Frida Kahlo’s “The Dream” smashes records with $54.7m auction sale

A haunting self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has just redrawn the art market’s ceiling for women artists. Her 1940 painting El sueño (La cama), The Dream sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $54.7m, becoming the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned.

The sale overtook the long-standing benchmark set by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, which fetched $44.4m in 2014. It also eclipsed Kahlo’s own previous auction high, the 1949 Diego and I, which went for $34.9m in 2021 and held the record for a Latin American artist.

What makes this moment even more striking is the painting’s rarity on the open market. Most of Kahlo’s works are considered national treasures in Mexico and cannot be exported or destroyed. This piece, however, remained in private hands outside the country, making it legally eligible for international sale. Sotheby’s said the unnamed owner “astutely” acquired it at auction back in 1980.

The identity of the buyer remains under wraps, but the concerns are familiar. Some art historians worry the work could slip back into obscurity, having not been publicly shown since the late 1990s. Others have raised questions about cultural patrimony. Still, Sotheby’s confirmed the painting has already been requested for exhibitions in New York, London and Brussels.

Visually, The Dream is classic Kahlo: intimate, surreal, unsettling. She appears asleep in a floating colonial-style bed, wrapped in a gold blanket, tangled in creeping vines. Above her hovers a skeleton strapped with dynamite, a quiet explosion waiting to happen. It’s both fragile and defiant, a visual echo of a life shaped by pain, resilience and relentless self-examination.

Kahlo began painting after a devastating bus accident at 18 left her with lifelong injuries. Confined to bed through surgeries and prolonged recoveries, she turned inward, and the world got some of the most uncompromising self-portraits in modern art before her death in 1954 at just 47.