A 1940 self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) in New York, making it the most valuable work by a female artist ever auctioned.
Titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The Bed), the portrait was estimated to bring in between $40m (£30.5m) and $60m (£45.8m) and drew about five minutes of bidding before it was finally sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) at Sotheby’s.
According to Artnews, the winning bid was placed by telephone via Sotheby’s head of Latin American art Anna Di Stasi.
The buyer's name has not been disclosed.
El sueño surpassed the record previously held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, which sold for $44.4m (£33.92m) in 2014 at Sotheby’s.
It has also broken the record for Latin American art, previously held by Kahlo herself. Her 1949 self-portrait Diego y Yo (Diego and I) sold for $34.9m (£26.6m) in 2021.
El sueño shows Kahlo herself asleep in a four-poster bed, floating against a blue sky; above her looms an oversized skeleton whose ribcage is bound with explosives and dried flowers.
The work’s combination of intimate, autobiographical detail and macabre symbolism is typical of Kahlo’s best-known self-portraits and has long been read as a meditation on pain, mortality and the artist’s fraught personal life.
Stasi told CNN that the work was “one of very few works of this calibre still in private hands”.
“Frida Kahlo occupies a completely singular place in art history. There’s an almost spiritual connection people have with her paintings, which are so deeply personal yet at the same time resonate universally. We’ve seen it this season while El sueño (La cama) has been on display around the world, with lines out the door,” she said.
“This painting has all the hallmarks of a signature Frida: the self-portrait, a surrealist imagery, and most importantly, a psychological intensity and that sense of communion between artist and viewer.”
Sotheby’s only said the lot of paintings came from a private collection, where it had remained for 45 years, and it was offered as part of its “Exquisite Corpus” sale of Surrealist and modernist treasures.
However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the portrait was part of the estate of Brazilian socialite and collector Selma Ertegun and her jazz producer husband, Nesuhi Ertegun.
According to the New York Times, Nesuhi Ertegun bought El sueño (La cama) at Sotheby’s in 1980, for $51,000 (£38,960).
Nesuhi Ertegun died in 1989 and Selma Ertegun died last year. Their collection also included Dorothea Tanning’s 1951 Interior with Sudden Joy, which also sold for a record-high $3.4m (£2.5m).
The painting is one of the very few Kahlo works still in private hands outside Mexico. Her body of work held inside the country has been formally declared an “artistic monument”, meaning pieces located in Mexico cannot be exported or destroyed under patrimony law. This has sharply restricted global supply of her paintings, which has driven collectors to pay high prices for the rare works that are in lawful international circulation.
El sueño was created during a turning point in Kahlo’s life, shaped by severe health problems stemming from childhood polio and the devastating bus accident she survived at 18, which left her in steel and leather corsets and confined her to bed for long stretches.
Her family mounted a mirror above her bed and adapted an easel so she could continue painting while lying flat, an experience she once summarised by writing: “I am not dead and I have a reason to live. That reason is painting.”
Before the auction, the painting, which had been unseen publicly for nearly three decades, toured London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Paris, and New York.
The record-setting sale also came two nights after Sotheby’s achieved another headline figure, when a Gustav Klimt painting sold for $236.4m (£179.7), the second-highest auction price ever recorded.
