Christie’s to Auction Andy Warhol’s Legendary Shot Sage Blue Marilyn Portrait

23.03.2022

The anticipated May auction in New York's Christie's auction house ended as expected—by setting a new record. Andy Warhol's iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe was recently sold for 195 million dollars. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is now the most expensive work of 20th century art to be sold at auction.

Like Warhol and Monroe, even the buyer is famous. The record-breaking bid was made in person by Larry Gagosian, the most influential art dealer in the world. People are now speculating whether Gagosian bought the artwork for himself or for one of his mega-collectors.
 
Along with his Campbell’s Soup Cans, the portrait of Marilyn Monroe is one of Andy Warhol’s most famous works. Already one of the legends of Pop Art, he began immortalizing the Hollywood beauty through silkscreen printing in 1962, shortly after her death. In 1964, he developed a more refined but much more demanding screen printing technique, which he used to hold up a mirror to the era’s ubiquitous mass produced images. This resulted in the very limited number of images he created, one of which is Shot Sage Blue Marilyn.
 
The famous painting was owned by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation, which was started by the Ammann siblings, who opened the Thomas Ammann Fine Art gallery in Zurich in 1977. All proceeds of the sale will benefit the foundation, whose mission is to improve the healthcare of children and provide them with educational programs worldwide.
 
“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,” says Alex Rotter, Christie’s Chairman, 20th and 21st Century Art.


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