Frida Kahlo makes history as self-portrait sets record for sale price for female artist

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million at a New York art auction and became the top sale price for a work by any female artist

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million at a New York art auction and became the top sale price for a work by any female artist.

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed — titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

The sale at Sotheby’s also topped Kahlo’s own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument. Her works in both public and private collections within the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale. Some art historians have scrutinized the sale for cultural reasons, while others have raised concern that the painting — last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s — could again disappear from public view after the auction. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.