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            Diego Rivera Painting Sells Privately for $15.7 Million

   by Associated Press

   A Diego Rivera painting has sold privately for $15.7 million, setting a
   world record price for any Latin American work of art, Phillips auction
   house said Friday.

   The price for "[1]Dance in Tehuantepec" nearly doubles the figure paid
   at auction last month for a painting by Frida Kahlo, Rivera's wife whom
   he later divorced. Her "Two Nudes in the Forest (The Land Itself)" set
   a new auction record for Latin American art.

   The private sale was facilitated by Phillips.

   The buyer, Argentinian collector Eduardo Costantini, told The
   Associated Press that he has waited 20 years to acquire "Dance in
   Tehuantepec," which he unsuccessfully tried to purchase in 1995 when it
   came up at auction at Sotheby's.

   It has been out of public view since then.

   "I always wondered who had bought the painting and where it was,"
   Costantini, founder and president of the Museum of Latin American Art
   of Buenos Aires (MALBA), said in a phone interview from Buenos Aires.

   "Dance in Tehuantepec," created in 1928, depicts a group of dancers
   performing the folk dance "zandunga" under a banana tree. It is one of
   the largest canvases the acclaimed Mexican muralist painted during his
   lifetime. It measures 79 inches by 64 inches.

   Costantini said he plans to exhibit the painting at his museum next
   March. Prior to that it will be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
   in the fall and at the ARCO Madrid next February.

   The painting is the most important Rivera work in private hands outside
   of Mexico, said August Uribe, deputy chairman of the Americas at
   Phillips.

   It first appeared in 1930 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
   and was included in a major Diego Rivera retrospective at the Museum of
   Modern Art in New York a year later.

   Uribe said the painting shows Rivera's efforts "to establish a national
   identity by breaking from European modernism and embracing Mexicanism."
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   [2]http://www.voanews.com/content/diego-rivera-painting-sells-privately
   -fifteen-point-seven-million/3339070.html

References

   1. http://www.diego-rivera-foundation.org/Dance-In-Tehuantepec-1928-large.html
   2. http://www.voanews.com/content/diego-rivera-painting-sells-privately-fifteen-point-seven-million/3339070.html