It depicts the actress Marilyn Monroe, synthesis of the American dream, an image universally recognized and imprinted in the collective consciousness, the most expensive painting of the twentieth century: one of the iconic pop portraits made by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the screen printing entitled “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” (1964), broke the new world record at Christie’s in New York with 195 million dollars during the sale of the catalog of the ’21st Century Evening Sale’.
After a bidding battle lasting less than four minutes between as many potential buyers, the work was purchased by the famous gallery owner Larry Gagosian present in the Rockefeller Center room. Gagosian refused to say whether he bought the painting for himself or for a client. Christie’s expected such a result and on the eve it had forecast 200 million dollars as the maximum of the starting estimate. The previous record for a Warhol job was $ 105.4 million, set in 2013 by “Silver car crash (Double disaster)” (1963). With its 19 million dollars, the painting of the king of Pop Art ousted “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O)” from the podium, a 1955 masterpiece by Pablo Picasso sold for 179.4 million in 2015, again at Christie’s in New York.
However, the pole position of the most expensive work of all time, “Salvator Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci, sold in 2017 by Christie’s in New York for 450 million dollars by the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, remains unattainable. “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” was delivered to the auction house by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation in Zurich: all proceeds from the sale will benefit the institution dedicated to improving the lives of children around the world thanks to the supply of health care and education programs. With one hundred percent of proceeds going to charity, the sale of this single painting constitutes the highest grossing philanthropic auction since the sale of ‘The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller’ catalog in 2018
The image that embodies the sense of an enchanting and at the same time escaping beauty was replicated by Warhol in five square canvases entitled “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” (each measuring 101.6 x 101.6 cm), depicting the diva Marilyn Monroe hit in the forehead by a single bullet with different colored backgrounds: red, orange, light blue, sage blue and turquoise. The one that goes up for auction is painted sage blue. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn painting is certainly now more famous than the original advertising frame for Henry Hathaway’s 1953 film “Niagara” on which it is based. “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” is a definitive work in Warhol’s production. The King of Pop Art began creating screen prints of Marilyn Monroe after her death in August 1962.
He created reproductions of his face several times in bright colors, often with slightly crooked features. In 1964 he developed a more refined and time-consuming screen printing technique, antithetical to the mass production that he is best known for, and produced a limited number of portraits of the Hollywood legend. This technique was so difficult, in fact, that he never returned to it. The spectacular portrait of the “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” series isolates the person and the star: Marilyn the woman is gone; the terrible circumstances of her life and her death are forgotten. All that remains of her is the enigmatic smile that connects her to another mysterious smile of a distinguished woman, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.