It took lower than two minutes for Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait “Diego and I” (1949) to crush public sale information in a 2021 Sotheby’s public sale. Fetching a worth of $34,883,000 with charges, Kahlo’s portray grew to become the costliest work by a Latin American artist ever bought at public sale. This coming November, one other portray by the Surrealist Mexican artist is anticipated to interrupt information but once more.
Beforehand held in an undisclosed non-public assortment, a lesser-known 1940 portray, “El sueño (La cama)” — “The dream (The bed)” — will go beneath the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York Metropolis on November 8 with an estimate of $40 million to $60 million. The outcomes might additionally set a brand new report for a piece by a lady artist at public sale, presently held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which bought for $44 million in 2014.
The work is one in every of 80 work in Beautiful Corpus: Surrealist Treasures from a Non-public Assortment, Sotheby’s first marquee sale in its newly acquired Brutalist Breuer landmark constructing this fall. Different works within the sale embody Salvador Dalí’s “Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages (Symbiosis of the head with the shells)” (1930) and “La Révelation du présent (The Revelation of the present)” (1936) by René Magritte, that are every anticipated to fetch between $2 and $3 million.
Sotheby’s will public sale René Magritte’s “La Révélation du présent” (1936) in November.
Like lots of Kahlo’s works, “El sueño (La cama)” is a self-portrait. Painted in 1940, the identical yr that Kahlo remarried fellow artist Diego Rivera after he had an affair along with her sister, the composition portrays the artist tucked into a cover mattress, floating in a clouded sky. Above the mattress the place Kahlo sleeps, wrapped in inexperienced vines, a skeleton lies in an analogous place atop the cover, wrapped in explosives and holding flowers. The portray is thought to be an exploration of mortality. Based on Sotheby’s, Kahlo did, actually, hold a papier-mâché skeleton above her mattress.
Kahlo additionally painted “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair,” which now resides within the assortment of the Museum of Trendy Artwork, in 1940. The self-portrait, which equally captures the upheaval of that interval of her life, portrays Kahlo chopping off her personal hair and carrying a go well with, visible representations of her tumultuous relationship with Rivera. That very same yr, Russian revolutionary chief Leon Trotsky, with whom Kahlo had an affair, was assassinated in Mexico Metropolis.
“’El sueño’ stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks — a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American Artwork at Sotheby’s, stated in a press launch. “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.”
Beds seem continuously all through Kahlo’s work, together with in “My Birth” and “Henry Ford Hospital” (each 1932); the latter depicts the artist’s expertise of a miscarriage. After a bus accident as a youngster that left her with a incapacity, Kahlo painted from a supine place in mattress, enabled by an easel contraption procured by her mom.
Earlier than showing at Sotheby’s in New York in November, “El sueño (La cama)” will journey to Sotheby’s London, Bassam Freiha Artwork Basis in Abu Dhabi, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, and an unspecified venue on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.
