Eight decades after that adulterous and captivating love in the Blue House, Frida Kahlo’s home as well as a refuge from all her pain and suffering, already we can put a price on your idyll with Len Trotsky: in this year 2022 through which we pass with more pain than glory, its affair with the communist leader it could reach 50 million euros through the work and grace of the communist steamroller. Tremendous paradox. That is the figure that, according to experts, would cost the last great find of the Mexican artist, today turned into a phenomenon mainstreammost revered cultural icon, planetary superstar who smashes all records, all auctions, all strokes of a biography that continues to feed the myth even 70 years after her death.
It is a violin that Frida gave to the communist leader, exiled in her house in Coyoacn between 1937 and 1939, painted and dedicated by hand by herself, which has just seen the light and is now to be auctioned. Given the supersonic interest in everything that has to do with the Mexican artist, 50 million to the highest bidder are not unreasonable at all. And so, as in a wonderful heresy, It will be the almighty Sotheby’s or Christie’s who will put a price on the communist love of Frida and Len Trotsky, and that ended with the assassination of the politician at the hands of the Spaniard Ramón Mercader. (A murder, by the way, that continues to be shrouded in morbidity and mystery: according to the official version, Mercader killed Trotsky on Stalin’s orders with a blow to the head with an ice ax, and even Frida herself was suspected of being behind that plotand was even detained at first).
“We must bear in mind that Kahlo was not a very prolific artist; she barely painted 143 works, of which 55 are self-portraits,” explains Javier Gallego, from Gallego y Sánchez Rolln Asociados and an expert in art and expert reports. “In November 2021, Diego and me Sold in New York for $34 million. thus beating all the records of a Latin American artist. It is a very small canvas, 15 cm. by 15cm. So a hand-painted violin, which also hides such an exciting relationship, can make history”.
No one knows how many hands the instrument must have passed before it reached its current owner, who, suspecting that it might be an authentic piece, contacted Gallego in Madrid to have him certify that both the drawings and the dedication were the work of Frida. On the obverse you can read: “A man without a country is like an old violin without strings, I hope that very soon he recovers his country and his home, his ideal and his struggle and returns to being the director of world history. Sincerely, Frida Kahlo”. On the reverse, the artist drew two butterflies and, inside a very black sun, the symbol of the hammer and sickle. Romanticism and politics merged by his quixotic brushstroke and its line naf.
Gallego has been in charge of coordinating the team of experts who have analyzed the authenticity of the violin. Guillermo Pastor Vzquez, the president of the National Association of Calligraphy Experts, has been in charge of verifying the handwriting and signature. And a Spanish company has confirmed, through the study of pigments, which was painted in the 1930s and that some of the colors used were only used in Central America. The result, then, has been conclusive: Frida painted the violin and therefore also gave it to her lover. It has even been said that that love could have been a revenge after discovering the affair of Diego Rivera, her then-husband, with Frida’s own sister. Well, despite the fact that the marriage had an open relationship -and stormy to a high degree-, that had to overcome all the red lines; what better way to make him jealous than by getting intimate with the great leader of the Communist Partyin which the marriage militated with much blood, much sweat and many tears.
Now what its author has been confirmedthe violin is all a candy for the big auction houses, where it will probably end up auctioned. But Gallego has no doubt that there will be a stir given the interest aroused by everything that has to do with Frida Kahlo: “The appearance of this violin has been carried out with great discretion, but as soon as his existence is known, many girlfriends will come out. Among them, the Mexican Government, which can claim why it has left the country, how it came into the hands of whoever has arrived… The current owner has the title deeds in his possession, but there will be controversy, that’s for sure.”
A controversy that keep embalming Frida even deadbecause not even the last will that he left written in his diary, that of resting at last, It seems that it is close to being fulfilled: “I hope for a happy exit and I hope never to return”, he yearned. But everything indicates that there will be noise (and music) for a while.
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