Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait sold for nearly $55 million, breaking the record for female artists

A 1940 self-portrait of the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.7 million at a New York art auction on Thursday, becoming the highest sale price for a work by a female artist.

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed – titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English “The Dream (The Bed)” – surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

The sale at Sotheby’s also surpassed Kahlo’s auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, sold for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings were reportedly sold privately for even more.

Thursday’s auction for the painting attracted bids from two collectors more than 5 minutes before the sale – at more than 1,000 times the price it sold for 45 years ago, according to Sotheby’s.

“When this painting sold at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000, few could have imagined that it would return 45 years later for $55 million. This record result shows how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of the genius of Frida Kahlo, but also in the recognition of women artists at the highest levels of the market,” said Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, in a press release. “In El sueño, Kahlo confronts her own fragility, but what emerges is a portrait of extraordinary resilience and strength. It is a lasting testament to one of the most admired and sought-after artists of our time.”

The self-portrait is one of the few works by Kahlo remaining in private hands outside of Mexico, where her entire body of work has been declared an artistic monument. His works present in public and private collections in the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale. Some art historians have scrutinized the sale for cultural reasons, while others have expressed concern that the painting – last publicly exhibited in the late 1990s – could disappear from public view again after the auction. He has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.

The identity of the buyer has not been disclosed.

The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a colonial-style wooden bed that floats in the clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in creeping vines and leaves. Above the bed is a skeleton wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vibrantly and unceremoniously depicted herself and the events of her life, which was turned upside down by a bus accident at age 18. She began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful operations on her damaged spine and pelvis, then wore casts until her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

During the years that Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to view it as a bridge between worlds while exploring her mortality.

The painting was the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted the label of surrealist, a dreamlike style of art centered on a fascination with the unconscious.

“I never painted dreams,” she once said. “I painted my own reality.”

In its catalog note, Sotheby’s said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”

“The hanging skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence has been shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the catalog notes.