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1940 self-portrait by the famous mexican artist Frida Kahlo The photo of her sleeping in bed may become history on Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s new york,
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El Sueño (La Cama)” – in English“The Dream (The Bed)” – Could surpass the top price of any female artist’s work when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid by Sotheby’s for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” in 2014.
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” which depicts the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. His paintings are said to have been sold privately for even higher prices.
The painting put up for auction depicts Kahlo sleeping on a wooden colonial-style bed, wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered with creeping vines and leaves. Above him, hovering over the bedpost, lay a life-size skeleton.
In its catalog notes, Sotheby’s The painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous border between sleep and death.”
Last displayed publicly in the late 1990s, the painting is the star of the sale of more than 100 Surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection whose owner has not been disclosed.
Kahlo vividly and spontaneously portrayed herself and the events of her life, which was marred by a bus accident at the age of 18. He began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on his damaged spine and pelvis, then wore a cast until his death in 1954 at the age of 47.
The catalog reads, “The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a scene of his anxiety about dying in his sleep, a fear very plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma.”