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Journalism of Courage
Considered one of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s “most psychologically resonant” and compelling works, painted in 1940 — the year that saw her divorce and remarriage to artist Diego Rivera as well as her deteriorating health — the canvas El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The Bed) fetched $54.7 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on November 20, becoming the expensive work by a female artist to sell at an auction.
The amount is more than 1,000 times the auction price it sold for 1980, and surpasses the record held by American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, who’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million in 2014.
The 74 by 98 cm canvas that came to the auction from a private collection in Mexico depicts the artist herself wrapped in vines, sleeping on a four-poster bed in a dreamlike setting where she appears to be floating in the sky. On the canopy of the bed, a large skeleton carries dynamite and a bouquet of flowers, in whant is believed to be a representation of Kahlo’s own anxieties at the time.
A note on the lot on the Sotheby’s website states, “Painted during a particularly fraught moment in Kahlo’s life, El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed) in English, occupies a critical position within her practice, encapsulating her lifelong preoccupation with mortality, physicality, and the emotional complexities of selfhood.”
Born to a German father of Hungarian descent and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Native American descent in 1907, often considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists and a global icon, Kahlo spent much of her life in pain after being diagnosed with polio at the age of six and suffering from a near-fatal bus accident in 1925.
Comparisons are also drawn between this work and that of the Surrealists, though Kahlo consistently rejected the label, famously declaring, “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” The auction note echoes that distinction, stating, “Kahlo’s use of symbolic duality in El sueño (La cama), between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, flesh and bone, places her in compelling dialogue with her Surrealist contemporaries, even as it underscores the distance between her vision and theirs. While artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte constructed sealed dreamscapes grounded in psychological displacement and formal illusion, Kahlo’s surrealism remains resolutely corporeal, tethered to the lived experience of her own body and mind.”
