$54.7M US sale of Frida Kahlo self-portrait shatters public sale report for feminine artists

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A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo offered Thursday for $54.7 million US ($77 million Cdn) at a New York artwork public sale and have become 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 report held by Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which offered at Sotheby's for $44.4 million US in 2014.

The very best worth at public sale for a Kahlo work was beforehand $34.9 million US (then $43.7 million Cdn), paid in 2021 for Diego and I, depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her work are reported to have offered privately for much more.

The self-portrait is among the many few Kahlo items which have remained in personal palms 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 offered overseas or destroyed.

The portray comes from a personal 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 Nineteen Nineties — may 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.

Visualization of artist's nervousness 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.

<img loading="lazy" alt="A woman walks past a painting in a gallery." srcset="https://i.cbc.ca/ais/8d0469bb-0601-4da8-8d69-31752fbf1452,1763688453459/full/max/0/default.jpg?im=Crop%2Crect%3D%280%2C0%2C7091%2C4727%29%3BResize%3D805 805w,https://i.cbc.ca/ais/8d0469bb-0601-4da8-8d69-31752fbf1452,1763688453459/full/max/0/default.jpg?im=Crop%2Crect%3D%280%2C0%2C7091%2C4727%29%3BResize%3D1104 1104w,https://i.cbc.ca/ais/8d0469bb-0601-4da8-8d69-31752fbf1452,1763688453459/full/max/0/default.jpg?im=Crop%2Crect%3D%280%2C0%2C7091%2C4727%29%3BResize%3D1280 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 762px) 93.6vw,730px" src="https://i.cbc.ca/ais/8d0469bb-0601-4da8-8d69-31752fbf1452,1763688453459/full/max/0/default.jpg?im=Crop%2Crect%3D%280%2C0%2C7091%2C4727%29%3B" style="aspect-ratio:1.5001057753331923" data-cy="image-img"/> A customer stands subsequent to the portray whereas it was on show throughout a pre-auction exhibition in Abu Dhabi in October. (Altaf Qadri/The Related Press) Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and occasions from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at age 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 dying in 1954 at age 47.

Throughout the years she was confined to her mattress, Kahlo got here to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.

The portray is 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 labelled a surrealist, a method of artwork that is dreamlike and centres on a fascination with the unconscious thoughts.

"I by no means painted desires," she as soon as mentioned. "I painted my very own actuality."

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The work of Frida Kahlo is taken into account by Mexico as nationwide treasures, so the nation sends skilled inspectors guarantee her work don't get broken. In its catalogue notice, Sotheby's mentioned the portray "provides a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and dying."

"The suspended skeleton is commonly interpreted as a visualization of her nervousness about dying in her sleep, a concern all too believable for an artist whose each day existence was formed by persistent ache and previous trauma," {the catalogue} notes.