Frida Kahlo self portrait sells for $55 million

Samantha Chery, Kelsey Ables

The Frida Kahlo self-portrait “El sueño (La cama)” shattered the auction record for a work by a female artist, selling for $55 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Thursday.

The sale “shows just how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, but in the recognition of women artists at the very highest level,” Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art for Sotheby’s, said. Kahlo’s haunting 1940 painting had previously sold at Sotheby’s 45 years ago for just $51 000.

Estimated to fetch $40 million to $60 million, the final price for the surrealist painting soared past the previous record - Sotheby’s 2014 sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” - by more than $10 million. The Kahlo work served as the centerpiece at an auction which included works from prominent Surrealists including Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

Kahlo painted “El sueño (La cama)” - which translates to “The dream (The bed)” - during an especially turbulent year. In 1940, her former lover Leon Trotsky was assassinated, and she remarried her ex-husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Known for her self-portraits depicting her distinctive unibrow and Tehuana-style clothing, Kahlo embraced her Mexican and Indigenous heritage in her work.

The prominent 20th-century artist and cultural icon spent much of her life in bed as a result of her childhood polio and severe injuries from a bus-trolley accident when she was 18. While bedridden, Kahlo used a mirror affixed underneath the bed’s canopy to help her paint. She died in 1954 at age 47.

The Sotheby’s auction also broke a personal record for the artist. The highest price paid at auction for a Kahlo work was $34.9 million in 2021 for “Diego and I,” featuring her and Rivera. Kahlo’s fame didn’t surpass her husband’s until after her death. She’s become a phenomenon, her story told in a 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek, that's been dubbed “Fridamania.”

The sale comes amid a record-breaking week at the auction house. On Tuesday, “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” by Gustav Klimt became the most valuable modern artwork sold at auction, taking in $236.4 million.

The majestic young woman draped in an imperial Chinese robe stands tall against a tapestry of soldiers, courtiers and celestial motifs. The 71-by-51-inch painting, was sold on Tuesday. It belonged to Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics heir who died in June.

A 19-minute bidding battle propelled the painting far beyond its $150 million estimate, with two bidders competing over the phone. The audience cheered when the price climbed to $200 million.

The price is only second to Leonardo da Vinci’s long-lost painting “Salvator Mundi” (“Savior of the World”), which shattered records in 2017 when it was sold for $450.3 million by Christie’s .

Klimt's commissioned portrait, painted between 1914 and 1916, shows the hallmark of his mature style, Robert Wellington, an associate professor of art history at the Australian National University, said.

Confiscated by the Nazis during World War II, the painting survived, unlike other Klimt works from the family’s collection, which were destroyed in a fire.