An enigmatic self-portrait by Frida Kahlo set a public auction record for the Mexican artist when it sold for $54.7 million with fees on Thursday evening, during a Sotheby’s auction of surrealist art in Manhattan after four minutes of bidding.
The painting of the artist asleep in a canopy bed with a papier-mâché skeleton smiling overhead was created in 1940 — a turbulent year in the chaotic life of Kahlo, who rarely found peace between a rocky marriage and chronic pain from injuries. She called it “El sueño (La cama),” or “The dream (The bed),” bringing the artist’s preoccupation with the border between sleep and death into focus.
“People feel this sense of connection and communion with her,” said Julian Dawes, the Sotheby’s executive who organized the auction.
The painting fell within the midrange of the auction house’s original estimate of $40 million to $60 million. It was just short of the record for a female artist. That price was set by Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44.4 million, which is about $60.5 million in today’s dollars.
But the sale highlighted both Kahlo’s growing stature as a pop-culture icon and the genre of Surrealism, the 20th century’s most provocative art movement, which is celebrating its centennial around the world. Its popularity has been driven by a combination of factors, such as museum exhibitions, increased scholarship and the market’s reappraisal of its female artists, including Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Gertrude Abercrombie.
After three years of declining sales, the November evening auctions, which end Friday, have provided a glimmer of hope in the art market. Sotheby’s generated $706 million on Tuesday night, more than double last year’s equivalent auctions, led by a record-setting portrait by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt that sold for $236.4 million.
At the beginning of the week, Christie’s sold $690 million worth of artworks at its 20th-century sales, among them a $62 million painting by Mark Rothko with vibrant stripes of orange and red. (All prices include fees.)
But the latest auction symbolized just how desired Kahlo paintings have become since her death in 1954.
Only a handful of Kahlo’s pictures have circulated through the art market since the Mexican government declared her artworks as artistic monuments in 1984, banning any work by Kahlo that was in Mexico at the time from being exported. A 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek as the artist introduced a new generation to her paintings and dramatic biography, which told of a debilitating bus accident at an early age, participation in the Mexican Communist Party and a tempestuous relationship with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera.
Her prior record was set four years ago, for the 1949 work “Diego and I,” at $34.9 million. That canvas was arguably a stronger example of her self-portraits because it featured a close-up of Kahlo’s face with a bushy unibrow, tears falling from her eyes and a disturbing image of her husband emerging from the center of her forehead.
Julia Halperin and Victoria Burnett contributed reporting
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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