Frida Kahlo's "El sueño" Portrait Sells for Record-Breaking $55 Million USD at Sotheby's Auction
A new auction record for a Latin American artist.
Summary
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Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, El sueño (La cama), sold for a record-breaking $55 million USD at Sotheby’s
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The 1940 painting, showing Kahlo in bed with a skeleton, reflects a period of the artist’s chronic pain and marital turmoil
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The sale set a new auction record for a Latin American artist
A deeply intimate self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has shattered the artist’s previous auction record, selling for a monumental $55 million USD at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. The piece, titled “El sueño (La cama),” or “The Dream (The Bed),” now holds the record for the most expensive work by any Latin American artist sold at auction.
The canvas, created in 1940, is a powerful reflection of a period of great distress in Kahlo’s life, coinciding with the deterioration of her health and her turbulent marriage. It visually captures the artist’s intense focus on the boundary between consciousness and death: Kahlo is shown asleep in a canopied bed, observed by a grinning papier-mâché skeleton hovering ominously above her. The painting translates her chronic suffering and romantic turmoil into a surreal, unforgettable image.
The $55 million USD final price landed within the auction house’s original estimation range. However, the result fell just short of the all-time auction record for a female artist, still held by a work from Georgia O’Keeffe (which sold in 2014 and is valued around $60.5 million USD today). The historic sale confirms the sustained, fierce demand for Kahlo’s unflinching, biographical masterpieces in the global art market. Kahlo remains one of the most sought-after Surrealist artists that continues to grow in stature in pop culture. Her popularity is in due part to major museum exhibitions and the market’s step towards reappraising female artists.
