Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for nearly €50 million, breaking auction record for female artists

A haunting 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold on Thursday for $54.7 million (€47.4 million) and became the top-selling work by any female artist at an auction.

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed - titled “El sueño (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 (€38.5) 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 (€30.2) million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

Kahlo self-portrait last publicly exhibited in the 90s

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 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.

The buyer's identity was not disclosed.

‘A spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death’

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.

In its catalogue note, Sotheby’s said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”

“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualisation of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the catalogue notes.

‘One of the most valued women’

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 Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being labelled a surrealist, a style of art that's dreamlike 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 (€204.7 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 (€389.7) - the record-holder over all and among male artists.