Frida Kahlo’s 1940 painting El sueño (La cama) — or The Dream (The Bed) — is set to go up for auction on Nov. 20 in New York, carrying an estimated price tag of $40 million to $60 million, potentially making it the most expensive work ever sold by a female or Latin American artist.
According to The Associated Press, Sotheby’s is exhibiting the piece internationally in London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Paris before the sale. Mexican art historian Helena Chávez Mac Gregor called the moment “a lot of speculation,” highlighting the intense interest surrounding the work.
In Mexico, Kahlo’s works are protected as national artistic monuments and cannot be sold or destroyed. But privately held pieces abroad, like this one, are legally available for international sale. “The system of declaring Mexican modern artistic heritage is very anomalous,” said curator Cuauhtémoc Medina.
El sueño (La cama) was painted following Kahlo’s trip to Paris, where she engaged with surrealist artists. The painting features a skull on the bed’s canopy, which Chávez Mac Gregor clarified is not a Day of the Dead skeleton but a Judas figure — a cardboard effigy traditionally burned during Easter to symbolize purification and the triumph of good over evil.
The skeleton is decorated with firecrackers and flowers, echoing a figure Kahlo kept above her own bed. “She spent a lot of time in bed waiting for death,” Chávez Mac Gregor said, noting her lifelong health struggles.
Although the painting is being auctioned alongside works by surrealists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, Kahlo never considered herself part of the movement. “Frida always had a critical distance from that,” said Chávez Mac Gregor, citing Kahlo’s communist beliefs.
Yet, elements of surrealism appear in her work, reflecting dreamlike imagery, sexual freedom, and revolutionary ideas, as seen in the painting’s depiction of her bed suspended in the sky.
El sueño (La cama) was last publicly exhibited in the 1990s, and after the auction, it may once again disappear from public view, a common fate for high-value artworks.
Exceptions include Kahlo’s Diego y yo, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021 and remains on display at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires.
Medina criticized the skyrocketing prices, saying, “When funds purchase art as mere investments… their fate may be worse; they may end up in a refrigerator at Frankfurt airport for decades to come.”
The current record for a female artist’s work is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, sold for $44.4 million in 2014. By contrast, male artists have set far higher benchmarks, with Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi fetching $450.3 million in 2017.
