An arresting self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, featuring the artist slumbering beneath a tangle of vines in a carved canopy bed with a skeleton reclining above her, will be auctioned by Sotheby's on Thursday night in New York. The sale of the 1940 painting, called El sueño (La cama), is widely anticipated to set a record for the most expensive artwork made by a woman.
"El sueño stands among Frida Kahlo's greatest masterworks — a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses," said Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby's head of Latin American art, in a statement. "Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant."
Sotheby's estimates that El sueño (La cama) will sell for between $40 and $60 million. The final price could easily outstrip the 2014 record set by Kahlo's friend and contemporary Georgia O'Keeffe, when O'Keeffe's 1932 work Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold at auction for $44.4 million. The last time Frida Kahlo broke an auction record was in 2021, when her 1949 work Diego y yo sold for $34.9 million; then the highest price for a Latin American artwork. It is also Kahlo's highest sale to date.
At a moment when art sales have dramatically softened, museums face massive financial restructuring and a number of leading galleries have shuttered, the buzz around this painting is significant but not surprising. Surrealist women artists are currently in vogue among collectors, and Kahlo is among a small handful of superstar artists with a seemingly bulletproof brand — think Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gustav Klimt. A Klimt painting auctioned by Sotheby's on Tuesday sold for $236.4 million, making it the second-most expensive painting ever auctioned.
Kahlo's mystique erupts in part from her psychologically complex self-portraits that focus on her disabilities, her politics, her heritage and her deep connection to the world shimmering around her.
"Her paintings tell stories — intimate, engaging, terrifying and tragic ones," wrote art historian Sharyn R. Udall in her 2003 article, "Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity and Artistic Aspiration," published in Woman's Art Journal. "When Kahlo looked into death's dark mirror, she saw herself. In the act of painting and in the resulting canvases, she documented her own attempts to survive pain, to make sense of it, to act out through images layered with irony, fantasy and allegory. Her work is searingly candid, overlaid with the unreality of an endless nightmare."
And her work seems to only grow in power. Just within the past year, more than a dozen museums around the world exhibited shows dedicated to Kahlo. An immersive experience that brought audiences inside some of them has been traveling internationally. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston will soon open a vast retrospective called Frida: The Making of an Icon. It's scheduled to transfer to the Tate Modern in London next June. And a new Frida Kahlo museum that explores the artist's early life opened in Kahlo's neighborhood in Mexico City in September. It's the third museum that centers Kahlo's life and art in the city.
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