Poised to shatter records ahead of its highly anticipated sale, one of Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo’s most vulnerable and poignant self-portraits sold for $54.7 million with fees at a Sotheby’s evening sale on Thursday, November 20.
Emerging on the market for the first time in 45 years, Kahlo’s “El sueño (La cama)” (1940) eclipsed the artist’s 2021 record by nearly $20 million in just five minutes, and overtook Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” (1932) as the most expensive work by a woman artist ever sold at auction.
The new record was welcomed amid an extended celebration of the Surrealism movement, which turned 100 last year. In May 2024, Sotheby’s ushered in an equally monumental sale for the women of Surrealism when Leonora Carrington’s esoteric composition “Les Distractions de Dagobert” (1945) broke records at $28.5 million with fees, establishing Carrington as the most valuable woman artist from the United Kingdom.
In “El sueño (La cama),” Kahlo depicts herself sleeping under a yellow blanket in her wooden four poster bed adrift in a partly cloudy sky. Recumbent above the bed’s scaffolding, a skeletal form wrapped in wires and sticks of dynamite lays its head on two pillows just like Kahlo does, and holds a bouquet of flowers. As Kahlo sleeps, vines and leaves creep from the roots knotted at foot of her bed and over her form, embracing her shoulders and the sheets around her.
Kahlo’s practice draws from various periods of profound physical and emotional pain and isolation. She painted this pivotal composition in the same year as the assassination of exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a good friend turned brief extramarital lover, and following her remarriage to her first husband, Diego Rivera, with whom she had reconciled years after his affair with her younger sister.
“El sueño (La cama)” came back onto the market from an undisclosed private collection, and Sotheby’s has not yet revealed the buyer who secured the purchase in the two-person bidding war that ensued over the phone yesterday evening. In 2021, Argentine art collector and museum founder Eduardo F. Constantini paid $31 million for another Kahlo portrait at Sotheby’s; he was also the purchaser of the recent Carrington oil.
The auction house noted that the work has been requested as a loan to four upcoming exhibitions, starting with Frida y Diego: The Last Dream at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in March 2026.
