Frida Kahlo, icon and artist, is once again making headlines. Her 1940 self-portrait, El Sueño/La Cama, has just sold for a record-breaking $54.7m. This makes it the most expensive artwork by a woman or a Latin American sold at auction.
The new top sale price smashes the previous record for an artwork by a woman, held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which was sold at Sotheby’s for $44.4m in 2014. The painting also surpasses Kahlo’s own record for the auction price of an artwork by a Latin American, which was $34.9m for her painting, Diego y Yo, sold in 2021.
El Sueño was sold Thursday evening, at Sotheby’s auction of surrealist art. It was sold after just four minutes of bidding. The sale price outshone all other paintings sold at the surrealist auction, including works by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Overall, Sotheby’s sold around $706m worth of artwork, including a painting by Gustav Klimt which sold for $236.4m – the second most expensive work to sell at auction.
Kahlo’s self-portrait is described in Sotheby’s catalogue as offering “a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.” It features the artist asleep in bed, a skeleton above her with its legs bound in dynamite. Critics have interpreted the painting as a representation of Kahlo’s fears of death and dying in her sleep. After a bus accident in 1925 left her bed bound, her legs and spine ruined, much of her work delt with her trauma and thoughts surrounding the life-defining accident – something that this painting evidently encapsulates.
It is rumoured that much of Kahlo’s work has been sold privately at much higher prices. This painting was sold from a private collection, and both buyer and seller are as of yet unknown. Requests for exhibition are already pouring in for the painting from all over the world, including London, New York, and Brussels. Many are scared that the self-portrait will fade back into the obscurity of a private collection, away from the light of exhibitions and museums.
The artwork is one of the few Kahlo pieces that has remained in private hands, outside of Mexico. Most of her work has been collected and reunited in her homeland. In Mexico, they cannot be sold abroad or destroyed, and are protected by the state. They have been declared an artistic monument, celebrating her cultural and artistic significance.