A self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was sold at auction in New York on Thursday for $54.6 million: according to Sotheby’s, it is the most expensive painting ever sold by a woman. With this work from 1940, entitled “The Dream (The Bed)”Kahlo surpassed the record held by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painting sold for $44.4 million in 2014. The price reached Thursday is also a record for a work by any Latin American artist, male or female. The previous record belonged to Frida herself with the self-portrait “Diego and I”, sold at Sotheby’s in 2021 for 34.9 million dollars.
The history of the painting
The work was “painted in 1940 during a crucial decade of his career, marked by his turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera”, famous Mexican muralist. The self-portrait was put up for auction with an estimated price of between 40 and 60 million dollars. The name of the buyer was not revealed.
The painting depicts the artist sleeping in a bed that seems floating in the sky. On the canopy lies a huge skeleton with its legs wrapped in dynamite. This painting by Kahlo is a “very personal” image, in which the artist “merges folkloric motifs from Mexican culture with European surrealism”, he explained to AFP Anna Di Stasi, responsible for Latin American art at Sotheby’s.
Pain and death are central elements of his work
Il pain and death they have always been central elements of his work. All her life Frida Kahlo had to struggle with poor health, marked by a childhood disease, polio, and by a serious bus accident in 1925.
Kahlo, died aged 47 in 1954, She “did not agree” with the fact that her work was associated with the surrealist movement, the expert added. But “in light of this magnificent iconography, it seems entirely pertinent to include it” in this current, Di Stasi estimated.
The painting was presented by the famous auction house in its new headquarters in New York, the Breuer Building, a modernist building in Manhattan that has reopened to the public after having long been part of the Whitney Museum. The works by women that have so far sold for higher prices are mostly by great figures of the 20th century.