One morning in Rockefeller Center this month, Jeff Koons waltzed through the Christie’s front atrium, where his Balloon Dog (Orange) was installed in 2013 prior to hitting the block. Koons currently holds the distinction of world’s most expensive living artist, but on this brisk day, he was a mere viewer, there to see a work that soon seems destined to go for many multiples of the $58.4 million that shiny steel canine fetched at auction. Staffers of the auction house, owned by French billionaire François Pinault, whisked Koons into the small, chapel-like room where he could get a full glimpse at Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, one of five portraits of Marilyn Monroe made by Warhol in 1964, at what was widely considered to be the peak of his creative output. Hitting the block in less than a month on May 9, it has an estimate of $200 million, the highest ever placed on an artwork prior to auction.
“Two hundred is a huge benchmark. It’s the highest reported estimate ever, it’s the highest estimate ever put on an artwork,” said Alex Rotter, the Christie’s chairman who’s overseeing the sale. “Could we have set more? You could always say more.”
Many are indeed saying more, making the $200 million mark seem not like the estimate—but the jumping-off point. Several dealers, advisers, auction specialists, and Warhol experts who I spoke to recently believe that, if the right tech billionaires, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, Asian foundations, or pandemic-enriched shipping magnates go head-to-head during the bidding, the work could hammer as high as $500 million, making it the most expensive artwork of all time—a marker currently held by Salvator Mundi, a rendering of Jesus Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that went for $450 million in 2017.
The bullishness has to do with the aura cast on this particular portrait of Monroe, which was in the collection of the Swiss dealer Thomas Ammann and his sister Doris, who died in 2021. (Another good reason to bid: The proceeds will all go not to another billionaire’s coffers but to a variety of charities.) For one, it’s a showstopper. An innovative silk screen system perfected the laborious reprinting of a still from the now forgotten Monroe movie Niagara that Warhol started tinkering with in 1962, after the death of the icon born Norma Jeane Mortenson. A portrait of a recently fallen movie star embodied the idea of pop art, and the works had bold wall power as soon as they were unveiled. A person who’s seen one Marilyn installed in a private home noted how visitors gravitate toward it over other masterpieces installed around it, like tourists ignoring MoMA’s many treasures to gawk at The Starry Night.
And these Marilyns are rare: Though known for democratizing the idea of fine art through pop imagery and mass production, Warhol only made five Marilyn Monroe portraits at this size, 40 inches square, each in a different color. Each time one has sold, it’s rejiggered the entire Warhol market—or possibly the entire art market in general. In 1998, in the midst of a recession, a great-niece of the German industrialist Karl Ströher put the Orange Marilyn on the block at Sotheby’s, with an aggressive estimate of at least $4 million. Stroher had bought it for an estimated $25,000 from the wife of Long Island collector Leon Kraushar, who bought it from Leo Castelli for $1,800 in 1965. When bidding started, casino magnate Steve Wynn went neck and neck with S.I. Newhouse, late co-owner of Condé Nast, this publication’s parent company, repped in the room by a pen-wielding Larry Gagosian. Gagosian, raising his pen on behalf of Newhouse, prevailed, to the tune of $17.3 million.
“Leon’s son Fred grew up with the painting, and when he heard about the sale, he said he wanted to put his head in the oven and turn the gas on,” said dealer and authenticator Richard Polsky, who wrote the memoir I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon). Polsky can commiserate. The book, true to its title, tells the story of his own premature sale of a lesser Warhol in 2005.
Nine years after the auction, Gagosian was in the middle of another deal for a Warhol Marilyn, and the price had more than quadrupled. The Chicago collector Stefan Edlis cooked up a private agreement to sell the Turquoise Marilyn to trader (and now New York Mets owner) Steve Cohen for $80 million. Years after that, it looked like Cohen got the thing cheap. Following Newhouse’s death in 2017, his estate appointed former Sotheby’s rainmaker Tobias Meyer to work through his collection. While some works wound up at auction, Orange Marilyn was sold in a private transaction to Citadel founder Ken Griffin for what two sources close to the transaction said was $240 million.
It could have gone even higher at auction four years ago. “There was talk at that stage that it would certainly go higher than $300 million,” said Brett Gorvy, the founding partner of the gallery LGDR, who for years was a top seller at Christie’s, orchestrating a number of eight- and nine-figure deals.
Why are these Warhols so in demand? Technically, the Warhol market has been soft since Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold at Sotheby’s for $104.5 million in 2013. But these five Marilyn works are in a league of their own, trophies that have transcended the artist and become mascots for contemporary art itself
“Whoever buys the Sage Marilyn, they will become world famous overnight,” Polsky said. “This is no longer about trophy works, this is about eternal fame. It’s like building a temple like the pharaohs did, it’s about eternal life. This is a monument to yourself that goes beyond investment.”
I asked if he had a guess for how much it would sell for. He said $500 million was a “nice round number.”
