Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait sells for almost $55 million, breaking record for female artists

A 1940 self-portrait by a famous Mexican artist. Frida Kahlo sold for $54.7 million at a New York art auction Thursday, becoming the highest sale price for a work by any female artist.

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed, titled “The Dream (The Bed),” surpassed the record of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

The sale at Sotheby’s also surpassed Kahlo’s auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, sold for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

Thursday’s auction for the painting drew bids from two collectors more than five minutes before it sold, for more than 1,000 times the price it sold for 45 years ago, according to Sotheby’s.

“When this painting sold at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000, few could have imagined that it would return 45 years later to sell for $55 million. This record result shows how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of the genius of Frida Kahlo, but also in the recognition of women artists at the highest level of the market,” said Anna Di Stasi, director of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, in a statement. press. “In The Dream, Kahlo confronts her own fragility, but what emerges is a portrait of extraordinary resilience and strength. It is a lasting testament to one of the most admired and sought-after artists of our time.”

The self-portrait is one of the few pieces by Kahlo that have remained in private hands outside of Mexico, where her work has been declared an artistic monument. His works in public and private collections in the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been revealed, and is legally suitable for international sale. Some art historians have examined the sale for cultural reasons, while others have expressed concern that the painting, last publicly displayed in the late 1990s, may once again disappear from public view after the auction. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities such as New York, London and Brussels.

The identity of the buyer was not revealed.

The piece shows Kahlo asleep on a colonial-style wooden bed floating in the clouds. She is wrapped in a golden blanket and tangled in vines and climbing leaves. On the bed there is a skeleton wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vibrantly and ruthlessly described herself and the events of her life, which was turned upside down by a bus accident at age 18. She began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, then wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47.

During the years that Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to see it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.

The painting was the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being labeled as a surrealist, a style of art that is dreamlike and focuses on a fascination with the unconscious mind.

“I never painted dreams,” he once said. “I painted my own reality.”

In its catalog note, Sotheby’s said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”

“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, an all-too-plausible fear for an artist whose daily existence was determined by chronic pain and past traumas,” the catalog notes.