A haunting 1940 self portrait by Frida Kahlo titled “El sueño (La cama)” or “The Dream (The Bed)” sold Thursday for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s in New York, becoming the top selling work by any female artist at auction and surpassing the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. The painting depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden colonial style bed floating in the clouds, draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves with a skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite lying above the bed, offering what Sotheby’s called “a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.” The sale also topped Kahlo’s own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist, surpassing her 1949 painting “Diego and I” which went for $34.9 million in 2021, though some art historians have scrutinized the sale for cultural reasons and raised concerns that the painting could again disappear from public view after not being exhibited since the late 1990s.
Kahlo created the work during years when she was confined to bed following a devastating bus accident at age 18 that upended her life, leading her to start painting while bedridden and undergo a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis while wearing casts until her death in 1954 at age 47. During this time she came to view her bed as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality through art that vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, always insisting “I never painted dreams, I painted my own reality” despite being grouped with surrealist artists. 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 that cannot be sold abroad or destroyed, though this particular painting from an undisclosed private collection is legally eligible for international sale and has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in New York, London and Brussels. Kahlo’s great niece Mara Romeo Kahlo celebrated the sale’s significance by saying she’s proud her aunt is one of the most valued women because “what woman doesn’t identify with Frida, or what person doesn’t? I think everyone carries a little piece of my aunt in their heart,” proving that art created from chronic pain and past trauma can transcend time to become the most valuable female artist work ever sold at auction.