This series has long been among the most cherished works to come out of the postwar canon. When Warhol first made the five works, they played directly into his obsessions with fame and the macabre, with iconography and identity, with art and mass production, mostly because he had found the perfect muse, one so recognizable at the time that immortalizing her on canvas was both a no-brainer and banal.
“Imagine if you were to see Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, that’s how emotional it was when you saw Marilyn—love her or hate her,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “The works are swirling with folklore, with gossip—it’s a full representation of who Warhol was.”
There’s also the matter of why four of them have the word shot in their title. In the fall of 1964, the performance artist Dorothy Podber walked into The Factory and asked if she could shoot the stack of Marilyn Monroe portraits propped against the wall. Warhol, thinking she was going to shoot a picture with a camera, said sure, at which point Podber took off her gloves, grabbed a gun from her purse, and shot four Marilyn Monroes right between the eyes. The works were restored, and the aura of violence hovering around them (though the turquoise edition was spared in the assault) fit in perfectly with Warhol’s obsession with the darker side of celebrity, especially after he himself was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968.
“Damage is seen as a negative, but it creates a layer of a story that is romantic and at the same time feeds completely into the theme of Marilyn and the commemoration of her death,” Gorvy said.
Vincent Fremont, who for decades served as the studio manager of The Factory and was a founder of the Andy Warhol Foundation, said that while Warhol rarely talked about his works in any kind of analytical way, he understood even then that these pieces were among his most powerful.
“Andy knew the value of the paintings would go up and the Marilyns were always the strongest,” Fremont said. “He did understand the value of his paintings. He kept lots of paintings in rolls so he could store them.”
Fremont added that it was all very serious collectors who bought the five Marilyns on the primary market from Warhol’s dealer, Leo Castelli. One was Peter Brant, who paid $5,000 for Shot Blue Marilyn in 1967, when he was 20 years old. Brant still owns it. The last Shot Marilyn, after accounting for Cohen’s turquoise and Griffin’s orange, is Shot Red Marilyn, purchased by Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos.
“A lot of collectors would like to be perceived to be in a club of five, especially when those five are the ultimate collectors,” Gorvy said.
A new member of the club will be minted May 9, and it’s currently an art world parlor game to guess who that person will be. One high-placed auction world source who spoke on background thought that many of the established collectors who might have bid on such a work in the past—Leon Black, Ron Lauder, Wynn—would avoid it simply because the ultra-bright spotlight to be shone on the buyer of this picture isn’t exactly their cup of tea. And the newly minted Bitcoin billionaires might be holding their cash for the sale later in the week, when treasures from the Anne Bass collection, including two Rothkos, come up on the block.
But Rotter said he’s gotten a remarkable amount of interest in the work, impressive given there’s only so many people on earth who could conceivably spend half a billion dollars on an artwork. And a Christie’s rep confirmed that, in terms of press coverage and overall impressions across social media, the Marilyn has already racked up more attention than Salvator Mundi, billed as “the Last Leonardo,” in 2017.
Gorvy said the run-up to the sale of Shot Orange Marilyn, when some believed it could be auctioned off, could prove prophetic. Though it ended up selling privately without any bidding, he said that “there were three or four people who came forward who were very disappointed” that they did not have the chance to outbid Griffin for the treasure.
While Gorvy didn’t specify who those would-be buyers were, he mused that perhaps the bidder and the underbidder for Salvator Mundi—Saudi prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud and United Arab Emirates leader Mohammed bin Zayed, respectively—might be in the running for this soon-to-be-sold Marilyn. Other sources indicated that the Qatari royal family—a shared enemy of the Saudis and Emeratis who made history when they bought Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players for more than $250 million in 2012—could also be in the mix.
“In the Middle East alone, there are three entities that can compete for this,” Gorvy said.
“Add on top of this Asia, and again, when you look across the world and you say, ‘Who can spend over $200 million?’ you can come up with quite a few. Is there the buying power out there, and are there people willing to spend more than $450 million? Yes, whether it is a sovereign nation or an individual, there are people.”
Rotter said he couldn’t possibly speculate on where it would hammer, but he certainly wasn’t willing to put a cap on it.
“It’s about the excitement in the marketplace and the once-in-a-generation opportunity to buy her, to buy this painting,” he said. “How much does it make? I don’t know what it will make, but I will say that nothing’s too much for her.”
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Congrats to working actor Nicola Peltz and young chef Brooklyn Beckham, two kids who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and got married in a nice little Jewish ceremony Saturday. Just kidding, Peltz’s dad is a junk bond billionaire and Beckham’s parents might be the most famous non-royal English-accented couple on the planet. The ceremony was a multimillion-dollar, three-day bash at the Peltzes’ $100 million mansion in Palm Beach—so private that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle might have been there, but no one can really say for sure. Well, it wasn’t so private that they couldn’t give our corporate cousins at Vogue exclusive photos, including a shot of the father of the bride accompanying his daughter in front of a giant work by Rashid Johnson.
