According to the AP: "In November, Frida Kahlo’s 1940 painting El sueño (La cama)—The Dream (The Bed)—sold at Sotheby’s for $54.7 million. The price established a new auction record for any work by a woman artist, surpassing the $44.4 million paid for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014. It also became the most expensive work of Latin American art ever sold at auction."
That is an extraordinary and very long-overdue milestone!
For centuries, women made remarkable art while being denied the training, opportunities, exhibitions, patronage, and historical recognition routinely given to men. Even today, the upper reaches of the art market remain overwhelmingly male but we're working on it. So there is something genuinely thrilling about seeing a painting by a woman (not to mention a Mexican woman, who painted so fearlessly from her own body, culture, pain, and identity) break through that ceiling.
BUT (written in all caps because it is a big "but") there is also an irony here so enormous that it feels almost like something Kahlo herself might have painted.
Frida Kahlo was a committed communist and an outspoken critic of capitalism. She believed deeply in "revolutionary politics and remained politically engaged throughout her life." It is difficult to imagine that she would have been entirely comfortable watching one of her deeply personal paintings become a $54.7 million luxury object, sold to an anonymous bidder in a room built around wealth, competition, and ownership.
She wanted her work to be seen and understood, and like nearly every working artist, she needed to sell paintings during her lifetime. But the transformation of Frida into a global, dare I say "commodity," with her face now appearing on everything from coffee mugs and tote bags to dolls and throw pillows, often removes the complicated, radical person from the image. The eyebrow(s) remain, while the politics are quietly edited out.
And then there is another revealing detail about the sale that I'm not sure anyone has noticed.
Sotheby’s presented El sueño (La cama) as the centerpiece of "Exquisite Corpus: Surrealist Treasures from a Private Collection." The auction house’s own description situated the painting within a major collection of "Surrealist" art alongside artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning.
The problem is that Kahlo repeatedly resisted being called a Surrealist. She famously explained that she "did not paint dreams; she painted her own reality." André Breton who labeled her a surrealist may have recognized something surrealist in her work, but Kahlo did not need a European movement (or a European man) to explain what she was doing.
That distinction matters, especially with this particular painting.
In El sueño (La cama), Kahlo sleeps in a carved bed floating among clouds. Green vines curl across her body and blanket, suggesting growth, life, entanglement, and perhaps the persistence of nature. Above her, stretched across the canopy, lies a skeleton decorated with flowers and wired with dynamite. Yes, dynamite.
It is certainly dreamlike, but it is not merely fantasy.
Most of you know this but the bed was a very real and recurring place in Kahlo’s life. After contracting polio as a child and suffering devastating injuries in a bus accident at eighteen, she endured chronic pain, numerous surgeries, and long periods of confinement. The bed became a place of suffering, recovery, intimacy and also creation. She sometimes painted from it with the help of a mirror mounted overhead.
The skeleton, meanwhile, connects to Mexican traditions in which death is not always hidden or treated only with fear. Kahlo reportedly kept a papier-mâché skeleton above her own bed. In the painting, however, the dynamite gives that companion an added charge. Death is not somewhere in the distance. There is the potential that things may erupt at any moment.
Below it, Frida sleeps.
She does not run from death or turn away from it. She rests beneath it. That combination of fragility and defiance is part of what makes the painting feel so powerful and why she was such an incredible painter. It represents mortality, but also the stubborn continuation of life.
Perhaps this is why the auction record feels both celebratory and a little, I want to say "uncomfortable" but there is probably a better word.
The price is wonderful evidence that women painters are finally receiving more of the recognition they have always deserved. Yet auction prices are not the same thing as artistic value. A painting does not become fifty million dollars more meaningful when an auctioneer’s hammer falls. Its power was already there, in the hands that made it, in the life embedded within it, and in the people who stand before it and recognize something of themselves.
Frida Kahlo would likely have appreciated the disruption of a woman artist overtaking another market record held for so long by men. But one suspects she would also have laughed, cursed, or rolled her eyes at the spectacle surrounding it. A communist painter sold for nearly $55 million, inside a Surrealist auction, despite rejecting both capitalism and the Surrealist label.
It is a contradiction worthy of Frida herself.
The great victory is not simply that her painting became the most expensive work by a woman ever sold at auction. It is that no amount of money, marketing, labeling, or commodification has managed to tame it.
The painting still belongs, in the most important sense, to Frida.
