Frida Kahlo valuation
Painted herself, her injuries and her marriage to Diego Rivera, mostly at small scale and mostly in Mexico.
Frida Kahlo was born at Coyoacán, outside Mexico City, in 1907, in the house now known as the Casa Azul.
What a work by Frida Kahlo is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Frida Kahlo was born at Coyoacán, outside Mexico City, in 1907, in the house now known as the Casa Azul. Polio at six and a bus accident at eighteen, which broke her spine and pelvis, left her in pain for the rest of her life, and she began to paint while confined to bed. She married Diego Rivera in 1929, divorced him in 1939 and remarried him the following year. The paintings, many of them small self-portraits on panel or metal, draw on Mexican folk painting, votive retablos and pre-Hispanic imagery. André Breton claimed her for Surrealism, a label she rejected. She died at the Casa Azul in 1954.
Very little comes to market. Most of the paintings are in museums, and in 1984 the Mexican government declared her work a national artistic monument and barred its permanent export, so a painting held in Mexico and one held abroad are on quite different footings; the rule was before Mexico's Supreme Court in 2026. Drawings, letters and photographs of her by others make up much of what is offered, and forgery is common enough that a work without a documented history should be treated with real caution. Prints and reproductions of the self-portraits circulate in huge numbers and are not her work.
Julien Levy, Paris and the Casa Azul
Kahlo's first solo exhibition was at Julien Levy's gallery in New York in 1938, and in 1939 she went to Paris for the exhibition Mexique, arranged by Breton, where the Louvre bought her self-portrait The Frame. Her only solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime was at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in 1953, which she attended in her own bed, carried into the gallery.
The Casa Azul opened as the Museo Frida Kahlo in 1958. For any work, the first questions are where it has been, which exhibitions and publications record it, and whether it has ever been in Mexico.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
