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A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million US ($77 million Cdn) at a New York art auction and became the top sale price for a work by any female artist.
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 at Sotheby’s for $44.4 million US in 2014.
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work was previously $34.9 million US (then $43.7 million Cdn), paid in 2021 for Diego and I, depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.
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 scrutinized 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.
Visualization of artist’s anxiety
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 age 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 she was confined to her bed, Kahlo came to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.
The painting is 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.”
The work of Frida Kahlo is considered by Mexico as national treasures, so the country sends professional inspectors ensure her paintings do not get damaged.
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 visualization 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.
