Frida Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait entitled “El sueño (La Cama)” could make history at Sotheby's auction on Thursday in New York.
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Self-portrait from 1940. famous mexican artist Frida Kahlo A photograph of her sleeping in bed could make history on Thursday when it goes up for sale at Sotheby's in New York.
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” (English for “The Sleep (The Bed)”) could exceed the top price for any artist's work when it goes under the hammer. The 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 auction price for a Kahlo work was $34.9 million, paid in 2021. “Diego and Me” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. It is reported that her paintings were sold privately for even more.
The painting up for auction shows Kahlo sleeping on a colonial-style wooden bed, wrapped in a gold blanket embroidered with climbing vines and leaves. Above her, seemingly floating on the headboard, lies a life-size skeleton.
A note in the Sotheby's catalog says the painting “offers a ghostly meditation on the porous border between sleep and death.”
Last publicly exhibited in the late 1990s, the painting was the star of sales of more than 100 surrealist works by artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection, the owner of which is not disclosed.
Kahlo vividly and mercilessly portrayed herself and the events of her life, which was upended by a bus accident at age 18. She began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, and then wore plaster casts until her death in 1954 at the age of 47.
“The hanging skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was defined by chronic pain and past trauma,” the catalog notes.
