Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $55m, sets auction record for a female artist
A surrealist painting by Frida Kahlo from the 1940s has sold for $54.7 million (£41.8 million), breaking an auction record for a work by a female artist.
According to Sotheby’s auction house, the painting was sold for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980 after a tense bidding war between two collectors.
The auction also broke the record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021.
The work, titled El sueño (la cama), which translates as The Dream (The Bed), depicts Kahlo sleeping in a four-poster bed beneath a skeleton wrapped in dynamite.
According to Sotheby’s, it marks one of the Mexican artist’s “most psychologically charged” self-portraits and was painted during a tumultuous period in Kahlo’s life – the year her ex-lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.
Kahlo, who died in 1954, was considered one of the greatest painters of the last century and was known for her personal portraits.
His work often conveyed his painful relationship with his body, which was crippled by polio in his childhood and severely injured after a bus accident.
Anna Di Stasi, the auction house’s head of Latin American art, said few people could have imagined that El sueño (la cama) would sell for $55 million when it was first consigned to Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000.
“This record-breaking result shows how far we have come, not only in appreciating the genius of Frida Kahlo, but also in recognizing female artists at the top end of the market,” she added.
El sueño (la cama) is one of the few Kahlo paintings to be found in public markets since Mexican authorities declared the works of art as artistic monuments in the 1980s, preventing them from being exported without permission.
Kahlo’s story was adapted into a biographical film starring Salma Hayek in 2002, telling the story of her rocky relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera, and her injuries.
The previous highest price for a work by a female artist at auction was Jimson Weed / White Flower No.1 by Georgia O’Keeffe, which sold for $44 million at Sotheby’s in 2014.
