Frida Kahlo and The Dream

The culture vultures have descended. On Nov. 20, 2025 Sotheby’s New York auctioned a 1949 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. It is titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The bed) in English. The auction house expected a very big fish to purchase it! Sotheby’s sold the painting for $54.7 million.

Sotheby’s said the artwork “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.” Ha! I say it offers a spooky meditation on the sieve-like demarcation line between ruling class money laundering and the inherent corruption of their art world lackeys. Is that a fair evaluation?

Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, said of The Dream: “This painting has all the hallmarks of a signature Frida: the self-portrait, a Surrealist imagery and, most importantly, a psychological intensity and that sense of communion between artist and viewer.” Well that’s all fine and dandy, however… Frida rejected being labeled a surrealist.

The French poet and essayist André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement and writer of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, visited Mexico in 1938. Breton correctly called Mexico “the most surrealist country in the world.” He incorrectly identified Frida Kahlo as a surrealist artist, calling her art “a ribbon around a bomb.”

Breton invited Kahlo to show her paintings in Paris at Mexique, an art exhibition he was organizing at the Renou et Colle gallery in March 1939. The show would feature pre-Columbian artifacts, Mexican folk art, European Master paintings, photos by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and 18 paintings by Frida Kahlo. She agreed to participate.

Kahlo was disappointed in the Mexique exhibit, with her paintings held-up in customs and the show quite disorganized. She expressed disdain for the surrealists, criticizing their haughty intellectualism as the cause for their disengagement from art, culture, and real life. The break with the surrealists came with this barb from Kahlo:

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Mi pobre Frida… she always believed her beloved Diego Rivera was the superior artist. Just look at how the vultures fight over her remains. ¡Qué vergüenza!

Every bourgeois art aficionado proclaimed the sale a “record figure” for a female artist. How sad. Like most artists, Frida struggled to a make a living from her art. In 1947 the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico paid Kahlo 4,000 Pesos for her oil painting The Two Fridas. That was the largest sum of money Frida Kahlo received in her lifetime. That’s around $58,700 US dollars today.

I continue to wonder… who gets the $54.7 million?

This much is true, the auction sale of a painting created by anti-American communist artist Frida Kahlo, did reach a historic amount of yankee dollars. Frida Kahlo said in 1939: “I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste. They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.”