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Long celebrated for reflecting the pain and upheaval of her life in her emotionally searing self-portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has set a new record with the sale of her 1940 canvas El sueño (La cama) for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s on November 20 — making it the most expensive work by a female artist to be sold at an auction.
Painted during a period of troubled health and emotional turmoil, with her brief separation from artist Diego Rivera, the canvas shows Kahlo asleep on a four-poster bed that appears to be floating in the sky, with her body encircled by twisting vines. On the canopy above her is a grinning skeleton with sticks of dynamite and a bouquet, representing mortality and anxiety, physicality and the artist’s own emotional complexities.
A feminist icon and a political activist, Kahlo remains an enigma. Here are five things to know about the artist and her art.
Born to a German father of Hungarian descent and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Native American descent in 1907, Kahlo spent most of her childhood at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán in Mexico City, witnessing the struggles and pain brought by the Mexican Revolution.
Suffering from spina bifida since birth, she also contracted polio at the age of six, leaving her bedridden for more than nine months and resulting in a deformity in her right leg. It is said that it was to cover her leg that she began wearing the long skirts in the traditional Mexican style that later became her trademark, appearing in several of her self-portraits.
A rebel, she was expelled from a German school for disobedience, and later enrolled in a vocational school, which she left after being sexually abused by a teacher. It was her father, artist and photographer Guillermo Kahlo, who acquainted her with literature, art and philosophy, also ensuring that she was socially and politically conscious.
Though she showed artistic prowess even during her formative years — when she received guidance from her father’s friend, printmaker Fernando Fernandez — she wanted to become a doctor, and enrolled at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City to pursue medicine.
According to the Frida Kahlo Foundation, the Mexican artist made 143 paintings, out of which 55 are self-portraits. The answer to when she began painting the self lies in the circumstances in which she gave up her dream of becoming a doctor and took up art.
In September 1925, Kahlo was in a near-fatal bus accident. Suffering from multiple fractures, including a crushed pelvis, she underwent numerous surgeries and was bedridden for months, At this time, art became her means of expression. She reportedly wrote: “I am not dead and I have a reason to live. That reason is painting.”
A special easel and a canopy bed with a mirror on the ceiling was designed for her. It is here that she began experimenting with small-scale portraits of the self, family and friends. A gift to her then boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias, one of her earliest professional self-portraits, Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, was painted as early as 1926.
Kahlo was personally introduced to Diego Rivera as a fellow member of the Mexican Communist Party in 1928. A highly-influential member of the party, Rivera was also an artist of much repute. Though he was 20 years older to Kahlo and had been married twice before, the couple bonded over politics and art and decided to marry in 1929.
While Kahlo’s father was supportive, her mother famously described the couple as “the elephant and the dove”.
The relationship was turbulent. Years later, Kahlo is reported to have said: “I suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down. The other accident was Diego.”
The couple cheated on each other several times, but when Rivera had an extramarital relationship with her sister, Kahlo saw it as betrayal and left their marital home. She also had a brief affair with communist leader Leon Trotsky. Rivera and Kahlo divorced in 1938, only to remarry in 1940 and staying together till Kahlo died in 1954.
Kahlo’s artworks largely depicted her state of mind. Often described as a surrealist, the artist herself stated: “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Deeply influenced by Mexican culture, her colour palette was bright, and she often turned to symbolism — from trees representing hope to monkeys, which in Mexican mythology represents lust. The pain she suffered through her life remained a constant theme in her depictions.
The Heart (1937) depicts her pain over her husband’s affair with her younger sister, with a large broken heart at her feet, in The Two Fridas (1939) painted after her divorce, she depicts her conflicting identities, her Mexican roots and modern sensibilities. The Broken Column (1944) reveals her body bruised by innumerable surgical operations, and in Henry Ford Hospital (1932) she depicts the miscarriage she suffered.
She also had several animals as pets — including monkeys, macaws, parakeets and parrots — whom she also treated as the children she could not bear due to health complications. Several of them also appeared on her canvases.
Her political ideology also reflected in her works, as is evident from canvases such as Self-Portrait with Stalin (1954) and Marxism will restore Health to the Sick (1954).
Overshadowed by her more successful husband, Kahlo had her first solo at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. In the following years, she exhibited across the world. In 1939, when the Louvre Museum acquired her painting The Frame, it was recognised as the first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist to be purchased by a major international museum.
However, her first major exhibition in Mexico only took place in 1953, a year before her death. Advised by her doctors to not attend the opening at Galeria Arte Contemporaneo due to her failing health, she decided to be there on her four poster bed, transported in the ambulance.
Kahlo is now celebrated as a revolutionary, feminist, and artist of immense talent who challenged existing norms. Associated with primitivism, magic realism and surrealism, she is one of the highest-selling women artists who also set a record for the most expensive Latin American work ever purchased at an auction, when her 1949 self-portrait Diego sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s in 2021.
