71 Years After Her Death, Frida Kahlo Shatters Several Auction Records, Including Her Own

Even in death, Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, can’t help but one up each other.

Way back in 2016, 62 years after her passing and 59 years after that of her husband, Kahlo set an auction record for Latin American art when Two Nudes in the Forest sold for $8 million. Then, in 2018, Rivera’s The Rivals sold for $9.76 million. Skip to 2021, and Kahlo’s Diego y yo sells for a whopping $34.9 million, only to be bested last night when her El sueño (La cama) hit $54.7 million. The sale marked a new record for Latin American work, for Kahlo herself, and notably, for any work by a female artist.

The sale points to the continually rising profile of a Surrealist whose work circled the darker aspects of life, and to the righting of a long-unstable art market (Sotheby’s reportedly doubled its earnings year-over-year at this week’s sales). El sueño (La cama), 1940, features Kahlo laid down in bed under a skeleton that rests on her canopy. She is encased by the vines that often circle her self-portraits, both a constricting and evolving motif for an artist that lived with debilitating chronic pain.

The pensive canvas is a far cry from Diego y yo, 1949, a close-up portrait of the artist crying, with a smaller characterization of Rivera plastered on her forehead. The two married in 1929, when Rivera had two common-law wives and Kahlo, at 22, was 21 years his junior. The pair weathered their rising popularity in tandem, though they were frequently unfaithful to each other. “Of course he does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist,” she told the press in 1933. In a particularly nasty turn, Rivera struck up an affair with Kahlo’s younger sister—a divorce followed, and then a reconciliation and another marriage. 

The tumult—of Kahlo’s physical health, her place in society, and in her marriage—is ever present in her work, which has seen her run through with arrows, cut with scissors, or sinking into nature scenes. The pieces are violent, lovely, and contemplative at once, startlingly prescient despite their advanced age. Indeed, the numbers show what Kahlo already knew nearly a century ago, she is the big artist of our time.