Aneta Ulibi

The painting is called El Suero La Cama.

That means the dream, the bed, and the 1940 work shows the artist asleep in a bed, adrift in the sky with a grinning skeleton wrapped in dynamite on top of the canopy.

The painting sold for $54.7 million.

That outstrips the $44.4 million fetched by a Georgia O'Keeffe flower painting back in 2014.

But the art market has softened.

The Kahlo painting fell short of Sotheby's estimate of $60 million on the high end.

And art by women still has a long way to go.

A painting by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt sold earlier this week for $240 million.

Netta Ulibi, NPR News.