Self-portrait by acclaimed Mexican painter sells for $55 million at auction, setting a record for female artists

Famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait sold for an astonishing $55 million at auction on Thursday – setting a new record for female artists. 

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed – titled ‘El sueño (La cama)’ or in English, ‘The Dream (The Bed)’ – surpassed the record previously held by Georgia O´Keeffe´s ‘Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,’ which once hung in the White House and sold for $44.4 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. 

Her 1949 painting ‘Diego and I,’ depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. 

That is now the third-most valuable painting by a woman. 

But ‘El sueño (La cama)’ had the rare distinction of remaining in private hands outside of Mexico, where the government declared her work an artistic monument in 1984 and banned any of her paintings that were in Mexico at the time from being exported.

It was previously sold at Sotheby’s in 1980 to Nesuhi Ertegun, the Turkish-American record producer who co-founded Atlantic Records with his brother Ahmet, according to historian Luis-Martin Lozano, who wrote an essay for the auction house on the painting, The New York Times reports.  

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 papier-mache skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite.

Famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait sold for an astonishing $55 million at auction on Thursday – setting a new record for female artists

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed – titled ‘El sueño (La cama)’ or in English, ‘The Dream (The Bed)’ was sold to an unidentified bidder at Sotheby’s in New York City on Thursday

The painting is deeply personal for Kahlo, who was confined to her bed for long periods of time as she endured chronic pain following a near-fatal bus accident at the age of 18 and underwent subsequent surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis.

During her recovery, Kahlo’s family set up an adapted easel and fitted mirror to the canopy of the bed so that she could continue to paint while lying down.

‘I am not dead, and I have a reason to live,’ she once wrote, according to CNN. ‘That reason is painting.’ 

In his essay, Lozano argued that the firecrackers tied to the skeleton suggested ‘Kahlo’s intent to signal a passage between dimensions – between reality and dream, life and death.’ 

Advertising the piece ahead of the auction, Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s head of Latin American art, said: ‘El sueño (La cama) stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks – a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses.

‘Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant,’ she said, according to NPR. 

On Thursday, auctioneer Oliver Barker also described the painting as ‘an evocative and spectral meditation on life, death and the spirit world.’

Kahlo made the masterpiece in 1940, a tumultuous year in her life.

It was the year remarried Rivera after divorcing him just one year prior. It was also the year her former lover, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, was assassinated.

‘El sueño (La cama)’ had the rare distinction of remaining in private hands outside of Mexico , where the government declared her work an artistic monument in 1984 and banned any of her paintings that were in Mexico at the time from being exported

The sale proved to be controversial, with some arguing Kahlo’s work should remain in Mexico, while others raised concern that the painting – last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s – could again disappear from public view after the auction

Ahead of Thursday night’s auction, Kahlo’s great-niece, celebrated the significance of the sale. 

‘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 told the Associated Press. 

‘I think everyone carries a little piece of my aunt in their heart.’

Kahlo’s work has been receiving renewed interest since a 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek as the artist introduced a new generation to her work and her dramatic biography.

Just within the past year, more than a dozen museums around the world have exhibited shows dedicated to Kahlo, and on Thursday, ‘El sueño (La cama)’ sold after four minutes of spirited bidding, The New York Times reports.

But at one point, bidding dramatically slowed at around $40 million – the low end of what auctioneers thought it could go for – and it seemed uncertain whether the painting would break any records.

Ultimately, Di Stasi handed the winning bid to a buyer on the phone, whose identity is not yet known.

Kahlo’s work has been receiving renewed interest since a 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek as the artist introduced a new generation to her work and her dramatic biography 

Kahlo’s 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 – despite Kahlo’s objections to being labeled a surrealist.

The art style centers on a fascination with the unconscious mind, but Kahlo once said: ‘I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’   

The sale of her painting on Thursday was also controversial as some argued her work should remain in Mexico, while others raised concern that the painting – last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s – could again disappear from public view after the auction.

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