A self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million (46 million euros) Thursday at Sotheby’s auction in New York, becoming the most expensive painting by a woman. The 1940 work “The Dream (The Room)” beats the previous record in this field, set by American Georgia O’Keeffe, which fetched $44.4 million in 2014. The buyer has not been named.
‘El sueño (La cama)’ by Frida Kahlo fetched $54.7 million, becoming the most valuable work by a female artist ever sold at auction.
Painted in 1940 during a crucial decade of his career, marked by his turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera. pic.twitter.com/t6Sni7fIKT
— Sotheby’s (@Sothebys) November 21, 2025
The work depicts the artist sleeping on a bed that seems to be floating in the sky, visible by a giant skeleton whose legs are surrounded by sticks of dynamite. This painting by Frida Kahlo is a “very personal” picture, where “she combines folkloric motifs from Mexican culture with European surrealism,” explains Anna Di Stasi, in charge of Latin American art at Sotheby’s.
The Mexican artist, who died in 1954 at the age of 47, “didn’t entirely agree” with seeing his work associated with the Surrealist movement, the expert added. But “given this incredible iconography, it seemed very relevant to include it” in this trend. The large skeleton depicted above the bed is not unique to the painting: Frida Kahlo actually had an object of this kind made of papier-mâché above her bed, according to Sotheby’s.
Pain and death have always been central elements of her work: throughout her life Frida Kahlo had to struggle with declining health, marked by childhood illness, poliomyelitis and a serious bus accident in 1925.
The painting is being presented by the famed auction house at its new flagship in New York, the Breuer Building, a modernist building in Manhattan that is reopening to the public after long being part of the Whitney Museum.
Popular artists of the 20th century
The women whose works sell for the highest prices to date are mostly major figures of the 20th century. In addition to the previous record held by Georgia O’Keeffe (“Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1”, 1932), next was the giant “Spider” by French sculptor and visual artist Louise Bourgeois, which sold for $32.5 million in 2023.
Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait “Diego y yo” (“Diego and I”, 1949) soared to $34.9 million in 2021 (30.7 million euros) and Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka’s “The Portrait of Marjorie Ferry” (1932) hit $21.2 million in 2020. The painting “Blueberries” (1960) by Joan Mitchell, a figure in the American abstract expressionism movement, sold for $16.6 million in 2018.
Old or classical artists rarely surpass the 10 million mark: “After Lunch”, by the impressionist Berthe Morisot, sold for 10.9 million dollars in 2013, the sculpture “La Valse” by Camille Claudel sold for 5.2 million euros in the same year and a painting by the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi representing Lucretia was bought for almost 4.8 million euros in 2019.
All types of artwork combined, 162 works have sold for more than $50 million so far and none are by women, according to the AFP database. Of the 468 companies with revenues exceeding $30 million, four account for women’s employment, or less than 1%. The world’s most expensive painting is the “Salvator Mundi” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450 million in New York in 2017.
