Frida Kahlo’s 1940 masterpiece El Sueño (La cama) has shattered records, selling for $54.66 million in New York and becoming the most expensive artwork ever auctioned by a woman artist, according to Sotheby’s.
The price far surpassed the previous record held by Georgia O’Keeffe, whose Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million in 2014. Kahlo’s painting had been estimated at $40–60 million and ultimately landed near the top of that range. The buyer has not been identified.
Painted during a crucial phase in Kahlo’s artistic life—deeply intertwined with her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera—the work shows the artist asleep in a floating bed beneath a skeleton wrapped in dynamite. Sotheby’s noted that the skeleton reflects a papier-mâché figure that hung over Kahlo’s real bed, symbolising her lifelong confrontation with pain, illness, and mortality.
Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s head of Latin American art, described the painting as deeply personal, merging Mexican folk imagery with European surrealist elements, even though Kahlo herself resisted being labelled a surrealist.
The sale highlights the stark gender gap in the art market. Before this auction, none of the 162 works that had sold for over $50 million were by women. Less than 1% of artworks sold for more than $30 million come from female artists.
Kahlo now stands at the top of the list of highest-selling women artists, ahead of O’Keeffe and French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose monumental spider sold for $32.5 million in 2023. Another Kahlo piece, Diego y yo, previously held the Latin American art record at $34.9 million.
The auction came just two days after Sotheby’s sold a Gustav Klimt painting for $236.4 million, now the second-most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. The global record remains Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, purchased for $450 million in 2017.
