Frida Kahlo’s face is one of the best known in art, thanks to her bold and challenging self-portraits.
A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist is going up for auction at Sotheby’s in what could be a record-setting sale.
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, "El sueño (La cama)" – in English, "The Dream (The Bed)" — may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer on Nov. 20. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1."
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $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.
"It's not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of a few that exists outside of Mexico and not in a museum collection," said Julian Dawes, vice chairman and head of impressionist and modern art for Sotheby’s Americas. "So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special."
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.
Painted in 1940, "El sueño (La cama)" shows the artist, wreathed in vines, lying in a four-poster bed floating in a pale blue sky. A skeleton wired with dynamite and clutching a bouquet of flowers lies atop the canopy.
The image is exploding with symbolism and feels like an allegory – but the artist really did have a papier-mâché skeleton on top of her bed.
Dawes said it's a psychological self-portrait by an artist at her peak.
"Her greatest works derive from this moment between the late 1930s and the early 1940s," he said. "She has had a variety of tribulations in her romantic life with Diego, in her own life with her health, but at the same time she’s really at the height of her powers."
Last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, the painting is the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection whose owner has not been disclosed.
A century after Andre Breton’s "Surrealist Manifesto" defined a revolutionary artistic movement characterized by unsettling juxtapositions and paradoxical statements, interest in – and prices for – surrealist art are booming. Surrealism’s share of the art market rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024, according to Sotheby’s. Magritte’s "L’empire des lumières" sold last year for $121.2 million, a record for a surrealist work.
Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, but Dawes said her "fascination with the subconscious" and use of otherworldly imagery place her squarely in that tradition.
He said it’s no surprise the genre is undergoing a resurgence.
"There are so many interesting parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s," Dawes said. "Coming out of a crippling global pandemic, a world that has to confront war on a more graphic and intimate level that had ever been experienced before — and economic and political and social forces swirling in the background that are eerily similar."
The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby’s in London until Tuesday, and then tours to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.
