ART : Beyond Kahlo : The increase in prices for the late Mexican painter’s work has been meteoric. But her popularity is only part of a larger phenomenon--the boom in the Latin American art market.

Never mind the Rauschenbergs, Twomblys and Lichtensteins that beckoned contemporary art lovers to New York last week for a round of big-ticket auctions. Forget the Matisses, Chagalls and Monets to be offered in this week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art. The star of the spring auction season is Frida Kahlo’s 1947 “Self-Portrait With Loose Hair,” which goes on the block in Christie’s May 15 sale of Latin American art. The Park Avenue auction house expects the painting to fetch between $1.5 million and $2 million.

That’s a pittance in comparison to pre-sale valuations during the art market boom of the late ‘80s. Even the current auctions, tailored to fit the recession, flaunt higher estimates. But $1.5 million to $2 million is a fabulous sum for a Latin American artwork--so fabulous that it would surpass the $1.43 million paid last May for Kahlo’s “Diego y Yo.” That sale not only set a record for Kahlo, but it marked the first time a Latin American artwork brought more than $1 million at auction.

The highly imaginative artist is something of a cult figure, celebrated in a spate of films, plays and books. She was married to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and died in 1954, at 47, nearly 30 years after a streetcar crashed into a bus in which she was riding and delivered her into a life of pain. Though largely forgotten until the late ‘70s, Kahlo is now idolized by feminists, teen-age girls and flashy female celebrities--all of whom admire her ability to stare down her dragons. Madonna is among collectors who lust after Kahlo’s paintings--some of which recount her physical calamities and emotional anguish in bizarre detail.

Is it time for another Kahlo price increase? New York dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who bought “Diego y Yo” and owns several other Kahlos, thinks so. She sold “Self-Portrait With Loose Hair” in 1983 for $85,000--at a profit--but Christie’s estimate is not out of line, she said in a telephone interview from her gallery on East 73rd Street.

Richard Nulman, a New York advertising executive and collector, agrees. It only takes two wealthy people to bid a price into the stratosphere, and Kahlo has a well-heeled following, he said.

Kahlo is a phenomenon, but she is more than a hungry art world’s flavor of the minute. She is also the most meteoric symbol of the Latin American art market’s rise. While prices for French Impressionist and American contemporary artworks have shot up and fallen back, Latin American art--generally defined as the products of artists who live and work in Latin America, and whose aesthetic identities were established there--has steadily moved up. (The field usually excludes Latino artists living in the United States.)

Only the work of such superstars as Kahlo, Matta (Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren) and Wilfredo Lam have escalated sharply, but lesser-known Latin Americans have found an increasingly appreciative audience. Public auctions have set six-figure records for Mexican artists Rufino Tamayo ($770,000), Remedios Varos ($825,000) and Juan O’Gorman ($550,000); Columbian Fernando Botero ($715,000); Matta, a Chilean ($660,000), and Lam, a Cuban ($605,000). Dealers report even higher sums in private deals.

Christie’s auction of 216 artworks, beginning the evening of May 15 and continuing the following day, is expected to net between $12.7 million and $16.2 million--more than last year’s $12.4-million sale, which set a record for Latin American art. Estimated prices range from $5,000 for a figure drawing by Costa Rican sculptor Francisco Zuniga to $50,000 for a painting by Uruguayan Pedro Figari. Those who have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend will have their choice of works by Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros, Venezuelan Hector Poleo and Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia, all bearing six-figure estimates. Tamayo’s 1960 painting “Mujeres” is valued at $750,000 to $950,000.

Prices for big names run high, but the most frequently cited reason for the recent growth of the Latin American market is relative affordability. “We have benefited tremendously from the crazy prices (of mainstream contemporary, modern and Impressionist art),” Martin said. “People who really want to collect but have seen prices go out of reach have had to look around in other fields. Kahlo, Lam and Matta are expensive, but for $20,000, $50,000 or $100,000, very good paintings by other Latin American artists are available. I can show you a painting by a talented young artist for $4,000 or $6,000. You get a lot for your money. Latin American art is vastly undervalued, and we like it that way.”

Collectors say it’s the art itself that gets them hooked. Nulman, who granted an interview from his car phone while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, said he “just flipped” over a show of Latin American art six years ago in Santa Fe, N.M. Then he “gulped” and forked over about $80,000 for a painting by Tamayo. He guesses it’s worth about $350,000 now, but he has no plans to sell it or anything else in his collection.

“There’s a mysticism about Mexican art that’s exciting, a magical quality,” said Dr. Stewart Frank, a soft-spoken cardiologist from La Jolla who credits his Mexican wife, Susana, and a period of living in Mexico with awakening his interest in the art. The works he has bought by Tamayo, Francisco Toledo and Adolfo Riestra “transcend any place or culture,” he said.

Interest in Latin American art is catching on in the United States, however belatedly, partly because of a growing Latino population whose cultural preferences are having a profound effect, collectors and dealers say. Although Latin American artists have traditionally been much better known in Europe than in the United States, that is beginning to change with the globalization of the art market and a new emphasis on multiculturalism in the arts.

The change has crept into the gallery scene. Martin pioneered as a Latin American specialist in New York 10 years ago when she opened her gallery, Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Arts, but now she has several competitors. Bernard Lewin tilled Los Angeles’ Latin American art fields nearly alone from 1958 until 1984, when he moved his gallery from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs. Now Latin American Masters, a 4-year-old gallery at 264 N. Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, displays works by well-established Latin Americans. Owner Bill Sheehy and director Ignacio Galbis have a $10-million inventory, built over the last 14 years.

