The unforgettable Frida Kahlo continues to write history, over 70 years after her death. His self-portrait “El sueño” (The Cama) was just sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Thursday for a whopping $54.6 million. And this is a record for a painting by a female artist.
Frida Kahlo’s masterpiece has, in fact, taken the lead from the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose iconic painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1” was purchased for 44.4 million dollars in 2014.
The profound meaning of the self-portrait
The self-portrait El Sueño”, in Italian “The Dream”, was created in 1940 by Frida Kahlo and is one of the most emblematic and disturbing works of the Mexican artist: an image that perfectly summarizes the complexity of her inner world. Painted in a turbulent period of her life, marked by physical suffering and personal difficulties, it reveals the link between reality and the unconscious, between life and death.
In the painting Frida Kahlo depicts herself lying on a canopy bed that seems to float in the sky, in a dreamlike landscape. The element that stands out most is the presence of a papier-mâché skeleton with flowers in its hand, depicted above her. This is the personification of death, a theme dear to Mexican culture, which is celebrated with music, celebration and a riot of color.
The historical and biographical context in which this painting was created is fundamental to understanding its most authentic meaning. At that stage Frida Kahlo was going through a period of great emotional instability. After her troubled marriage to Diego Rivera, her health conditions continued to worsen, due to the consequences of the serious accident in 1925 which caused her to break her spine and various fractures to her pelvis and femur; that episode, which forced her to undergo various operations and live with chronic pain, marked a watershed in her existence.
In the self-portrait “El Sueño” the bed takes on a double symbolic value. On the one hand, it is the place that keeps her trapped due to suffering, but on the other it is also a sort of laboratory where her art takes shape and where she reflects. His figure covered in leaves seems to be suspended between sleep and death, a limbo in which the border between dream and reality becomes uncertain and fluid.
