Frida Kahlo\u2019s face is one of the best known in art, thanks to her bold and challenging self-portraits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist is going up for auction at Sotheby\u2019s in what could be a record-setting sale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sue\u00f1o (La cama)” \u2013 in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” \u2014 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\u2019s in 2014 for Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s “Jimson Weed\/White Flower No. 1.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“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\u2019s Americas. “So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Painted in 1940, “El sue\u00f1o (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The image is exploding with symbolism and feels like an allegory \u2013 but the artist really did have a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 skeleton on top of her bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dawes said it’s a psychological self-portrait by an artist at her peak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“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\u2019s really at the height of her powers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 Dal\u00ed, Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection whose owner has not been disclosed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A century after Andre Breton\u2019s “Surrealist Manifesto” defined a revolutionary artistic movement characterized by unsettling juxtapositions and paradoxical statements, interest in \u2013 and prices for \u2013 surrealist art are booming. Surrealism\u2019s share of the art market rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024, according to Sotheby\u2019s. Magritte\u2019s “L\u2019empire des lumi\u00e8res” sold last year for $121.2 million, a record for a surrealist work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said it\u2019s no surprise the genre is undergoing a resurgence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“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 \u2014 and economic and political and social forces swirling in the background that are eerily similar.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby\u2019s in London until Tuesday, and then tours to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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