Frida Kahlo Painting Sells for Record $54.7M at Auction

Frida Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait, "El sueño (La cama)"—or "The Dream (The Bed)"—sold for $54.7 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York on Thursday, setting a new record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction, the Guardian reports. The painting, which shows Kahlo asleep in bed while a smiling, dynamite-wrapped skeleton rests above her, surpassed the previous record of $44.4 million set by Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1" in 2014. The Kahlo painting was expected to sell for $40 million to $60 million. The identity of the buyer has not been disclosed.

It also set a new record for Latin American art, beating the $34.9 million fetched by Kahlo's "Diego y Yo" in 2021. That painting, which also sold at Sotheby's, showed Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera. "El sueño (La cama)," one of the few Kahlo works still owned in a private collection outside Mexico, came from an anonymous collector. Mexico considers Kahlo's art an "artistic monument," meaning works in the country can't be sold abroad or destroyed, whether they're part of a public or a private collection. Some art historians have expressed concern that "El sueño (La cama)"—last displayed in public in the late 1990s—may again vanish from public view.

The winning bid, which was 1,000 times more than the painting was auctioned for in 1980, came after a fierce battle between two bidders, the BBC reports. The auction was part of a larger sale of surrealist art, including works by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Kahlo, who began painting while confined to bed after a bus accident at age 18, is known for her unflinching self-portraits exploring pain and mortality. She resisted the surrealist label, once saying, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." Per the Sotheby's catalog, the skeleton in the painting is sometimes seen as symbolic of Kahlo's fear of dying in her sleep.