Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn made $195 million to become the most expensive 20th century artwork ever sold at Christie’s in New York last night. The painting was the final lot of the single-owner Thomas and Doris Ammann Collection which featured 36 lots and totalled $317.8 million.
Proceeds from the entire sale of this Zurich collection will benefit charities providing urgent medical and educational services to children. The buyer of Warhol’s Marilyn has been invited to partner with the Ammann Foundation and play an active role in fulfilling its global mission for children’s aid, with the opportunity to nominate the charities to which 20% of the work’s proceeds will be allocated, subject to the Foundation’s final approval.
Warhol’s colourful reproductions of Monroe’s photo portrait — originally a publicity still from her 1953 movie “Niagara” — are among his most recognisable works. Warhol first began creating silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe following her death in August 1962. He would create reproductions of her visage multiple times in bright colours, often with the features somewhat askew. In 1964, he developed a more refined and time-intensive screen printing technique, antithetical to the mass production he was best known for, and created a limited number of portraits of the Hollywood legend of which Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is one. This technique was so difficult that he never returned to it again.
Bloomberg is reporting that it was bought by the art dealer Larry Gagosian. The previous record price for a piece of American artwork was $110.5m for a skull painting created in 1982 by Jean-Michael Basquiat. The previous record for a 20th Century work of art was set in 2015 when a 1955 painting by Pablo Picasso – Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) – sold for $179.4m, including fees.