FILE - A painting by Frida Kahlo titled "El sueño (La cama)" or (The Dream (The Bed), is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms in London, Sept. 19, 2025. The painting, estimated at 40-60 million US dollars, is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled ahead of its upcoming sale in New York. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
FILE - Bidding representatives react after Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" sold for $450 million at Christie's in New York, Nov. 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)
FILE - Self portraits by artist Frida Kahlo, titled from left, "Self Portrait with Braids", 1941, "Self Portrait with Monkeys", 1943, and "Self Portrait with Small Monkey", 1945, are displayed as part of the exhibition "Frida & Diego: Passion Politics and Painting", at the High Museum in Atlanta, Feb. 8, 2013. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
FILE - A painting by Frida Kahlo titled "El sueño (La cama)" or (The Dream (The Bed), is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms in London, Sept. 19, 2025. The painting, estimated at 40-60 million US dollars, is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled ahead of its upcoming sale in New York. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
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FILE - Bidding representatives react after Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" sold for $450 million at Christie's in New York, Nov. 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)
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FILE - Self portraits by artist Frida Kahlo, titled from left, "Self Portrait with Braids", 1941, "Self Portrait with Monkeys", 1943, and "Self Portrait with Small Monkey", 1945, are displayed as part of the exhibition "Frida & Diego: Passion Politics and Painting", at the High Museum in Atlanta, Feb. 8, 2013. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo of her asleep in a bed could make history Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s in New York.
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)†– in English, “The Dream (The Bed)†— may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. 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.â€
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for depicting the artist and her husband, . Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.
The painting up for auction depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden colonial-style bed, wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered with crawling vines and leaves. Above her, seemingly levitating atop the bedposts, lies a full-sized skeleton.
In its catalog note, Sotheby's said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.â€
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.
“The suspended 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 shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,†the catalog notes.
