Jul 15, 2021 - Sale 2576

Sale 2576 - Lot 138

Price Realized: $ 6,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 800
Kahlo, Frida (1907-1954) Photograph by Lucienne Bloch.
Portrait, 1933.

Black-and-white photograph bearing Bloch's label on the verso, "Lucienne Bloch Dimitroff" inscribed in ink, "Lenin Panel, New Workers School NYC Nov. 1933"; showing Kahlo before the central panel of Diego Rivera's mural, Proletarian Unity, standing, leaning on one elbow, gazing at the camera; (corners slightly bumped), 5 x 7 in.

Bloch and Kahlo formed a close friendship in the early 1930s while the former apprenticed with Diego Rivera. This particular piece was originally commissioned as a massive pro-labor project by the New Workers School in New York. It occupied twenty-one panels, of which eight are extant. Bloch worked as part of Rivera's crew on the Rockefeller mural project, one of a six-person team employed in scaling up the mural from the artist's smaller paper sketch to full-sized format on tracing paper, destined for the wall, and later, destruction, and so we may infer that she was active on this mural as well in a similar capacity. In this portrait, Lenin looms over Kahlo's head, with Marx at his right shoulder, sketchy areas fringe the bottom sections of the painting. The mural is currently owned by the Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan.