A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million at a New York art auction and became 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 at Sotheby’s for $44.4 million in 2014.

The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work was previously $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera . Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that has remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been decla

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