A 1940 self-portrait by famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo offered Thursday for $54.7 million at a New york city art auction and ended up being the leading list price for a work by any female artist.
The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed – entitled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” – exceeded the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which cost Sotheby’s for $44.4 million in 2014.
The greatest cost at auction for a Kahlo work was formerly $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” portraying the artist and her other half, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to have actually offered independently for a lot more.
The self-portrait is amongst the couple of Kahlo pieces that has actually stayed in personal hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has actually been stated a creative monolith. Her operate in both public and personal collections within the nation can not be offered abroad or damaged.
The painting originates from a personal collection, whose owner has actually not been divulged, and is lawfully qualified for worldwide sale. Some art historians have actually inspected the sale for cultural factors, while others have actually raised issue that the painting – last showed openly in the late 1990s – might once again vanish from public view after the auction. It has actually currently been asked for upcoming exhibits in cities consisting of New york city, London and Brussels.
The piece portrays Kahlo asleep in a wood, colonial-style bed that drifts in the clouds. She is curtained in a golden blanket and knotted in crawling vines and leaves. Above the bed lies a skeleton figure covered in dynamite.
IMAGES: $54.7 M sale of Frida Kahlo self-portrait shatters auction record for female artists
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly portrayed herself and occasions from her life, which was overthrown by a bus mishap at 18. She began to paint while bedridden, went through a series of uncomfortable surgical treatments on her broken spinal column and hips, then used casts up until her death in 1954 at age 47.
Throughout the years Kahlo was restricted to her bed, she concerned see it as a bridge in between worlds as she explored her death.
The painting is the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists consisting of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Kahlo withstood being identified a surrealist, a design of art that’s dreamlike and centers on a fascination with the unconscious mind.
” I never ever painted dreams,” she when stated. “I painted my own truth.”
In its brochure note, Sotheby’s stated the painting “uses a spectral meditation on the permeable limit in between sleep and death.”
” The suspended skeleton is frequently analyzed as a visualization of her stress and anxiety about passing away in her sleep, a worry all too possible for an artist whose everyday presence was formed by persistent discomfort and previous injury,” the brochure notes.
Source: The Washington Times.
