$54.7M Frida Kahlo Painting Smashes Sale Record At UES Auction

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo made auction history on the Upper East Side Thursday, when her haunting portrait, "El sueño (La cama)" sold for $54.7 million, setting a new auction record for Kahlo — and for any woman artist ever sold at auction.

The surrealist painting, made in 1940, had been tucked away in the same private collection for 45 years, Sotheby's said, before it was sold in auction at Sotheby's new flagship location at the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street Thursday.

Its owners originally purchased it at Sotheby’s in 1980 for just $51,000, Sotheby's said.

The painting beat the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," which was bought in 2014 for $44.4 million.

This is the second record set at Sotheby's this week. On Tuesday, a Gustav Klimt painting with a remarkable holocaust backstory sold for a stunning $236,400,000 at Sotheby’s on the Upper East Side, setting a new record for a modern artwork.

The title of Kahlo's painting translates to “The dream (The bed).” In the painting, the surrealist shows herself lying asleep in a wooden bed, wrapped in a gold blanket decorated with vines.

Above her, a life-sized skeleton rests on the bedposts, wrapped in dynamite and topped with bright flowers, echoing her own pose.

"Kahlo's surrealism begins not in fantasy and the unconscious, but in examining the reality, the irony and humor in human experience," Anna Di Stasi, the head of Latin American Art at Sotheby's, said of the painting.

The work reflects Kahlo’s meditation on the thin line between sleep and mortality, Di Stasi said.

The new buyer’s identity was not disclosed, Sotheby's said.

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