This week, Los Angeles will gain another Latin American showcase, Iturralde Gallery, at 154 N. La Brea Ave. The owners, Mexican-born sisters Ana and Teresa Iturralde, established their first gallery four years ago in La Jolla. Now they are expanding into the potentially vast Los Angeles market. The Iturraldes plan to show a wide range of Latin American art with emphasis on established and emerging artists from Mexico. They will open with works by a dozen artists, including Toledo, Tamayo, Luis Granda and Fernando de Szyszlo.

While galleries offer continuing visibility for Latin American art, big traveling exhibitions provide an occasional blitz of cultural awareness. During the past few years, shows such as “the Latin American Spirit,” “Images of Mexico” and “The Art of the Fantastic” have focused attention on Latin American art.

But nothing has had the scope or clout of “Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries,” an enormous exhibition that opened in October at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Currently at the San Antonio Museum of Art (to Aug. 4), the show will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Oct. 6 and run through Dec. 29. An ambitious program of related events promises to turn Southern California into a giant stage for Mexican and Latino culture.

The Iturraldes have planned three exhibitions in conjunction with the big Mexican show: “Mexican Painting: The Contemporary Classics” (Sept. 27-Oct. 27), “Eight Contemporary Mexican Artists” (Nov. 1-30) and “Women in Mexican Art” (Dec. 6-31). The sisters say the traveling exhibition and their gallery work provide an opportunity to feel good about their much-maligned homeland. “Mexico’s image is very bad. You think of illegals and corruption. We want to show the other side. The art being produced there is some of the best in the world,” Teresa said.

If Los Angeles’ experience is anything like New York’s, the effect of “Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries” will be “unbelievable,” Martin said, recalling an unprecedented rush of activity in her gallery for the duration of the exhibition. “It was as if there was an auction every day,” she said, referring to the crowds of collectors who come to New York for semiannual Latin American art auctions. “People would come in with checklists of all the artists whose work they wanted to see. Some of them said, ‘I’ve always loved this work,’ and I had to wonder where they had been.” Exhibitions in major museums seem to give them confidence, she said.

The Latin American art market is riding high, but only after “tremendous ups and downs,” said Lisa Palmer, head of Christie’s Latin American department. Austrian-born and German-raised, Palmer got her Latin American art education while living in Brazil and by organizing auctions in New York. After establishing Christie’s Latin American department in 1981, she found she was dealing with a market that depended upon nationalistic collecting--and therefore on individual nations’ economic health. If the Bolivian economy took a dive, Bolivian art didn’t sell; if Argentina suffered from extreme inflation, Argentine art fell flat.

“It was extremely difficult. There were a lot of buy-ins,” she said, referring to works that failed to sell at auction. During the past few years, the market has expanded internationally and Americans have moved in, she said in an interview at Christie’s.

The event that got the whole thing going in New York was an enormously successful benefit auction organized in 1979 for the Center for Inter-American Relations (now the Americas Society). Both Palmer and Martin, who was then head of Sotheby’s painting department, worked on the auction, which attracted celebrated collectors and netted more than $1 million.

Martin had been including a selection of Mexican work in modern art sales once a year at Sotheby’s, but she soon widened her net and stepped up the pace with semiannual sales of Latin American art. In 1982, the year after Palmer launched Christie’s department, Martin decided to leave Sotheby’s and open her own gallery. Her new business was about as far as one could get from New York’s trendiest galleries, she said, but her vision has paid off. “In the last 10 years there has been an opening up of people’s taste. There isn’t such an iron grip of a few dealers,” she said.

Initially, many of her clients were transplanted Latin Americans (Cubans from Miami, Mexicans who had homes in Houston or California), but many Anglos have since joined them. “People walk in from all over,” she said. The market is about 50% Latin American; next come Europeans, then Americans and, most recently, a few Japanese.

At the moment, Christie’s rules the Latin American auction scene because Sotheby’s closed its Latin American department in January. The move appeared to be a cost-cutting measure, but Sotheby’s issued a statement explaining the change as a way of incorporating Latin American art into international sales--in effect eliminating the ghetto of separate sales and possibly getting higher prices in a proper historical context.

The argument makes sense in art historical terms. “Latin American art” is an arbitrary, geographic category that encompasses a vast range of history and styles. But there has been strong resistance from collectors who say that only well-known artists will be included at Sotheby’s while others will drop out of sight. Current sale catalogues support this charge. While Christie’s will offer works by 103 Latin American artists on May 15 and 16, Sotheby’s is including only a dozen Latin Americans in its spring auctions of contemporary and modern art.

“If I were the president of Sotheby’s, I would put out a press release that says, ‘Oops. We made a mistake.’ And I would reinstate the department,” collector Nulman said. The auction house isn’t likely to use those words, but it is reviewing the situation, said press officer Matthew Weigman. “We are watching to see how the May sales do. We’re in a wait-and-see mode,” he said.

In the long run, aficionados of Latin American works expect the market to grow steadily in the United States as Americans become better informed about the art and Latinos become more affluent, but they do not predict an explosion.

For now, the art is available but scholarship isn’t, say Galbis and Sheehy of Latin American Masters. But the shortage of publications about Latin American artists is a ready-made opportunity for fledgling scholars. “Look at what Frida Kahlo did for Hayden Herrera,” Sheehy said, referring to the art historian who became known as an authority on Kahlo. Independent film producer Nancy Hardin has optioned Herrera’s 1983 biography “Frida.” (A Kahlo film directed by Luis Valdez is scheduled to begin production in September; Madonna, Robert De Niro and director David Cronenberg reportedly are developing Kahlo projects as well.)

When auctioneer Christopher Burge cracks his gavel on the Kahlo sale, the art world may see a new high for the darling of Latin American art. But there will be another winner: The Chrysalis Foundation is selling “Self-Portrait With Loose Hair” to endow an Iowa women’s archive at the University of Iowa.