Why Frida Kahlo Continues to Dominate the Art Market

Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait, El sueño (La cama), sold last night, November 20th, at Sotheby’s New York for $54.66 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a woman artist ever sold at auction and the most valuable Latin American piece in history. The lot was the star of Exquisite Corpus, a private collection of more than 80 works that captured the breadth, depth, and daring of Surrealism. Presented at the auction house’s new Breuer Building headquarters, El sueño (La cama) had been auctioned in 1980 for $51,000.

The sale of the work opened at $22 million and quickly rose with bidders in the room and on the phone. It hammered down in just four minutes for $47 million, bringing the final price with fees to $54.66 million. With this result, Kahlo broke her previous record of $34.9 million achieved in 2021 by Diego y yo (1949). The previous record for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower N 1 (1932), sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014 (if adjusted for inflation, the price for this work would be $60.5 million).

In El sueño (La cama), Kahlo appears reclining on a floating bed wrapped in vines, while a skeleton crowned with flowers holds a bouquet covered in dynamite above the canopy. Created shortly after her divorce from the artist Diego Rivera and only months after the assassination of her lover, Leon Trotsky, the work returns to one of the central motifs in her iconography: the bed as a space of pain, convalescence, and creation. Kahlo spent long periods bedridden due to an illness she had as a child and from the aftermath of a bus accident that nearly killed her at age 18. The presence of the calaca (or skeleton), a key figure in the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration, reaffirms the artist’s engagement with the inevitability of death as expressed through Mexican tradition.

“I never painted dreams. I paint my own reality,” Kahlo (1907–1954) once wrote. Many Surrealist artists, including André Breton, tried to place her within their movement, but she rejected that label from the outset. In a letter written after meeting members of the movement in Paris in 1939, she dismissed them as “a bunch of crazy bastards.”

As with so many female artists of her time, the true significance of Kahlo’s work was not recognized during her life. For decades, she was known primarily as Rivera’s wife, and the monetary value of her work was nowhere near what it is today. In 1939, for example, she wrote in a letter describing her astonishment when the actor Edward G. Robinson purchased four of her paintings for $200 each after she exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, one of the few gallery shows she had during her lifetime.

Her reevaluation began in the 1980s with the publication of historian Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography. Herrera’s research found that the painter’s feminist significance first took shape within the Chicano community, where migrant women living along the U.S. border saw in Kahlo a figure they could identify with. Chicano feminism then embraced her as a standard-bearer of the movement. The influential nonprofit Galería de la Raza, founded in San Francisco in 1970 and dedicated to promoting Chicano and Latino art and culture, was among the first to champion Frida outside Mexico. Many major artists from Judy Chicago to Julian Schnabel would also go on to pay tribute to both her work and figure.

Since that formative period of re-recognition, Kahlo has ascended to become a global cultural force. Her biography, aesthetics, activism, pain, and vitality formed a visual language that fascinated entire generations. “The market sometimes responds to trends, to things that become fashionable, but Frida Kahlo is the exception. She has remained in demand since the 1980s. She transcends any trend,” Anna Di Stasi, senior vice president at Sotheby’s, told Artsy. In her view, “Kahlo’s work is a testimony to her biography, a very Mexican exercise in introspection that also dialogues with contemporary discourses on the body, gender, and identity. These connections activate the desire of collectors.”

Her auction records, she added, “open the field for many other Latin American artists.”

One of the places where this impact can be seen is Malba in Buenos Aires; its artistic director, Rodrigo Moura, emphasizes both Kahlo’s pictorial power and symbolic relevance. On display are Diego y yo (1949) and Autorretrato con chango y loro (1942), works that the collector Eduardo Costantini, the museum’s founder, acquired in 2021 and 1995, respectively. The latter is one of the collection’s highlights and cost $3.2 million when it was purchased 30 years ago.

“Frida is a tremendous painter, and curiously, little is said about that. She is also a symbol of Latin culture, a figure who embodies difference and brings discussions of gender and identity to the forefront,” Moura told Artsy. The visibility generated by her records, he said, “opens doors and increases interest in the art of the region.”

The painter’s magnetism also found a new chapter with the opening of the Museo Casa Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico City, located just a few minutes’ walk from the famous Casa Azul. The space, opened in September, is dedicated to her formative years and the intimate life she shared with her family, especially her bond with her father, Guillermo. “Frida has so many facets and so much strength in each one that she continues to attract attention,” said the museum’s director, Adán García Fajardo. “Some see a story of breaking barriers, or a sisterly, supportive figure. Frida speaks to many audiences.”

Regarding the value of her works, García Fajardo recalled a conversation on taking out insurance for the museum, which houses original and unpublished pieces: “Whatever value you assign to it, if it is lost, burned, or stolen, it is beyond replacement,” he recalled. “No amount in dollars, pounds, or euros can compensate for such a loss, because a work by Frida Kahlo is irreplaceable.”

The ongoing interest in Kahlo is also reflected in the growth of the market for Latin American women artists linked to surrealism. In 2024, Leonora Carrington’s Las distracciones de Dagoberto (1945) reached $28.4 million. Thirty years earlier, it had sold for $299,500.

Remedios Varo’s Revelación (El relojero) (1955) sold for $6.22 million at Christie’s earlier this year, narrowly surpassing its previous record of $6.19 million set in 2020. Other artists from the region, such as Kati Horna, Maria Martins, and Tarsila do Amaral have also seen significant increases.

In addition to Frida, the top five auction sales from Latin American artists include Rivera, whose Baile en Tehuantepec (1928), sold for $15.7 million in 2016; Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose Omi Obini (1943) sold for $9.6 million in 2020; and Rufino Tamayo, whose Trovador (1945), sold in 2008 for $7.2 million.