Warhol mixed adoration of “real” stars such as Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis with a levelling belief that anyone can be a celebrity, at least for a moment. His studio and hangout with silver foil walls came to define 60s Manhattan and regularly gets recreated in films as a plastic fantastic party venue. He made the word “superstar” famous, applying it to anyone who took his eye and could hold their own in the amphetamine-fuelled, sarcastic atmosphere of the Factory. Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn seems to sum up so much about him. But it’s all just the market’s way of catching up with the outrageous and unlikely fact that Andy Warhol is the greatest and most profound artist to have worked anywhere since 1945. That frisson of violence and chaos adds to the sales pitch. The shot went through the stack of canvases behind it the one on sale still bears the poorly concealed scar. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”īut what is it that makes Shot Sage Blue Marilyn so apparently valuable? In 1964 a visitor to Warhol’s studio named Dorothy Podber created her own moment of performance art by pulling a gun and shooting a newly silkscreened Marilyn in the forehead. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Later he would get philosophical on the subject. Money is beautiful, these early works of pop art whisper. He churned out multiple images of the almighty dollar, not as forgeries but works of art. In 1962 Warhol started to literally print dollar bills. So Andy will be established as bigger than Pablo and therefore the greatest artist of the modern age – at least according to an equation of artistic and monetary value he himself invented. That will make it the most expensive 20th-century work of art ever auctioned.
If Christie’s has got its estimate right, his 1964 painting Shot Sage Blue Marilyn will sell for about $200m (£150m). It’s probably his most recognised work, “one of the rarest and most transcendent images in existence”, if you believe the Christie’s blurb, which compares it to the Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Venus. Warhol first created it in 1962, the year Monroe took her life, by cropping a publicity still from her early film Niagara to focus solely on her face, then getting a silkscreen mesh made so he could print it on canvas as many times as he liked, adding hand-painted colours. Photograph: Santi Visalli Inc/Getty ImagesĪ more famous Warhol portrait will go on auction at Christie’s in New York in May: his Marilyn, the most iconic face of pop art. ‘So spiritual about everything’ … Warhol at the Factory in 1968.
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