The most expensive painting of the 20th century
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn
One of Andy Warhol's iconic Marilyn Monroe portraits has become the most expensive piece of 20th century art ever to be put on auction. The portrait, which measures 101.6 centimetres on each side, is titled "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn" and is just one of Andy Warhol’s five Monroe paintings from the ‘60s. But on a Monday evening last year, the painting was sold at a Christie's auctions in New York for a staggering 195 million dollars.
Prior to the sale, Christie's had described "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn" as "one of the rarest and most transcendent images in existence." It has previously been shown at museums including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and London's Tate Modern. The auction house had initially stated that the expected bid was in the region of 200 million dollars.
Warhol's colourful reproductions of Monroe's photo portrait - originally a publicity shot from her film 'Niagara' (1953) – are, along with his signature paintings of Campbell's soup cans, among his most recognizable works. The portrait is created by silkscreen printing, which duplicates images on paper or canvas using a layer of fine-mesh silk as a stencil.
Warhol began creating his famous portraits in 1962, shortly after the untimely death of the Hollywood star. As with his depictions of other famous figures such as Elvis Presley and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, the pop artist created several versions of Monroe's portrait in different colours and configurations. ’Shot Sage Blue Marilyn’ was part of Warhol’s series of five Monroe portraits called "Shot Marilyns". Warhol painted Marilyn's portrait in 1964 with different coloured backgrounds: red, orange, light blue and sage blue.
Warhol was storing the five canvases at The Factory, his Manhattan studio, when Dorothy Podber, a friend of The Factory photographer Bill Name, saw the paintings in the studio and asked Warhol if she could shoot them. He thought she meant to photograph the paintings, but she actually meant to shoot them with a gun.
Podber put on a pair of gloves, fished a small revolver from her bag and fired a shot into the pile of four of the five Marilyn paintings, damaging them. The fifth painting, the one which recently sold for a record price, was not in the stack and therefore not damaged. The other four became known as the “Shot Marilyns”.
The text is translated by Pernille Kaufmann. See more here
