A Frida Kahlo self-portrait, “El sueño (la cama)” - translated to “The Dream (The Bed)” – has shattered the auction record for a work by a female artist, selling for $54.7 million (£41.8 million) at Sotheby’s. The 1940s painting depicts Kahlo asleep under a canopy bed, shadowed by a skeleton and entwined with dynamite.
The sale price far exceeds the previous record of $44 million, held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed / White Flower No.1” sold in 2014, and surpasses Kahlo’s previous auction high of $34.9 million set in 2021. A tense bidding war between two collectors drove the price over 1,000 times its $51,000 value from a 1980 auction at the same house.
Sotheby’s head of Latin American art, Anna Di Stasi, noted the meaning of the result: “This record-breaking result shows just how far we have come, not only in our recognition of Frida Kahlo’s genius, but in the recognition of women artists at the very highest level of the market.”
The painting is considered one of Kahlo’s “psychologically charged” works, created during a tumultuous period in her life following the assassination of a former lover and shortly after her divorce and remarriage to Diego Rivera. Kahlo, who died in 1954, is celebrated for her intensely personal portraits exploring themes of physical pain stemming from childhood polio and injuries sustained in a bus accident.
“El sueño (la cama)” is rarely available on the public market, as Mexican authorities declared Kahlo’s artworks artistic monuments in the 1980s, restricting their export without authorization. Her life and art were also the subject of a 2002 biographical film starring Salma Hayek,focusing on her relationship with Rivera and her personal struggles.
