Frida Kahlo Painting Commands $54.7 Million at Sotheby’s, Shattering Auction Records
58Nov. 22, 2025
Frida Kahlo’s 1940 paintingEl sueño (La cama)sold for $54.7 million including fees atSotheby’sExquisite Corpus sale, held the evening of November 20 in New York. The amount is the highest ever paid at auction for a work by a woman, and the most ever paid for a Latin American artwork. Bidding began at $22 million and lasted for five minutes, with Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of its Latin American art department, securing the prize for an unnamed client over the telephone.
El sueño (La cama)dethronesGeorgia O’Keeffe’sJimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932, sold by Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44.4 million (though that figure would translate to roughly $61.1 million in today’s dollars). Kahlo’s most expensive painting to date had beenDiego y yo, 1949, which hammered for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2021. The highest amount ever paid for a work of art at auction is about $450 million, for Leonardo’sSalvator Mundi, at a 2017Christie’ssale.
El sueño (La cama) brings death and loss into the sphere of the familiar. Kahlo made the painting the same year that Leon Trotsky, a former lover, was assassinated, and around the time Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced and quickly remarried. The painting depicts the artist asleep in a floating canopy bed beneath a yellow blanket encircled by a spreading vine. A skull-headed figure reclines atop the canopy, clutching a bouquet of flowers, its legs festooned with sticks of dynamite. Sotheby’s in accompanying press materials noted that Kahlo kept a traditional papier-mâché skeleton above the canopy of her bed.
The canvas had been estimated to sell for between $40 million and $60 million. Artnet News reported that the seller was Selma Ertegun, who with her late husband, record producer Nesuhi Ertegun, had amassed a collection of Surrealist works. According to the New York Times, the Erteguns bought the work for $51,000 in 1980.