It took less than two minutes for Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait “Diego and I” (1949) to crush auction records in a 2021 Sotheby’s auction. Fetching a price of $34,883,000 with fees, Kahlo’s painting became the most expensive work by a Latin American artist ever sold at auction. This coming November, another painting by the Surrealist Mexican artist is expected to break records yet again.
Previously held in an undisclosed private collection, a lesser-known 1940 painting, “El sueño (La cama)” — “The dream (The bed)” — will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York City on November 8 with an estimate of $40 million to $60 million.
The work is one of 80 paintings in Exquisite Corpus: Surrealist Treasures from a Private Collection, Sotheby’s first marquee sale in its newly acquired Brutalist Breuer landmark building this fall. Other works in the sale include Salvador Dalí’s “Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages (Symbiosis of the head with the shells)” (1930) and “La Révelation du présent (The Revelation of the present)” (1936) by René Magritte, which are each expected to fetch between $2 and $3 million.
Like many of Kahlo’s works, “El sueño (La cama)” is a self-portrait. Painted in 1940, the same year that Kahlo remarried fellow artist Diego Rivera after he had an affair with her sister, the composition portrays the artist tucked into a canopy bed, floating in a clouded sky. Above the bed where Kahlo sleeps, wrapped in green vines, a skeleton lies in a similar position atop the canopy, wrapped in explosives and holding flowers. The painting is regarded as an exploration of mortality. According to Sotheby’s, Kahlo did, in fact, keep a papier-mâché skeleton above her bed.
Kahlo also painted “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair,” which now resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in 1940. The self-portrait, which similarly captures the upheaval of that period of her life, portrays Kahlo chopping off her own hair and wearing a suit, visual representations of her tumultuous relationship with Rivera. That same year, Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, with whom Kahlo had an affair, was assassinated in Mexico City.
“’El sueño’ stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks — a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American Art at Sotheby’s, said in a press release. “In this composition, Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.”
Beds appear frequently throughout Kahlo’s work, including in “My Birth” and “Henry Ford Hospital” (both 1932); the latter depicts the artist’s experience of a miscarriage. After a bus accident as a teenager that left her with a disability, Kahlo painted from a supine position in bed, enabled by an easel contraption procured by her mother.
Before appearing at Sotheby’s in New York in November, “El sueño (La cama)” will travel to Sotheby’s London, Bassam Freiha Art Foundation in Abu Dhabi, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, and an unspecified venue on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.