A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $US54.7 million ($A84.2 million) at a New York art auction, becoming the top sale price for a work by any female artist.
The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed - titled El sueño (La cama) or in English, The Dream (The Bed) - surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1, which sold for $US44.4 million in 2014.
The sale at Sotheby's also topped Kahlo's own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist.
The 1949 painting Diego and I, depicting Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $US34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.
The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument. Her works in both public and private collections within the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.
The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale.
Some art historians have scrutinised the sale for cultural reasons, while others have raised concern that the painting - last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s - could again disappear from public view after the auction.
The buyer's identity was not disclosed.
The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed that floats in the clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves. Above the bed lies a skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite.
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18. She started to paint while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, then wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47.
During the years Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.
In its catalogue note, Sotheby’s said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”
