New York (AFP) – A self-portrait by celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, setting a record for the price of a painting by a woman, the auction house Sotheby’s said.
The sale of Kahlo’s 1940 artwork, titled “El sueno (La cama)” — which translates to “The dream (The bed)” — broke the previous record set by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose 1932 painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1” sold for $44.4 million in 2014. Kahlo’s painting is “the most valuable work by a woman artist ever sold at auction,” Sotheby’s said in a post on social media platform X.
The artwork depicts Kahlo sleeping in a bed that appears to float through the sky, beneath a skeleton with its legs wrapped in sticks of dynamite. The work was painted during a pivotal decade in Kahlo’s career, marked by her turbulent relationship with Mexican painter Diego Rivera, the auction house said on X. The painting went on the auction block with an estimated price range of $40 million to $60 million. The buyer’s name was not disclosed.
The work is a “very personal” painting, in which Kahlo “merges folkloric motifs from Mexican culture with European surrealism,” Anna Di Stasi, the head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, told AFP. The Mexican artist, who died in 1954 at the age of 47, “did not completely agree” with her work being associated with the surrealist movement, Di Stasi said. However, “given this magnificent iconography, it seems entirely appropriate to include it,” she said.
Kahlo struggled with fragile health throughout her life due to childhood illness, polio, and a serious bus accident in 1925, and pain and death were central to her work. The skeleton depicted in the painting echoed the papier-mache version that hung above Kahlo’s bed, according to Sotheby’s.
-Women under-represented-
None of the 162 pieces of art that had previously sold for more than $50 million were by women, according to an AFP tally. Less than one percent of the 468 works sold for more than $30 million are by women artists. The record-setting sale of Kahlo’s self-portrait came two nights after Sotheby’s made another record sale, with a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt fetching $236.4 million — the second-most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” which he painted between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of his main patron standing in front of a blue tapestry. The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the “Salvator Mundi,” (Savior of the World), a Renaissance work attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was bought for $450 million in 2017.
Female artists whose works have fetched the highest sale prices are primarily prominent 20th-century figures. The third-highest sale price, after O’Keeffe’s “White Flower No.1,” was for a huge spider sculpture by French visual artist Louise Bourgeois, which sold for $32.5 million in 2023. Kahlo’s self-portrait “Diego y yo” (“Diego and I”, 1949) fetched $34.9 million in 2021, and “Portrait of Marjorie Ferry” (1932) by the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka was sold for $21.2 million in 2020.
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