This Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait Could Become the Most Expensive Work by a Female Artist Ever Sold at Auction

“The Dream (The Bed)” will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in November. Experts say it could fetch between $40 million and $60 million

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

September 29, 2025

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When a self-portrait by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo goes to auction in November, it’s expected to fetch up to $60 million. If it reaches that historic sum, the piece would become the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold.

Titled El Sueño (La Cama)—Spanish for The Dream (The Bed)—the 1940 oil painting depicts Kahlo asleep in a large four-poster bed, enveloped in green vines. A large skeleton wrapped in explosives and holding a bouquet of flowers lies on the bed’s canopy above her.

“It’s not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of a few that exists outside of Mexico and not in a museum collection,” Julian Dawes, head of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless. “So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special.”

Kahlo is known for her unique, imaginative self-portraits. Born in Mexico City in 1907, the artist was severely injured in a bus accident as a teenager. The chronic pain she endured in the years that followed inspired paintings like The Broken Column (1944), in which Kahlo’s spine is replaced by a cracked ionic column. Her difficulty with conceiving children inspired Henry Ford Hospital (1932), which shows Kahlo in bed surrounded by blood and symbolic representations of her pain.

Other Kahlo self-portraits feature the artist with parrots, monkeys, tree roots and, notably, her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera. The two painters’ marriage was passionate and unstable, with Rivera committing countless infidelities. In 2021, Kahlo’s Diego and I (1949), depicting Rivera’s face inside her own forehead, sold for $34.9 million. It currently holds the record for the most expensive Kahlo work ever auctioned.

Kahlo painted The Dream (The Bed) during a year of “intense personal trauma and creative renewal,” according to a statement from Sotheby’s. The year 1940 was when revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Kahlo’s former lover, was assassinated. She was also dealing with her divorce from Rivera, though the two would later remarry.

“Her greatest works derive from this moment between the late 1930s and the early 1940s,” Dawes tells the AP. “She has had a variety of tribulations in her romantic life with Diego, in her own life with her health. But at the same time, she’s really at the height of her powers.”

As the AP writes, The Dream (The Bed) “feels like an allegory,” but it’s actually somewhat true to life. Kahlo kept a papier-mâché skeleton above her bed to “symbolize the continuity between life and death, a theme prevalent throughout her work,” writes the Art Newspaper’s Kabir Jhala. Rivera playfully suggested the skeleton was Frida’s lover.

Sotheby’s will auction off the painting as part of “Exquisite Corpus,” a private collection of more than 80 Surrealist paintings, drawings and sculptures by the likes of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. While Kahlo didn’t call herself a Surrealist, Dawes tells the AP that her dreamlike imagery and “fascination with the subconscious” fits with the movement. “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t,” she once said. “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Sotheby’s estimates that The Dream (The Bed) will fetch between $40 million and $60 million when it goes to auction in New York on November 8. The current auction record for an artwork made by a woman belongs to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

“El Sueño stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks—a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” says Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, in the statement. “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.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.