Warhol’s Portrait of Marilyn Monroe Sells For Record Price
The result makes it the most expensive work by a 20th-century artists ever to be sold at auction.
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Andy Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen portrait of Marilyn Monroe, arguably one of the most recognisable images born out of the last century, sold for approximately a record-setting $280 million (including fees) at Christie’s New York on Monday evening. The result makes it the most expensive work by a 20th-century artists ever to be sold at auction.
It sold to art dealer Larry Gagosian, who was bidding in the room.
The painting, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), depicts a press photo from Monroe’s 1953 noir film Niagara. The image of the actress is one Warhol used repeatedly in his work until his death in 1987. It derives from his “Shot Marilyn” portrait series, which Warhol produced after an incident at his downtown studio when he prompted a collaborator, Dorothy Podber, to shoot into a stack of canvases.
The result for this 1964 work almost doubled the artists’ previous auction record of approx. $151million, set when his 1963 canvas Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold at Sotheby’s in 2013. The present lot had been held in a private collection for five decades.
With the sale, Christie’s also rode a double-pronged pop culture wave of renewed interest in both Warhol and Monroe. This year, Netflix released a six-part documentary series The Andy Warhol Diaries looking at artist’s personal life, as well as a documentary film, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. And just last week, the resurgence of Monroe’s 1962 custom-made nude gown, which the star infamously wore when she sang a breathy “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy, just months before her death, was donned by Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala. Kardashian’s decision to wear the actual dress on the red carpet subsequently caused a stir among fashion archivists.
Four bidders—one on the phone with Christie’s co-chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and Modernist, Adrien Meyer, two others on the phone with New York specialists, and a bidder in the room—competed for the work, which was offered as the last lot of the night.
The painting, which was offered in the sale without a financial guarantee, hammered at a bid of $170 million, going to Gagosian, the room bidder, for a final price of $195 million. The hammer price was approx. $43 million below the approx. $288 million estimate upon request that Christie’s had designated it ahead of the auction.
The work was sold from the estate of Swiss art dealers Thomas and Doris Ammann, siblings who cofounded Thomas Ammann Fine Art in 1977, which long boasted a roster of high-profile collectors of modern and contemporary art. Doris, who survived her brother, ran the enterprise until her death at age 76 in March 2021.
Not only did Shot Sage Blue Marilyn bring a new artist record for Warhol, it has also become one of the most expensive works of art ever to sold at auction, surpassing Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (“Version O”) as the second high-selling work to hit the auction block. That painting sold at Christie’s for $257 million in 2015 to Qatari royal Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. (The most expensive work to ever sell at auction was Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for approx. $648 million.)
The new benchmark for Warhol falls in lockstep with the values for blue-chip brand name artists, New York art appraiser David Shapiro told ARTnews. Works from the famed “Shot Marilyn” series, of which there are only five, Shapiro said, have long been highly sought after and there are only a handful of private collectors with the means to acquire one.
Though the milestone price brings Warhol to rival Picasso as the most valuable artists of modern age, Shapiro said, “Within the greater market for trophy art, the figure of $288 million is very much in keeping with prices realized in the private dealer market for quite a few years.”
This article was originally published on ArtNews.
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