The most expensive painting in history ever painted by a woman

BarcelonaThe surrealist self-portrait Sleep (The bed) A painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has become the most expensive work of art ever painted by a woman, selling for $54.7 million (€47.4 million) at Sotheby's in New York. It surpassed the previous record held by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Jimson weed / White flower No. 1 in 2014 for 38.5 million euros. The third painter on the podium is Kahlo herself: the painting Diego and I It sold in 2021 for $30 million. The most expensive living female painter at auction is South African Marlene Dumas.

The painting, which was estimated to reach this figure, between $40 and $60 million, had last been sold at auction in 1980 for $51,000. The buyer is unknown, for now, because the purchase was made through the head of the Latin American art department at the auction house, Anna Di Stasi.

Kahlo painted Sleep (The bed) In 1940, at a particularly delicate time, both in terms of her health and her complicated relationship with Diego Rivera, she evoked death, painting herself asleep and, in the foreground, a life-size skeleton. The bed appears to be floating, making it "a physical and metaphysical support," according to Sotheby's experts. In Kahlo's work, death is both an everyday occurrence and a creative force: "it is not taboo or tragic, but intimate, beautiful, and enduring."

At the same auction, Dorothea Tanning also broke her own record. Works by Remedios Varo, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí were sold, with Dalí's reaching 3.5 million. Shell head symbiosis, an oil painting of about 30 centimeters from 1931 that was part of a private collection.