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Headline: RAW VIDEO: Frida Kahlo painting sets new auction record for a female artist
Caption: A surrealist self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) in New York, setting a new auction record for a female artist. El sueño (La cama), painted in 1940, was offered at Sotheby’s as part of a sale at Sotheby’s in New York on 20 November. With a pre-sale estimate of $40m–$60 m, it was widely expected to surpass Kahlo’s previous record of $34.9m, set at Sotheby’s in 2021 for Diego y yo. After exceeding its estimate the painting has now also overtaken the previous auction benchmark for a woman artist - Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. The painting triggered a tense bidding battle between two collectors and ultimately sold for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, according to Sotheby’s. Kahlo, who died in 1954, is regarded as one of the most influential painters of the 20th Century. Her work often explored themes of pain, identity and the body, shaped by childhood polio and severe injuries sustained in a bus accident at 18. During her long recovery, confined to bed, her family built her a special easel and installed a mirror in the canopy so she could paint lying flat. El sueño (La cama), translated as The Dream (The Bed), shows Kahlo asleep beneath a canopy while a skeleton, entwined with dynamite and holding dried flowers, lies above her. Sotheby’s described it as one of her most “psychologically charged” self-portraits, created during a period of personal turmoil — the year her former lover Leon Trotsky was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage. Anna Di Stasi, Senior Vice President and Head of Latin American Art at Sotheby’s said: “El sueño stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks - a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses. In this composition, Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. It is an enduring testament to her genius and its appearance on the market presents an unparalleled opportunity to acquire a cornerstone of Surrealism.” In El sueño, Kahlo’s bed appears to float in a pale sky, her resting body wrapped in green vines symbolising life and renewal, while the dynamite-laden skeleton evokes mortality - a familiar presence in Mexican culture, where death is ritualised rather than shunned. Kahlo herself kept a papier-mâché skeleton above her bed, a detail reflected directly in the painting.
Keywords: frida kahlo,painting,art,auction,video,photo,feature
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