Frida Kahlo’s painting sells for record breaking $54.7M

Legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s work has sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, setting an auction record for an artwork by a woman. Its auction price in 1980 was $51,000.

The 1940 surrealist painting titled El sueno (La cama), which translates to “The dream (The bed),” shows Kahlo asleep under a skeleton wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo created the work during a turbulent period marked by heartbreak and political violence. Very few of her pieces appear on the open market today because Mexico declared her art a national monument in the 1980s, making export difficult without government approval.
The previous woman artist to hold an auction record was American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose 1932 oil on linen painting, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, sold for $44 million in 2014.