Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) sold for $54.7 million on November 20. The painting was part of a Sotheby’s sale of Surrealist art in New York.
Because the painting had a pre-sale estimate of $40 million to $60 million, it was all but guaranteed to break Kahlo’s auction record of $34.9 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2021 for the 1949 painting Diego y yo.
The painting also broke the record for a women artist more generally. The record for a woman artist at auction was set at Sotheby’s New York in 2014, with the $44.4 million sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.
Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the Latin American art department, won the Kahlo piece for a phone bidder. It hammered at $47 million, though with fees, the sum increased to $54.7 million.
As Artnet News previously reported, the 1940 Kahlo was consigned to Sotheby’s by the estate of Selma Ertegun, who built the collection with her late husband Nesuhi Ertegun. The painting depicts Kahlo reclining on a floating bed, on top of which lies a skeleton. According to Sotheby’s, Kahlo did, in fact, sleep with a papier-mâché skeleton in her canopy.
Though not as well-known as some of Kahlo’s other works, El sueño (La cama) is considered a key piece by the artist. It was discussed in depth by art historian Whitney Chadwick by her landmark 1985 book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, which centered women within a movement that had previously sidelined them long before that was fashionable. Chadwick noted that the skeleton is lined with explosives and wires, hinting at the possibility of destruction, and that the work evinces Kahlo’s “identification with the Mexican belief in the indivisible unity of life and death.”
As Chadwick pointed out, Kahlo, like many other women tied to Surrealism, had a vexed relationship with the movement, which was male-dominated. But works by her and other women tend to appear frequently these days in Surrealism auctions; paintings by Kay Sage, Remedios Varo, and Valentine Hugo were auctioned off at tonight’s Sotheby’s auction.
[See the 32 best Surrealist artworks, ranked.]
The Kahlo sale follows rising prices for female Surrealists, who have become a source of widespread fascination in recent years. Interest in women artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, and others reached new levels in 2022 with curator Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale, which took its name from a Leonora Carrington quotation.
Signs of Carrington fever were evident at the 2024 May auctions in New York, where a 1945 painting by the artist, Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s, shooting more than $10 million beyond its high estimate and notching a new record for the artist.
Tonight’s Kahlo result came ahead of a traveling exhibition devoted to the artist and her influence that will open at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in January. The exhibition will also visit Tate Modern in London next year. Sotheby’s lot description for El sueño (La cama) said that the painting had been requested for the Tate iteration of the show.
