Frida Kahlo‘s 1940 painting, El sueño (la cama), has shattered auction records, selling for $54.7 million and becoming the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold. The sale at Sotheby’s New York not only cements Kahlo’s place in art history, but also reveals a poignant story behind the canvas-a tale of love, heartbreak, and a complex emotional landscape during a turbulent period in the artist’s life. The painting’s journey, which included a decades-long absence from Mexico due to a 1984 national decree protecting her work, underscores the enduring power and market value of this iconic artist’s oeuvre.
Frida Kahlo’s 1940 painting, El sueño (la cama), is more than just a work of art – and its recent sale for $54.66 million proves it. The price tag places it among the most expensive paintings by a woman ever sold at auction, solidifying Kahlo’s enduring legacy in the art world and her continued influence on contemporary culture. Behind the piece, which Sotheby’s describes as encapsulating Kahlo’s “permanent concern for mortality, the physical, and the complexities of emotional individuality,” lies a story of heartbreak and a quiet exit from Mexico.
Art historian Luis-Martín Lozano explains that the painting, which he defines as “a complex self-portrait,” left the country sometime in the 1940s or 50s, before a 1984 government decree declared all of Frida Kahlo’s work a National Artistic Monument and prohibited any further exports. The painting’s departure was tied to a painful chapter in Kahlo’s personal life. She intended to give it away, a gift for photographer Nickolas Muray, who had been her lover for ten years, after he announced his engagement in 1939.
Those years were particularly challenging for the artist. Having recently arrived in Paris in 1939, Kahlo received devastating news. “Rivera asks her for a divorce and Frida is devastated because she doesn’t understand why,” Lozano said. “They had an open relationship: she knew [he] was involved with many women; he, in turn, suspected that she had lovers. It wasn’t a conventional relationship, but the point is that she has to make her own way and she is willing to do so.” And she had reason to believe she could. She had just had a solo exhibition in New York, where she sold several works, the Louvre Museum had purchased a painting during her trip to the French capital, and she had Nickolas Muray by her side. “He is a support, a man who loves her and doesn’t ask anything in return,” Lozano explained, adding, “in quotes, because, in reality, Nick would have married Frida if Frida had been able to leave Diego.”
Muray’s impending marriage caught Kahlo off guard as she was finishing El sueño (la cama), a gift to thank him for his emotional and financial support over the years. “It’s a painting that has to do with dreams, yes, but it has to do with that reality constructed in Frida Kahlo’s subconscious,” Lozano explained. “What happens in that constructed reality? She has peace: she is outside the conflict of Rivera’s divorce, she is outside the conflict of her illness and her pains, and she is at peace when she is with Nick, because she is very happy with Nick Muray.” But that happiness crumbled with the announcement of his upcoming nuptials, leading Kahlo to decide the painting had to go.
According to the art specialist, in 1939, Kahlo told Muray she had to sell the work to the Misrachi Gallery in Mexico City due to a financial emergency, but that was a lie. The letter is dated 1939, while the canvas is dated 1940. “That is to say, she hadn’t finished it when she wrote that fictitious letter to Nick,” Lozano said, suggesting Kahlo didn’t want to give the painting to Muray because “he was going to get married and then he would stop being the recipient of that message” of gratitude and affection with which she had created it. The painting continued to circulate, and after Kahlo offered it to American collector friends for $400, it eventually ended up with a man named Luis de Hoyos. “We don’t know much about him. What we do know is that he came to Mexico and loved to fish,” Lozano said. It was De Hoyos who ultimately led to the painting’s reappearance outside of Mexico. “When he died in his home in the United States, near New York, among the paintings that were given to Sotheby’s was this one,” Lozano explained. The rest, as they say, is history.
On May 9, 1980, Sotheby’s sold the painting to a private buyer, and on November 20, it resurfaced after 45 years. The return was a grand one, not only breaking a record but also demonstrating the enduring attraction and fascination that the Mexican artist evokes worldwide. This sale underscores the growing market for Latin American art and the increasing recognition of female artists.
Anna Di Stasi, Director of Latin American Art at Sotheby’s, explained that there is “an emotional state that is universal” in Kahlo’s work. “Frida Kahlo continues to have a very direct, very emotional connection, through generations with different women, in different countries and with different people,” she said. For Di Stasi, “the reaction with her [Kahlo] is always emotional,” which goes hand in hand with the “fascination with her work and her life.” “It is one of her most surreal paintings and it is understood that it is not just a portrait of her or her face, but rather a portrait of her emotional state and her relationship with death. It is a highly psychoanalytic work.”
Di Stasi wasn’t surprised by the success of El sueño (la cama). “We have been building an art market led primarily by women, many of them Latin American, who have found important projection, at prices unthinkable 15 years ago, on their artistic production,” she detailed. The Sotheby’s Senior Vice President believes that “these auctions establish a knowledge that did not exist before about the region and about the cultural heritage of a continent.” She also believes that the art market fluctuates and “has preferences just like the design market does,” but for her, the important thing is to continue being part of the discourse. Regarding the specific moment this record was reached, and what that says about the value placed on these works, she concluded: “I don’t know if we’re late, but I imagine it’s better to be late than never.”
