Kahlo Self-Portrait Sells for $54.7M, Sets Female Artist Record

A 1940 self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby's auction house in New York on Thursday, setting a new record for the highest price paid at auction for a work by a female artist and for any Latin American artwork.

The painting, titled "El sueño (La cama)" or "The Dream (The Bed)," depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed floating amid clouds. She lies draped in a golden blanket, entwined with crawling vines and leaves, while a skeleton figure wrapped in sticks of dynamite hovers above the bed's canopy. Created during a tumultuous period in Kahlo's life, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, a former associate, and her divorce and remarriage to muralist Diego Rivera, the work explores themes of mortality and the boundary between sleep and death. Sotheby's catalog described it as a "spectral meditation" on those ideas, noting the skeleton's resemblance to a traditional papier-mâché figure Kahlo kept above her own bed.

Bidding started at $22 million and lasted five minutes, with Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby's senior vice president and head of its Latin American art department, securing the lot for an undisclosed buyer over the...