Andy Warhol's Marilyn portrait to be auctioned for $272m

NEW YORK • Upping the ante for the spring auctions and attesting to the strength of blue-chip trophies, Christie's announced that it would sell a 1964 Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe in May for an estimated US$200 million (S$272 million), which would make it the most expensive 20th-century artwork to sell at auction.

The announcement about the work, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, represents a significant burst of excitement for a high-end art market that has come through the pandemic largely unscathed.

"The most significant 20th-century painting to come to auction in a generation, Andy Warhol's Marilyn is the absolute pinnacle of American Pop and the promise of the American dream, encapsulating optimism, fragility, celebrity and iconography all at once," Mr Alex Rotter, Christie's chairman for 20th-and 21st-century art, said in a statement.

He added that it was "one of the greatest paintings of all time" and likened it to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Sandro Botticelli's The Birth Of Venus and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

The painting comes to the auction house from the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation Zurich, which supports healthcare and educational programmes for children.

All proceeds from the sale would go towards the foundation, making it potentially the highest-grossing philanthropic auction since the sale of Peggy and David Rockefeller's collection at Christie's in 2018.

The siblings Thomas and Doris Ammann in 1977 founded Thomas Ammann Fine Art, a Zurich gallery that specialised in Impressionist, modern, post-war and contemporary artists.

Doris continued to lead the gallery after Thomas' death in 1993. She died last year.

The auction record for a Warhol is US$104.5 million for his Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) in 2013.

The silk-screen work - striking for its bright blue eye shadow, yellow hair and red lips - is based on a promotional photo from the late actress' film Niagara (1953), part of a Warhol series of Shot Marilyn portraits.

The series is so titled because in 1964, a woman walked into Warhol's Factory studio and, with a pistol, shot a hole through the stack of four Marilyn paintings.

"The spectacular portrait isolates the person and the star," said Mr Georg Frei, the foundation's chairman, in a statement. "Marilyn the woman is gone; the terrible circumstances of her life and death are forgotten. All that remains is the enigmatic smile that links her to the mysterious smile of another distinguished lady, the Mona Lisa."

The work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London.

NYTIMES