Frida Kahlo portrait could sell for $60 million and shatter records at Sotheby's

LONDON (AP) — Frida Kahlo’s face is one of the best known in art, thanks to her bold and challenging self-portraits.

A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist is going up for auction at Sotheby’s in what could be a record-setting sale.

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 on Nov. 8. 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.”

The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

“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,” said Julian Dawes, vice chairman and head of impressionist and modern art for Sotheby’s Americas. "So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special.”

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.

Painted in 1940, “El sueño (La cama)” shows the artist, wreathed in vines, lying in a four-poster bed floating in a pale blue sky. A skeleton wired with dynamite and clutching a bouquet of flowers lies atop the canopy.

The image is exploding with symbolism and feels like an allegory – but the artist really did have a papier-mâché skeleton on top of her bed.

Dawes said it's a psychological self-portrait by an artist at her peak.

“Her greatest works derive from this moment between the late 1930s and the early 1940s,” he said. “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.”

Last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, the painting is the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection whose owner has not been disclosed.

A century after Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” defined a revolutionary artistic movement characterized by unsettling juxtapositions and paradoxical statements, interest in – and prices for – surrealist art are booming. Surrealism’s share of the art market rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024, according to Sotheby’s. Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” sold last year for $121.2 million, a record for a surrealist work.

Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, but Dawes said her “fascination with the subconscious” and use of otherworldly imagery place her squarely in that tradition.

He said it’s no surprise the genre is undergoing a resurgence.

“There are so many interesting parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s,” Dawes said. “Coming out of a crippling global pandemic, a world that has to confront war on a more graphic and intimate level that had ever been experienced before — and economic and political and social forces swirling in the background that are eerily similar.”

The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby’s in London until Tuesday, and then tours to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.

A painting by Salvador Dali called Symbiose de la tete aux coquillages is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms, the painting estimated at 2-3 million US dollars is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled in London ahead of their sale in New York, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

A painting by Dorothea Tanning called Interior with Sudden Joy is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms, the painting estimated at 2-3 million US dollars is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled in London ahead of their sale in New York, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

A painting by Frida Kahlo called El sueño (La cama) is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms, the painting estimated at 40-60 million US dollars is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled in London ahead of their sale in New York, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

A painting by Frida Kahlo called El sueño (La cama) is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms, the painting estimated at 40-60 million US dollars is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled in London ahead of their sale in New York, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

A painting by Frida Kahlo called El sueño (La cama) is displayed at Sotheby's auction rooms, the painting estimated at 40-60 million US dollars is part of a collection of surrealist masterpieces unveiled in London ahead of their sale in New York, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump sought on Wednesday to explain his rationale for the war against Iran at a pivotal moment at home and abroad, but he offered few new details as he amasses extraordinary executive authority to prosecute the military operation.

The war is fast becoming a signature of his second-term agenda and the speech was a capstone to a remarkable day flexing presidential power.

Trump started the morning as the first sitting president to show up for a U.S. Supreme Court hearing, a stunning reach of the executive into the affairs of the judicial branch. He ended with his first primetime address from the White House about a war he launched on his own, bulldozing past Congress.

On an early spring night when many Americans may have been looking upward as Artemis II astronauts lifted off for NASA's return to the moon, Trump gave a nod to that historic milestone. Then he quickly refocused attention back to him — and to the conflict with Iran that has killed more than a dozen U.S. service members and appears to have no easy exit in sight.

"America, as it has been for five years under my presidency is winning — and now winning bigger than ever before," Trump said.

“We’re going to finish the job and were going to finish it very fast," he added.

The president said at the top of his address that he wanted to “discuss why Operation Epic Fury is necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world,” showing that part of the goal for Wednesday’s speech was to take on the confusion that has persisted as he and his administration have shifted their reasons for launching the mission and its objectives.

But Wednesday night, Trump did not offer any new explanations.

He maintained that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, calling such a prospect “an intolerable threat.”

Though he and his administration insisted that the U.S. and Israel obliterated Iran’s nuclear program in strikes last summer, he said Wednesday that Iran sought to rebuild its nuclear program after those strikes at a new different location. He did not offer details but said it indicated Iran was not backing away from its nuclear ambitions. He also said Iran was building a vast arsenal of ballistic missiles that were a threat to America’s homeland.

While he said Iran’s ballistic missile capacity was greatly reduced, he didn’t explain how the operation had headed off Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

He instead painted the threats from Iran generally as having been wiped away, though he didn’t back up that assertion, especially as multiple competing factions of power remain within Iran’s theocracy.

Iran long has insisted its nuclear program was peaceful. It had, however, been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. Before the war, U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran had yet to begin a weapons program, but had “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Thousands of additional U.S. troops are heading to the Middle East. Gulf allies are urging Trump to finish the fight, arguing that Tehran hasn’t been weakened enough.

And yet Trump himself has predicted the U.S. will be done “within maybe two weeks."

He said the “core strategic objectives are nearing completion" and did not signal any preparations for a ground invasion by American troops — to retrieve Iran's enriched uranium or secure the Strait of Hormuz, where a chokehold by Iran has sent energy prices soaring.

But Trump offered few details about next steps. At one point he told allies to simply reopen the waterway critical to oil shipments themselves — “take it," he implored.

Trump is fast approaching the 60-day mark when he must seek approval from Congress under the War Powers Act to continue any military operations.

Trump did not announce the imminent start of peace talks or any other diplomatic effort to end the war.

Instead he recounted the long wars in Korea and Vietnam and vowed the U.S. would be better off because of this one.

“This is a true investment for your children and your grandchildren’s future,” he said.

Trump has berated U.S. allies for not doing their part in the conflict, even as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would convene a diplomatic summit to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz after the fighting ends.

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have suggested that NATO will need to be reconsidered once the Iran war is over. But Trump did not mention NATO by name during the speech.

Trump has gone so far as to say he is “seriously considering” withdrawing from the military alliance, which has been a bulwark of transatlantic unity and security since the end of World War II.

But he cannot simply withdraw from NATO on his own without a legal fight.

“We’re going to have to re-examine the value of NATO and that alliance for our country,” Rubio said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Ultimately, that’s a decision for the president to make, and he’ll have to make it.”

Trump, who ran as the “America First” president vowing not to drag the country into endless wars, has yet to fully address the political pushback he faces from his own base of supporters over the Iran conflict.

The U.S. economy is roiling, the financial markets are swinging with Trump's various pronouncements about the war effort, and Americans are facing pain at the pump as the cost of living rises.

While the president often describes the inflationary high prices as a momentary setback, it's all feeding into a rocky November midterm election.

Some of the sharpest criticism he’s faced in the early days of the Iran war has come from once-loyal media figures in the MAGA-universe, including Tucker Carlson.

President Donald Trump speaks about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

President Donald Trump gestures after speaking about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House before signing an executive order Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)