Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies. (click on image to enlarge)
Andy Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies made $20,242,500 at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in New York on May 10. The auction brought in $128.1 million and 47 of the 58 lots were sold.
In the early 1960s Warhol’s rows of soup cans and movie stars were screened within a single canvas. With the Jackie paintings the artist created numbers of small panels later assembled into large compositions for the first time. He employed eight Jackie images from smiling wife to grieving widow with their mirror reversals through the press coverage of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy surrounding her husbands assassination.
The images follow Jackie from her arrival at Dallas, through the motorcade, the assassination, the administration of the oath of office for the new President Johnson and the funeral in Washington.
Jeff Koons’ Pink Panther, one of the most important works by the artist ever to have appeared at auction, sold for $16,882,500. The work last appeared at auction in 1999 when it made $1.8 million. The porcelain sculpture is the artist’s proof from an edition of three, with the other examples in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Art of the last 30 years fared well. Six of the seven Warhol’s at the sale were sold, totalling over $31 million.
The result followed the $54.8 million achieved the previous night for the Allan Stone collection, bringing Sotheby’s overall two day total to $182,910,000.