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A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo bought Thursday for $54.7 million at a New York artwork public sale, changing into the highest sale worth for a piece by any feminine artist.
The portray of Kahlo asleep in a mattress — titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Mattress)” — surpassed the document held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which bought for $44.4 million in 2014.
The sale at Sotheby’s additionally topped Kahlo’s personal public sale document for a piece by a Latin American artist. The 1949 portray “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. Her work are reported to have bought privately for much more.
Thursday’s public sale for the portray drew bids from two collectors over 5 minutes earlier than promoting — at greater than 1,000 instances the worth it bought for 45 years in the past, in keeping with Sotheby’s.
“When this portray bought at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000, few might have imagined it returning 45 years later to command $55 million. This record-breaking outcome exhibits simply how far we have now come, not solely in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, however within the recognition of girls artists on the very highest stage of the market,” Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American artwork at Sotheby’s, stated in a information launch. “In El sueño, Kahlo confronts her personal fragility, but what emerges is a portrait of extraordinary resilience and power. It’s an everlasting testomony to probably the most admired and sought-after artists of our time.”
Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP 
The self-portrait is among the many few Kahlo items which have remained in non-public fingers exterior Mexico, the place her physique of labor has been declared a creative monument. Her works in each private and non-private collections throughout the nation can’t be bought overseas or destroyed.
The portray comes from a non-public assortment, whose proprietor has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for worldwide sale. Some artwork historians have scrutinized the sale for cultural causes, whereas others have raised concern that the portray — final exhibited publicly within the late Nineties — might once more disappear from public view after the public sale. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities together with New York, London and Brussels.
The client’s id was not disclosed.
The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a wood, colonial-style mattress that floats within the clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves. Above the mattress lies a skeleton determine wrapped in dynamite.
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and occasions from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18. She began to color whereas bedridden, underwent a collection of painful surgical procedures on her broken backbone and pelvis, then wore casts till her demise in 1954 at age 47.
Through the years Kahlo was confined to her mattress, she got here to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.
The portray was the star of a sale of greater than 100 surrealist works by artists together with Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, a method of artwork that is dreamlike and facilities on a fascination with the unconscious thoughts.
“I by no means painted goals,” she as soon as stated. “I painted my very own actuality.”
In its catalog word, Sotheby’s stated the portray “affords a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and demise.”
“The suspended skeleton is usually interpreted as a visualization of her nervousness about dying in her sleep, a concern all too believable for an artist whose every day existence was formed by persistent ache and previous trauma,” the catalog notes.
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