El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), a 1940 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo was sold for $54.7 million at a New York auction, a new record for a female artist.
The Dream (The Bed) was expected to reach a price between $40 and $60 million, which meant it would break the record for Latin American art, The Guardian reports.
The previous record held by another Kahlo work, Diego y Yo (Diego and I) was set at $34.9 million in 2011.
None of Kahlo’s work held in private and public collections in Mexico is permitted to be sold abroad in terms of a declaration of her work as an artistic monument.
The portrait sold in New York was in a private collection, last exhibited in the late 1990s. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in New York, London and Brussels.
The painting was the main event at the auction of over 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
In a catalogue note, Sotheby’s said that “[the artwork] offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death”.
It continued: “The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualisation of [Kahlo’s] anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by her chronic pain and past trauma.”
[Image: By Lola Álvarez Bravo – https://fotografica.mx/fotografias/frida-kahlo-2/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132631391]