. “Frida has so many facets and so much strength in each one that she continues to attract attention,” said the museum’s director, Adán García Fajardo. “Some see a story of breaking barriers, or a sisterly, supportive figure. Frida speaks to many audiences.”

Regarding the value of her works, García Fajardo recalled a conversation on taking out insurance for the museum, which houses original and unpublished pieces: “Whatever value you assign to it, if it is lost, burned, or stolen, it is beyond replacement,” he recalled. “No amount in dollars, pounds, or euros can compensate for such a loss, because a work by Frida Kahlo is irreplaceable.”

Latin American Surrealist women on the rise

The ongoing interest in Kahlo is also reflected in the growth of the market for Latin American women artists linked to surrealism. In 2024, Leonora Carrington’s Las distracciones de Dagoberto (1945) reached $28.4 million. Thirty years earlier, it had sold for $299,500.

Remedios Varo’s Revelación (El relojero) (1955) sold for $6.22 million at Christie’s earlier this year, narrowly surpassing its previous record of $6.19 million set in 2020. Other artists from the region, such as Kati Horna, Maria Martins, and Tarsila do Amaral have also seen significant increases.

In addition to Frida, the top five auction sales from Latin American artists include Rivera, whose Baile en Tehuantepec (1928), sold for $15.7 million in 2016; Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose Omi Obini (1943) sold for $9.6 million in 2020; and Rufino Tamayo, whose Trovador (1945), sold in 2008 for $7.2 million.

But even with the growing momentum of other Latin American artists, Kahlo remains unmatched at the top of the market.

Although it now has a new owner, El sueño (La cama) will embark on an extensive international tour: it will be part of the exhibition “Frida y Diego: The Last Dream,” which will open at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art in March 2026; then it will travel to London’s Tate Modern for “Frida: The Making of an Icon”; and finally it will arrive at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2027 for “Frida Kahlo. The Painter.”

The auction result and tour underscore how Kahlo’s magnetism not only endures but continues to rise, crossing borders and finding new audiences.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/RW7fUkQ