{"id":307184,"date":"2025-11-22T14:22:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T14:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/307184\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T14:22:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T14:22:13","slug":"frida-kahlo-becomes-most-expensive-woman-artist-at-auction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/307184\/","title":{"rendered":"Frida Kahlo Becomes Most Expensive Woman Artist at Auction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poised to shatter records<\/a> ahead of its highly anticipated sale, one of Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo\u2019s most vulnerable and poignant self-portraits sold for $54.7 million with fees at a Sotheby\u2019s evening sale on Thursday, November 20.<\/p>\n

Emerging on the market for the first time in 45 years, Kahlo\u2019s \u201cEl sue\u00f1o (La cama)\u201d (1940) eclipsed the artist\u2019s 2021 record<\/a> by nearly $20 million in just five minutes, and overtook Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s \u201cJimson Weed\/White Flower No. 1\u201d (1932) as the most expensive work by a woman artist ever sold at auction.<\/p>\n

The new record was welcomed amid an extended celebration of the Surrealism movement, which turned 100 last year. In May 2024, Sotheby\u2019s ushered in an equally monumental sale for the women of Surrealism when Leonora Carrington\u2019s esoteric composition \u201cLes Distractions de Dagobert\u201d (1945) broke records at $28.5 million<\/a> with fees, establishing Carrington as the most valuable woman artist from the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

In \u201cEl sue\u00f1o (La cama),\u201d Kahlo depicts herself sleeping under a yellow blanket in her wooden four poster bed adrift in a partly cloudy sky. Recumbent above the bed\u2019s scaffolding, a skeletal form wrapped in wires and sticks of dynamite lays its head on two pillows just like Kahlo does, and holds a bouquet of flowers. As Kahlo sleeps, vines and leaves creep from the roots knotted at foot of her bed and over her form, embracing her shoulders and the sheets around her. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tAuctioneer Oliver Barker sells Frida Kahlo\u2019s \u201cEl sue\u00f1o (La cama)\u201c (1940) at Sotheby\u2019s on November 20, 2025.<\/p>\n

Kahlo\u2019s practice draws from various periods of profound physical and emotional pain and isolation. She painted this pivotal composition in the same year as the assassination of exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a good friend turned brief extramarital lover, and following her remarriage to her first husband, Diego Rivera, with whom she had reconciled years after his affair with her younger sister.<\/p>\n

\u201cEl sue\u00f1o (La cama)\u201d came back onto the market from an undisclosed private collection, and Sotheby\u2019s has not yet revealed the buyer who secured the purchase in the two-person bidding war that ensued over the phone yesterday evening. In 2021, Argentine art collector and museum founder Eduardo F. Constantini paid $31 million for another Kahlo portrait<\/a> at Sotheby\u2019s; he was also the purchaser of the recent Carrington oil. <\/p>\n

The auction house noted that the work has been requested as a loan to four upcoming exhibitions, starting with Frida y Diego: The Last Dream at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in March 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poised to shatter records ahead of its highly anticipated sale, one of Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo\u2019s most vulnerable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,195,229,88,15527,198],"class_list":["post-307184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-auctions","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-frida-kahlo","tag-sothebys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}