1940 FRIDA KAHLO SELF PORTRAIT BREAKS RECORDS BY SELLING FOR A WHOPPING $54.7 MILLION
Georgia O’Keeffe maintained the auction record for the highest-priced work by a female artist, at $44.4 million, for over ten years. Everything changed on November 20, 2025, when a self-portrait by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo fetched an incredible $54.7 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Sotheby’s predicted that the work would sell for between $40 and $60 million, greatly exceeding the artist’s prior auction record of $34.9 million, established in 2021 with the painting Diego y Yo.
The 1940 portrait, titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The Bed), shows Kahlo resting in bed, wrapped in a yellow blanket and a tangle of ivy. However, above the bed's canopy lies a massive papier-mâché skeleton, which is not covered by a blanket but by several sticks of dynamite. The skeleton’s face is covered with an eerie grin, which forms a striking contrast between Kahlo’s serene rest and the sky in the painting’s background. The artwork serves as a memento mori, aligning perfectly with the artist's broader creative framework and the other unflinching self-portraits she created during her lifetime.
After a serious bus accident at the age of 18, Kahlo took up painting while confined to bed, delving into her own mortality through motifs of trauma, memory, consciousness, and pain. Due to the frequency of her confinement to one bed after her near-fatal accident and subsequent surgeries, beds became a recurring motif in her work as well.
The catalogue essay for the auction observes, “The suspended skeleton is frequently seen as a representation of her fear of dying in her sleep, an all too real concern for someone whose daily life was defined by chronic pain and past trauma.”
Before it appeared on the auction block, El sueño had not been shown publicly for almost thirty years. Significantly, it is one of the rare Kahlo works that has stayed in a private collection outside of Mexico, where her body of work has been regarded as an artistic monument since 1984. “El sueño has been one of the very few works of this calibre still privately owned,” Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s head of Latin American Art, told CNN. “This artwork bears all the characteristics of a signature Frida: the self-portrait, surreal imagery, and most crucially, a psychological intensity and a sense of communion between artist and viewer.” However, the sale sets a new record not only for a piece by a female artist. It has also broken records for a piece by a Latin American artist, reinforcing the increasing interest in art from this region.
The "Exquisite Corpus" sale, which included over 80 surrealist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by artists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, contained El sueño. "El sueño is a rare and remarkable illustration of Kahlo's most surrealist tendencies, and it stands among her best masterworks," Stasi continued. “[She] blends dream imagery and symbolic precision with unrivalled emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.”