Frida Kahlo Becomes Most Expensive Woman Artist at Auction

"In "El sueño (La cama)," Kahlo depicts herself sleeping under a yellow blanket in her wooden four poster bed adrift in a partly cloudy sky. Recumbent above the bed's scaffolding, a skeletal form wrapped in wires and sticks of dynamite lays its head on two pillows just like Kahlo does, and holds a bouquet of flowers. As Kahlo sleeps, vines and leaves creep from the roots knotted at foot of her bed and over her form, embracing her shoulders and the sheets around her."

"Kahlo's practice draws from various periods of profound physical and emotional pain and isolation. She painted this pivotal composition in the same year as the assassination of exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a good friend turned brief extramarital lover, and following her remarriage to her first husband, Diego Rivera, with whom she had reconciled years after his affair with her younger sister."

Frida Kahlo's El sueño (La cama) (1940) sold at Sotheby's for $54.7 million with fees, establishing a new auction record for a woman artist. The painting returned to the market for the first time in 45 years and surpassed Kahlo's 2021 record by nearly $20 million within minutes. The composition shows Kahlo sleeping under a yellow blanket in a wooden four‑poster bed floating in a partly cloudy sky, accompanied by a skeletal figure, flowers, and creeping vines. The work was painted in 1940 amid Trotsky's assassination and Kahlo's remarriage to Diego Rivera, and the sale coincides with renewed interest in Surrealism and women Surrealist artists.

Read at Hyperallergic