Overview
- The self-portrait El sueño (La cama) (1940) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Nov. 20 for about $54.7 million as the headline lot in a surrealist auction, with bidding concluding in roughly four minutes.
- The price surpasses the previous female-artist auction record set by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 at $44.4 million, and it exceeds Kahlo’s prior auction high of $34.9 million for Diego y yo in 2021.
- The work came from a private collection outside Mexico; both the seller and buyer remain undisclosed, with reports indicating the winning bid was placed through Sotheby’s Latin American art head Anna Di Stasi.
- Sotheby’s describes the painting as a “spectral meditation” on the boundary between sleep and death, showing Kahlo asleep on a colonial wooden bed beneath a life-size skeleton.
- After decades off view since the late 1990s and with Mexican cultural protections heightening sensitivity over privately held works, the painting is confirmed for exhibitions in New York, London and Basel through early 2027.