Frida Kahlo painting sells for £41.8m, breaking auction record for women artists

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed — titled El Sueno (La Cama) or in English, The Dream (The Bed) — surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, which sold for 44.4 million dollars (£34 million)in 2014.

The sale at Sotheby’s in New York also topped Kahlo’s own 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, went for 34.9 million dollars (£26.7 million) in 2021.

Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument.

Her works in both public and private collections within the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale.

Some art historians have scrutinised the sale for cultural reasons, while others have raised concerns that the painting — last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s — could disappear from public view again after the auction.

It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.

The buyer’s identity was not disclosed.

The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed that floats in the clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves. Above the bed lies a skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18.

She started to paint 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 Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.

Before the auction, her great-niece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, celebrated the significance of the upcoming sale during a recent interview with The Associated Press in Mexico City.

“I’m very proud that she’s one of the most valued women, because really, what woman doesn’t identify with Frida, or what person doesn’t?” she said.

“I think everyone carries a little piece of my aunt in their heart.”

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

Kahlo resisted being labelled a surrealist, a style of art that is dream-like and centres on a fascination with the unconscious mind.

“I never painted dreams,” she once said.

“I painted my own reality.”

Earlier this week, a Gustav Klimt painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold at Sotheby’s for 236.4 million dollars (£180.8 million).

Klimt’s Portrait Of Elisabeth Lederer became one of the most expensive pieces of artwork ever sold at auction, second only to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at 450 million dollars (£344 million) — the record-holder over all and among male artists.