Frida Kahlo breaks auction history, becomes the first woman to set a record-breaking sale

WEB DESK: A self-portrait by iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, setting a new global auction record for any artwork created by a woman, Sotheby’s announced.

The 1940 painting, El Sueño (La cama) — The Dream (The Bed) — surpassed the previous benchmark held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which fetched $44.4 million in 2014. Sotheby’s described the Kahlo piece as “the most valuable work by a woman artist ever sold at auction.”

The surrealist-infused painting shows Kahlo asleep in a floating bed, overshadowed by a skeleton bound in sticks of dynamite. The work was created during a defining period in her career, shaped by her fraught relationship with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Sotheby’s said the motifs blend Mexican folk tradition with European surrealism, even though Kahlo herself rejected being labelled a surrealist.

The painting carried a pre-sale estimate of USD40–60 million. The buyer, however, remains anonymous.

Kahlo’s lifelong battle with illness, including polio, a crippling bus accident, and chronic pain, informed much of her art, with themes of mortality and suffering appearing throughout her work. The skeleton in the piece mirrors a papier-mâché figure that hung above her own bed.

The landmark sale also highlights the stark gender gap in the art market: none of the 162 artworks previously sold for over $50 million were by women, and less than one percent of works surpassing $30 million were created by female artists.

The auction came just two days after Sotheby’s sold Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer for $236.4 million, the second-highest price ever achieved at auction. The overall record still belongs to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million in 2017.

Kahlo now joins the small group of women whose works have crossed major price thresholds, alongside O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois and Tamara de Lempicka.