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A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican creator Frida Kahlo sold Thursday (November 20, 2025) for $54.7 cardinal astatine a New York creation auction and became the apical merchantability terms for a enactment by immoderate pistillate artist.
The coating of Kahlo dormant successful a furniture — titled “El sueno (La cama)” oregon successful English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the grounds held by Georgia O'Keeffe's “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," which sold astatine Sotheby's for $44.4 cardinal successful 2014.
The highest terms astatine auction for a Kahlo enactment was antecedently $34.9 million, paid successful 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the creator and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to person sold privately for adjacent more.
The self-portrait is among the fewer Kahlo pieces that has remained successful backstage hands extracurricular Mexico, wherever her assemblage of enactment has been declared an creator monument. Her works successful some nationalist and backstage collections wrong the state cannot beryllium sold overseas oregon destroyed.
The coating comes from a backstage collection, whose proprietor has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for planetary sale. Some creation historians person scrutinised the merchantability for taste reasons, portion others person raised interest that the coating — past exhibited publically successful the precocious 1990s — could again vanish from nationalist presumption aft the auction. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions successful cities including New York, London and Brussels.
The portion depicts Kahlo dormant successful a wooden, colonial-style furniture that floats successful the clouds. She is draped successful a aureate broad and entangled successful crawling vines and leaves. Above the furniture lies a skeleton fig wrapped successful dynamite.
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a autobus mishap astatine 18. She started to overgarment portion bedridden, underwent a bid of achy surgeries connected her damaged spine and pelvis, past wore casts until her decease successful 1954 astatine property 47.
During the years Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to presumption it arsenic a span betwixt worlds arsenic she explored her mortality.
The coating is the prima of a merchantability of much than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, a benignant of creation that's dreamlike and centres connected a fascination with the unconscious mind. “I ne'er painted dreams,” she erstwhile said. “I painted my ain reality.”
In its catalog note, Sotheby's said the coating “offers a spectral meditation connected the porous bound betwixt slumber and death.”
“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted arsenic a visualization of her anxiousness astir dying successful her sleep, a fearfulness each excessively plausible for an creator whose regular beingness was shaped by chronic symptom and past trauma,” the catalog notes.
