NEW YORK — The art world made history as a deeply personal and haunting self-portrait by Mexican master Frida Kahlo sold for a staggering $54.7 million at auction in New York, establishing a monumental new record for the most valuable work by a female artist ever sold.
The work, titled El sueño (La cama)—”The Dream (The Bed)”—was the centerpiece of Sotheby’s recent Surrealist art auction. The 1940 oil on canvas dramatically surpassed its pre-sale estimates and the previous record, underscoring Kahlo’s enduring market power and cultural significance.
An Intimate Meditation on Mortality
El sueño (La cama) is a signature example of Kahlo’s unflinching biographical work. It depicts the artist asleep in her four-poster, colonial-style wooden bed, which appears to float mid-air in a sky of clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket entwined with green, crawling vines and leaves, symbolizing regeneration. Most strikingly, resting directly above her on the bed’s canopy is a grinning, life-size skeleton figure wrapped in sticks of dynamite.
The painting was created during a pivotal and tumultuous time in Kahlo’s life, marked by chronic pain following her 1925 bus accident and the complex dynamics of her relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera. The skeletal figure, which mirrors a papier-mâché Judas effigy Kahlo kept above her own bed, is interpreted by art historians as a meditation on the boundary between sleep and death, and a visualization of the artist’s anxiety about dying in her sleep due to her constant health struggles.
Kahlo Ousts Previous Record-Holder
The $54.7 million sale price decisively surpassed the decade-old record for a female artist, previously held by American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million in 2014. Kahlo had already held the record for the most expensive Latin American artwork with her 2021 sale of Diego y yo for $34.9 million, a record that this new sale now smashes.
Sotheby’s noted that the painting, which last sold in 1980 for just $51,000, is one of the very few Kahlo masterpieces of this caliber to remain in private hands outside of Mexico, where her entire body of work has been declared an artistic monument and is largely restricted from international sale.
While the buyer’s identity was not disclosed, the record-setting price is seen by many in the art community as a long-overdue market correction, finally placing one of the 20th century’s most iconic and revered women artists into the upper echelons of the global art market, though still far behind the record for a male artist. The painting, last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, has already been requested for upcoming international exhibitions, offering the public a chance to view the historic work.
With additional report: inquirer.net
