FRIDA KAHLO – EL SUENO (LA CAMA)
Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self portrait The Dream, the Bed sold for $54,660,000 at Sotheby’s in New York last night to become the most expensive work ever by a female artist. It surpassed the record for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.
The painting shows Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed that floats. Above the bed lies a skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite. The artist depicted herself and her life. Injured in a bus accident aged 18 she began to paint whilst bedridden with a damaged spine and pelvis. She wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47. The buyer’s identity was not revealed.