This month’s spring sales in New York, which collectors believe are among the most anticipated ever, including an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe for an estimated $200 million.
When Christie’s auctions Warhol’s 1964 “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” on Monday, the auction house believes it to be the most expensive 20th century work ever sold.
Not to be outdone, Sotheby’s is offering $1 billion in modern and contemporary art during its headline week in May, including the second helping of the legendary Macklowe Collection.
The frenzy around this season’s auctions is “definitely unusual,” according to Joan Robledo-Palop, a collector and CEO of Zeit Contemporary Art in New York City.
The silkscreen, which measures 40 inches by 40 inches (100 centimetres by 100 centimetres), is part of a series of portraits Warhol created after Monroe died of a heroin overdose in August 1962.
After a visitor to Warhol’s “Factory” studio in Manhattan fired a gun at them, piercing the portraits, they became known as the “Shot” series.
The portrait has been dubbed “the most significant 20th century picture to come to sale in a generation” by Alex Rotter, Christie’s head of 20th and 21st century art.
Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which sold for $179.4 million in 2015, is the most expensive auctioned art from the twentieth century.
The $104.5 million purchased for “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” in 2013 set a new auction record for a Warhol.
Other highlights include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict” (1982), which is projected to sell for more than $30 million, and Mark Rothko’s “Untitled (Shades of Red),” which is expected to sell for up to $80 million.
Three Claude Monet oil on canvas paintings are also up for sale, with each one expected to fetch upwards of $30 million.
“Every couple of decades, there’s a sale with such great quality that you don’t generally see everything at once.” This season has turned into one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” Rotter told AFP.
Sotheby’s will auction the remaining 30 objects from the Macklowe Collection when its sales open on May 16 after selling the first set of works from the collection — the most expensive to touch the market at $600 million — last October.
Gerhard Richter’s 1975 “Seascape,” estimated at up to $35 million, and Rothko’s 1960 “Untitled,” with a high-end pre-sale estimate of $50 million, are two highlights.
