Mexican painter Frida Kahlo became the most expensive female artist at auction on Thursday when Sotheby’s in New York sold her sleeping self-portrait for $54.7 million.
The 1940 canvas, “The Dream (The Bed),” topped the previous record held by a $44.4 million Georgia O’Keeffe, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” that sold to Walmart billionaire Alice Walton 11 years earlier.
The Kahlo also became the world’s priciest Latin American artwork by besting the $34.9 million that Buenos Aires real-estate developer Eduardo Costantini paid in 2021 for the previous titleholder, a different Kahlo from 1949, “Diego y yo.” That self-portrait depicted the artist with a tiny portrait of her muralist husband, Diego Rivera, atop her forehead.
“The Dream” shows Kahlo, who lived from 1907 to 1954, floating against a blue sky, asleep in her canopy bed as vines curl toward her and an oversize skeleton lays overhead, its bones strapped with explosives and dried flowers. Her face is framed by her long, loose hair and her signature unibrow.
Heading into these sales, Sotheby’s acknowledged Kahlo’s global star power by giving the “Dream” a $40 million low estimate. The house also sent the piece on an international preview tour to potential bidders in London, Paris, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong.
When the painting came up for bid, two bidders pounced, competing for the work for at least five minutes before a telephone bidder won it to applause in the house’s new salesroom within the Breuer building. Earlier that same night, Sotheby’s sold off the $110 million estate of Hyatt founder Jay and Marian “Cindy” Pritzker, including an 1887 Vincent van Gogh, “Parisian Novels (The Yellow Books),” that sold for $62.7 million. It was estimated to sell for $40 million.
Kahlo’s “Dream” may have triumphed for several reasons, including its size and subject matter. After being badly injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, Kahlo was often compelled to paint from her bed, so her canvases tend to be small—but this example stretched over 3 feet wide, lending it greater wall power, dealers said. Earlier this week at Christie’s, a more typical 15-inch example by her from 1931-32, “Window Display on a Detroit Street,” sold for $7.2 million, within its $6 million to $8 million estimate.
While Kahlo showed and sold her own art in New York and elsewhere during her lifetime, Mexican patrimony laws for Kahlo have since declared her works still in Mexico to be “artistic monuments,” which mean no one there is supposed to sell any abroad, constricting supply. Collectors who can still find a few of her works already in global circulation tend to pay a premium for Kahlo’s self-portraits.
“The Dream” also explores her complicated relationship to death following that debilitating bus accident, one of her signature themes. The scene she depicts even imitates her real life: Kahlo actually kept a smaller, papier-mâché skeleton atop her own canopy bed in Mexico City as a reassuring symbol of death’s ubiquity. Rivera used to joke that the skeleton was her lover.
During the couple’s lifetimes, Rivera was held in greater art-world esteem than his wife, but Kahlo’s global popularity has surged in recent years as museums have explored the visceral vulnerability of her works, which chronicled her life and pain in surreal, raw ways. Next year, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and London’s Tate Modern will mount major shows of her work. She’s also become a pop-cultural style icon, revered for the way she wore Mexican folk dress and braided her hair.
Sotheby’s example of her work came from the estate of Selma Ertegun, a Brazilian socialite who, with her jazz producer husband, Nesuhi Ertegun, amassed a vast collection of surrealist art before his death in 1989 and hers last year. Along with the Kahlo, Sotheby’s sale offered up 23 works from their estate, including Dorothea Tanning’s 1951 “Interior with Sudden Joy” that sold for a record-high $3.4 million, over its $3 million high estimate.
Last year, Christie’s sold off their sister-in-law Mica Ertegun’s estate that included a $121.2 million René Magritte from 1954, “Empire of Lights.” That sale pushed Magritte into a rarefied roster of at least a dozen (male) artists whose works have topped $100 million.
Kahlo’s record-setter at $54.7 million suggests female artists still have a ways to go to cross that bar.
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com