What happens when the home country of the world’s most famous female artist lacks the resources to maintain control of her work? That is the drama surrounding the paintings of Frida Kahlo, as resentment percolates in Mexico over the provenance of the 152 to 200 paintings she did over three decades.
Kahlo started painting after she was nearly killed in a bus crash in 1925. She married the famous Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, in 1929 (and again in 1940 after their divorce), accompanying him to the United States, for example, to do a mural commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts. But her later fame far overshadowed his, especially after American historian Hayden Herrera published a 1983 biography, which turned Kahlo into a global pop-culture icon and put her face on keychains and coffee mugs. Last year, one of her paintings auctioned in New York for a record US$55 million (a Rembrandt sold for $10 million in 2026). And this year, Kahlo exhibitions are being held in Houston, London and New York.
But a looming problem with Kahlo’s wildly popular paintings, according to Mexican historian Francisco Berzunza, is that only about half remain in Mexico and around seven are directly owned by the government. (For comparison, of the approximately 400 paintings by Rembrandt, about 50 are in two state-controlled museums in the Netherlands.) One private trove, the Gelman collection, has about 18 Kahlo paintings, ten of which are currently, and controversially, exhibited in Spain, and are being used as collateral on a loan from the Spanish bank Santander to the Mexican owner of the collection — a common modern practice, according to Bank of America.
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