Frida Kahlo's haunting 1940 self-portrait, 'El sueño (La cama),' sold for a record-breaking $54.7 million at Sotheby's, becoming the top-selling work by any female artist and a Latin American artist at auction.
Famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait, 'El sueño (La cama)' (The Dream (The Bed)), achieved a historic sale at Sotheby's in New York, fetching $54.7 million. This monumental price established it as the top-selling work by any female artist at auction, surpassing Georgia O’Keeffe’s previous record, and also broke Kahlo's own record for a Latin American artist. The painting depicts Kahlo asleep in a floating, colonial-style bed, draped in a golden blanket, entangled in vines, with a skeleton wrapped in dynamite suspended above. Art historians and Sotheby's interpret the piece as a 'spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death,' reflecting Kahlo's life of chronic pain and trauma following a bus accident at 18. Despite her resistance to being labeled a surrealist, stating she 'painted her own reality,' the dreamlike imagery is striking. The artwork came from a private collection and was legally eligible for international sale, a rarity for Kahlo's works, most of which are protected within Mexico as artistic monuments. Concerns have been raised by some art historians regarding the cultural implications of the sale and the potential for the painting to once again disappear from public view, although it has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions globally.
