Warhol’s Portrait of Marilyn Monroe Sells for $195 M. at Auction – RisePEI

Andy Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen portrait of Marilyn Monroe, arguably one of the crucial recognizable photos born out of the final century, offered for a record-setting $195 million (together with charges) at Christie’s New York on Monday night. The end result makes it the costliest work by a Twentieth-century artists ever to be offered at public sale.

It offered to artwork supplier Larry Gagosian, who was bidding within the room.

The portray, Ssizzling Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), depicts a press photograph from Monroe’s 1953 noir movie Niagara. The picture of the actress is one Warhol used repeatedly in his work till his loss of life in 1987. It derives from his “Shot Marilyn” portrait collection, which Warhol produced after an incident at his downtown studio when he prompted a collaborator, Dorothy Podber, to shoot right into a stack of canvases.

The end result for this 1964 work virtually doubled the artists’s earlier public sale file of $105.4 million, set when his 1963 canvas Silver Automotive Crash (Double Catastrophe) offered at Sotheby’s in 2013. The current lot had been held in a non-public assortment for 5 a long time.

With the sale, Christie’s additionally rode a double-pronged popular culture wave of renewed curiosity in each Warhol and Monroe. This 12 months, Netflix launched a six-part documentary collection The Andy Warhol Diaries artist’s private life, in addition to a documentary movie, The Thriller of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. And simply final week, the resurgence of Monroe’s 1962 custom-made nude robe, which the star infamously wore when she sang a breathy “Pleased Birthday” to John F. Kennedy, simply months earlier than her loss of life, was donned by Kim Kardashian on the Met Gala. Kardashian’s choice to put on the precise costume on the purple carpet subsequently caused a stir among fashion archivists.

4 bidders—one on the cellphone with Christie’s co-chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and Modernist, Adrien Meyer, two others on the cellphone with New York specialists, and a bidder within the room—competed for the work, which was supplied because the final lot of the evening.

The portray, which was supplied within the sale with no monetary assure, hammered at a bid of $170 million, going to Gagosian, the room bidder, for a last value of $195 million. The hammer value was $30 million beneath the $200 million estimate upon request that Christie’s had designated it forward of the public sale.

The work was offered from the property of Swiss artwork sellers Thomas and Doris Ammann, siblings who cofounded Thomas Ammann High-quality Artwork in 1977, which lengthy boasted a roster of  high-profile collectors of recent and modern artwork. Doris, who survived her brother, ran the enterprise till her loss of life at age 76 in March 2021.

Not solely did Ssizzling Sage Blue Marilyn deliver a brand new artist file for Warhol, it has additionally change into one of the crucial costly artistic endeavors ever to offered at public sale, surpassing Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (“Model O”) because the second high-selling work to hit the public sale block. That portray offered at Christie’s for $179 million in 2015 to Qatari royal Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. (The costliest work to ever promote at public sale was Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450 million.)

The brand new benchmark for Warhol falls in lockstep with the values for blue-chip model title artists, New York artwork appraiser David Shapiro informed ARTnews. Works from the famed “Shot Marilyn” collection, of which there are solely 5, Shapiro mentioned, have lengthy been extremely wanted and there are solely a handful of personal collectors with the means to amass one.

Although the milestone value brings Warhol to rival Picasso as essentially the most invaluable artists of recent age, Shapiro mentioned, “Throughout the larger marketplace for trophy artwork, the determine of $200 million could be very a lot consistent with costs realized within the personal supplier marketplace for fairly a number of years.”