A painting of actor Marilyn Monroe by pop art icon Andy Warhol was auctioned on May 9 for about $195 million to an unknown buyer at Christie's in New York, making it the most expensive piece of 20th century art ever sold, and the most expensive American artwork to date. Titled 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn', the painting beat the American artwork record of $110.5 million (with fees) set by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) painting of a skull at a Sotheby’s New York auction in 2017. The painting 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn' (1964) is part of a set of five paintings called 'The Shot Marilyns'. Each 40 inch by 40 inch canvas uses silkscreen print to produce a portrait of Monroe against different backgrounds — red, orange, light blue, sage blue, and turquoise. There's a story behind the paintings' name. Warhol had stored four of them in his Manhattan studio, called the Silver Factory. A friend of the Factory photographer Billy Name, the artist Dorothy Podber, saw them stacked against a wall and asked if she could "shoot" them. Warhol understood her to mean she wanted to photograph them, and agreed. But Podber took out a revolver from her purse, aimed at the stack, and fired. The bullet went through the foreheads of the portraits, and the works have been called the Shot Marilyns ever since. The turquoise Marilyn was not part of the stack. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn and the other three paintings were subsequently repaired. "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is the absolute pinnacle of American Pop," Alex Rotter, chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at Christie’s, said in a statement. "The painting transcends the genre of portraiture, superseding 20th century art and culture. Standing alongside Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon, Warhol’s Marilyn is one of the greatest paintings of all time." Other versions from the Shot Marilyn series are owned by the American collectors Steven A Cohen, Kenneth Griffin, and Peter Brant. Monroe and Warhol The Shot Marilyns bear Warhol's signature stamp — the same image against different backgrounds. Warhol was looking at the commodification of images and icons, and how populations "consumed" them. According to Christie's, news of Monroe's sudden death affected Warhol personally, and he began immortalising her in his work shortly thereafter, utilising a cropped publicity still from the movie 'Niagara'. From 1962 onward, Warhol would continue to revisit Monroe's visage as his primary subject, revising and revamping his approach to the same time-honoured publicity still. 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn' is striking for the actor's blue eye shadow, yellow hair and red lips. It has been exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Modern in London among other museums. "Warhol’s choice of the studio headshot, the close cropping of Marilyn’s face and the contrast of colour all draw the eye to Marilyn’s lips, which hinge between a smile and an expression of clenched teeth," a report in The New York Times quoted Jessica Beck, curator of art at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, as saying. "It’s that tension that gives this painting its magic." Another NYT report published earlier this year noted that Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous at present — onscreen, onstage, in museums, and in the streets. Earlier this year, the documentary 'The Andy Warhol Diaries' started showing on Netflix; two plays, the biomusical 'The Trial of Andy Warhol', and 'The Collaboration', centred on Warhol's relationship with Basquiat, went on stage; and the theatrical walking tour production 'Chasing Andy Warhol' was launched. Thirty-five years after Warhol's death in 1987, the famous dictum attributed to him, "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes", seems to be especially relevant in the age of social media and reality TV, the NYT report noted. Newsletter | Click to get the day's best explainers in your inbox
