Frida Kahlo Portrait Could Shatter Some Records

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, reports the AP. With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, "El sueño (La cama)" may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer on Nov. 8. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby's in 2014 for Georgia O'Keefe'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, 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 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."