Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait El sueño (La cama) sold for an extraordinary $55 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday. This is a new global record for any female artist. The figure surpassed the previous benchmark set in 2014, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 fetched $44.4 million.
The result also broke Kahlo’s own record for the highest price paid for a Latin American artwork, exceeding the $34.9 million achieved by her 1949 painting Diego and I in 2021. That piece now ranks as the third-most valuable painting by a woman.
All About Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait El sueño
Painted in 1940, El sueño (La cama) is among the few Kahlo works that remained in private hands outside Mexico. She remarried muralist Diego Rivera that year after their brief divorce, and it was also the year her former lover, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, was assassinated.
Since 1984, her paintings held within the country have been legally designated as artistic monuments and cannot be exported.
The work was last sold in 1980, when Sotheby’s auctioned it to Nesuhi Ertegun, the Turkish-American record producer and co-founder of Atlantic Records. Historian Luis-Martín Lozano, in an essay for the auction house, traced its journey as part of the lead-up to Thursday’s landmark sale.
What Is The Hidden Meaning Behind Frida Kahlo’s Art?
The painting portrays Kahlo asleep in a floating wooden bed surrounded by clouds. She is wrapped in a golden blanket, entwined with vines and leaves, while a papier-mache skeleton bound in sticks of dynamite rests above her.
Kahlo’s paintings are inseparable from her lifelong battle with physical suffering. She contracted polio as a child and survived a catastrophic bus accident at 18 that left her bedridden and dependent on body casts and multiple surgeries. El sueño captures that ongoing physical torment through its explosive skeleton figure hovering above her bed.
“I am not dead, and I have a reason to live,” she once wrote, according to CNN. “That reason is painting.”
Ahead of the sale, Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s head of Latin American art, described the painting as one of Kahlo’s most powerful creations.
“El sueño (La cama) stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks – a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” she said, quoted by NPR. “Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity.”
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Zubair Amin is a Senior Journalist at NewsX with over seven years of experience in reporting and editorial work. He has written for leading national and international publications, including Foreign Policy Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Wire, Article 14, Mongabay, News9, among others. His primary focus is on international affairs, with a strong interest in US politics and policy. He also writes on West Asia, Indian polity, and constitutional issues. Zubair tweets at zubaiyr.amin
