Andy Warhol painting sells for R$ 458 million at auction in New York

Andy Warhol may be best known for his pop art iconography of Marilyn Monroe, Chairman Mao Tse Tung and Campbell’s soup cans, but it was one of his silkscreen prints of a car accident that, on Wednesday (16), became joined the most valuable post-war works sold at auction.

“White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times)”, a colossal image from the artist’s “Death and Disaster” series, raised US$ 85.4 million – equivalent to R$ 458 million in this Thursday’s (17) values ​​– at Sotheby’s in New York. The auction house described the sum as “monumental”.

By the time Warhol created the work in 1963, he was transfixed by gruesome and morbid images – clouds of atomic bombs, electric chairs – and how print publications reproduced them, believing that readers had become immune to their impact. Of all its output, the series dealt most explicitly with its fixation on human mortality.

In “White Disaster”, Warhol duplicated a single image of an automobile accident 19 times in black and white. At 3.6 meters high and 1.80 meters wide, it is the largest of his works focused on car accidents.

“What distinguishes [a obra de arte] it’s not just its sheer scale, which really confuses anyone standing in front of it…but also its palette,” explained David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, ahead of the sale.

“It really does seem to glow, the way the black silkscreen registers against the crisp white background,” he added, explaining that Warhol has repeated his image in the series in different hues, including lavender and orange.

Galperin likened the piece’s scale and form to religious altars, referring to Warhol’s Catholic upbringing and the religious undercurrents in his work—particularly how religious icon paintings informed his celebrity portraits. Warhol worked on the “Death and Disaster” series at the same time that he was silkscreening his famous images of Monroe after his death in 1962.

“These ideas of celebrity, tragedy, fame, death – these are the themes that occupied Warhol and I think the series he was working on simultaneously, the Marilyn paintings and the ‘Death and Disaster paintings’ are inextricably linked,” he said. Galperin.

In 2013, a minor work in the series, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” sold at Sotheby’s for a record $105.4 million. It reigned as Warhol’s most expensive artwork until last year, when one of his silkscreens of Monroe broke the record for any American artist, fetching $195 million.

Before the sale, “White Disaster” had been in a private collection for 25 years and was owned by Heiner Friedrich, founder of the Day Art Foundation, and art dealer Thomas Ammann, according to Sotheby’s. She has appeared in major exhibitions on Warhol and pop art more widely at the Tate Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Center Pompidou in Paris and, most recently, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The work was up for sale at one of two major auctions held at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday, which fetched $314.9 million. Elsewhere, an untitled painting by Willem de Kooning sold for $34.8 million, the second-highest amount ever paid for a work by the Dutch-American artist, the auction house said. Works by Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among some of the other eight-figure sales.