A 1940 self-portrait by the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (Tk6.7b) at an art auction in New York, setting a new record for the highest price achieved by any female artist at auction, reports The Guardian.
‘El sueño (La cama)’, or ‘The Dream (The Bed)’, which shows Kahlo asleep in a bed beneath a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her, was sold on Thursday night during a Sotheby’s auction of surrealist art, following just four minutes of bidding.
The sale price, which includes fees, surpasses the previous record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44.4m (Tk5.4b). Sotheby’s has not yet revealed the identity of the buyer.
Originally estimated to fetch between $40m (Tk4.8b) and $60m (Tk7.3b), the $54.7m (Tk6.70b) result also shatters the auction record for Latin American art, previously set by Kahlo’s Diego y Yo (Diego and I) in 2021 when it sold for $34.9m (Tk4.3b). That work depicted the artist alongside her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.
It is believed that some of Kahlo’s works have sold privately for even higher sums. The self-portrait is one of the few Kahlo paintings to remain in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument. Works held in Mexico, whether publicly or privately, cannot be exported or destroyed.
The piece comes from a private collection, its owner undisclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale. Some art historians have scrutinised the auction on cultural grounds, while others have expressed concern that the painting, last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, may once again vanish from public view. It has already been requested for future exhibitions in New York, London and Brussels.
Kahlo’s work is known for its vivid and unflinching portrayal of herself and the events of her life, which was dramatically altered by a bus accident at the age of 18. She began painting while bedridden, endured multiple painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis and wore medical corsets until her death in 1954 at the age of 47.
During the years she spent confined to her bed, Kahlo came to see it as a threshold between worlds, using her art to explore her own mortality. The painting is the highlight of a sale featuring more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Although often associated with surrealism, a movement characterised by dreamlike imagery and an interest in the unconscious mind, Kahlo resisted the label. “I never painted dreams,” she famously said. “I painted my own reality.”
In its catalogue note, Sotheby’s described the painting as offering “a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”
“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualisation of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the note added.
