A self-portrait of Frida Kahlo–the surrealist Mexican artist who was famously portrayed by Salma Hayek in the 2002 biopic Frida--officially became the most expensive artwork ever made by a woman when it fetched $54.7 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
The anonymous buyer closed out a four-minute bidding battle over the phone with the purchase of El Sueño (La Cama), or The Dream (The Bed), per Barron’s. In the 1940 oil painting, Kahlo is shown wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered with green tendrils, which extend beyond the fabric boundary and directly onto her face, pillow and sheets. Ominously, a full-size skeleton wound in dynamite fuses rests above the bedposts.
The subjects in the foreground are all floating in a cloudy blue, lavender and gray sky. Sotheby’s notes that the work is “certainly [a] a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”El Sueño (La Cama) set a new benchmark for female-crated artworks, usurping the record from Georgia O’Keefe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4 million in 2014 at an American art sale at Sotheby’s in New York, far exceeding its $15 million high estimate.
“A full decade plus after the landmark O’Keeffe sale, the market has spoken and set a new global benchmark,” Suzanne Gyorgy, a partner in Emigrant Bank’s fine art practice, told Barron’s. “Slowly but surely, women artists are claiming their rightful place—recognized as accomplished, talented, top-tier, and innovative in their own right.”
El Sueño is the second painting to fetch a mega-sum in the past few days. Sotheby’s New York Sales series of auctions in mid-November also saw Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, from the collection of the cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder, sell for an astronomical $236 million, blowing past its $150 million estimate to become the most expensive modern artwork ever sold. The six-foot-tall canvas was painted by the Austrian master between 1914 and 1916 and shows Lederer, a young heiress and daughter of Klimt’s patrons, draped in a Chinese robe.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is also the second-most expensive piece of art ever sold period, behind only (and distantly) Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which fetched $450 million in 2017.
