The Frida Kahlo self-portrait “El sueño (La cama)” shattered the auction record for a work by a female artist, selling for $55 million at Sotheby’s Thursday.
The sale “shows just how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, but in the recognition of women artists at the very highest level of the market,” Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art for Sotheby’s, said in a news release. Kahlo’s haunting 1940 painting had previously sold at Sotheby’s 45 years ago for just $51,000, according to the auction house.
Estimated to fetch $40 million to $60 million, the final price for the surrealist painting soared past the previous record — Sotheby’s 2014 sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” — by more than $10 million. The Kahlo work served as the centerpiece of the “Exquisite Corpus” evening auction, which included works from other prominent Surrealists including Salvador Dalí, Kay Sage, René Magritte and Dorothea Tanning.
In “El sueño (La cama)” — which translates to “The dream (The bed)” — the Mexican artist sleeps in her wooden, four-poster canopy bed, covered by a golden blanket as a vine appears to encroach on her. A skeleton lies atop the bed canopy, a flower bouquet in hand and dynamite coiled around it.
Kahlo painted the work during an especially turbulent year. In 1940, her former lover Leon Trotsky was assassinated, and she remarried her ex-husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.
The artwork represents “her lifelong preoccupation with mortality, physicality, and the emotional complexities of selfhood,” Sotheby’s catalogue note says, and “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”
Known for her self-portraits depicting her distinctive unibrow and Tehuana-style clothing, Kahlo embraced her Mexican and Indigenous heritage in her work.
The prominent 20th-century artist and cultural icon spent much of her life in bed as a result of her childhood polio and severe injuries from a bus-trolley accident when she was 18. While bedridden, Kahlo used a mirror affixed underneath the bed’s canopy to help her paint. She died in 1954 at age 47.
The Sotheby’s auction also broke a personal record for the late artist. The highest price paid at auction for a Kahlo work was $34.9 million in 2021 for “Diego and I,” featuring her and Rivera. Kahlo’s fame didn’t surpass her husband’s until after her death. She’s become a phenomenon, her story told in a 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek, her face donning tote bags and T-shirts, and exhibitions of her work drawing crowds at museums around the world. It’s been dubbed “Fridamania.”
“El sueño (La cama)” has been featured in exhibitions in London, Berlin, Stockholm and New York and is considered “a cornerstone of Kahlo scholarship,” according to Sotheby’s.
“The painting drew bids from two determined collectors over a gripping 5 minutes,” Sotheby’s said.
The sale comes amid a record-breaking week at the auction house, as confidence in the art market bounces back. On Tuesday, “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” by Gustav Klimt became the most valuable modern artwork sold at auction, taking in $236.4 million.
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