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, “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, it 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.
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 percent to 16.8 percent 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.
The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby’s in London until Nov. 11, and then tours to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.