…After three long years away, Expo Chicago brought art fairs back to the Windy City last week, setting up shop on Navy Pier from Thursday to Sunday. Opening hours welcomed reps from what seemed like every contemporary art institution up and down the Midwest and on both sides of the Mississippi. Collectors who attended included local bigwig Penny Pritzker and Sharjah Art Foundation president Hoor Al Qasimi. And while on-the-rise collector Barack Obama was in town to give a speech at his former university of employment, he didn’t make it to the fair. Celeb-spotters had to instead take selfies with Chance the Rapper, who not only swung by to see works by Sahara Longe at the Timothy Taylor booth, but also got onstage at the post-opening cocktail party to address the arts patrons of Chicago personally.
…In Venice, the PinchukArtCentre, run by Ukrainian billionaire collector Victor Pinchuk, has interrupted its scheduled programming to stage This Is Ukraine: Defending Freedom, a show staged at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in the Cannaregio. It features artists currently living and working in Ukraine, including Yevgenia Belorusets, Mykyta Kadan, and Lesia Khomenko, as well as some really famous names like Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Plus, it’s presented in partnership with the Office of the President of Ukraine and features a personal quote and signature from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Busy guy!
…Longtime power collector Lisa Perry has given the Hamptons yet another must-see art institution for the out-east set—and it’s in a fabulous historic home that Perry single-handedly saved from demolition. The midcentury-modern domicile was built by architect Paul Lester Wiener for the pioneering pop art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull in 1962, and this year it was on the market and needed serious TLC. Perry snapped it up and fixed it up, and now it will be a place for only female artists, open to the public in time for the start of the season.
…Al Pacino and Julian Schnabel are old buddies, and sometimes when they hang out, Schnabel likes to do impressions of Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface. If you were friends with Al Pacino, wouldn’t you do the same? Are you already doing a Scarface impression right now, my little friend? Anyway, Pace Gallery, which inaugurated its new Tinseltown gallery with a big Schnabel show, threw a fancy bash for the artist Saturday at Felix, the Venice trattoria that people like so much they actually go to Venice for it. Pacino sat with Jason Momoa, who went viral when he Instagrammed Pacino’s Shrek iPhone case. Just another night at a gallery dinner in the City of Angels, folks!
On Tuesday night at the Paris Review Revel, the venerable literary concern’s annual fundraising bash, the artist Chloe Wise was standing with fellow artist Anna Weyant, taking in Cipriani 42nd Street’s golden light bouncing off the marble walls, when next to us an old-timey jazz band started up on a ragtime tune.
“It’s giving Titanic vibes,” Wise said to the group, which included the art dealer Larry Gagosian.
“But not, like, sinking-ship vibes,” I said.
“No, like, Titanic-glamorous, before the ship sank,” Wise clarified.
Indeed, the SS Paris Review is very much afloat of late, thanks to a snazzy new redesign courtesy of editor Emily Stokes, who took over last year. For starters, the new format is lighter and easier on the eyes. “My first priority was to make it so you could read it in bed,” Stokes said at Cipriani. It also plunges the lit mag fully into the art world. For instance, Gagosian has joined the board, which also includes Dodie Kazanjian, the longtime art doyenne at Vogue who curates the art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Opera. (Also on the board, full disclosure: Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones.)
Stokes cannily hired Matthew Higgs, director of the long-running nonprofit gallery White Columns, as a contributing editor, and has enlisted top-notch artists to contribute covers. Rose Wylie’s sensual painting of two connected cherries graced Stokes’s first redesigned issue; an intimate scene of a table at a window painted by Scottish artist Andrew Cranston fronted her second. Higgs couldn’t make the gala, but in his stead was Sam Gordon, proprietor of the great gallery concern Gordon Robichaux. At every table, in fact, there seemed to be art world interlopers: Dustin Yellin at one table, Lucas Zwirner at another, Laura Owens running around snapping pictures. Gagosian’s table was especially stacked, with Spencer Sweeney, Rachel Feinstein, John Currin, and Ed Ruscha all chatting it up as the ceremonies began.
“This is my basic nightmare,” said Zadie Smith, the novelist, as she moonlit as the master of ceremonies for the evening. “It’s true, the emcee is just the person who drones on at the key moment when you’re going to hear a bit of literary gossip from a downtown poet. It’s like the Feast of San Gennaro—nobody wants that shit!”
Despite her concerns, Smith was a natural and ably moved the night along. Eventually, longtime New Yorker staff writer Ian Frazier took the stage to introduce Jamaica Kincaid, his former colleague at the magazine turned novelist, who received the Review’s Hadada Award this year. Kincaid did not come to mince words.
“It was events like these that made me leave New York,” the 72-year-old Kincaid said, to roaring applause and a standing ovation. “If you attend events like this, you can’t say, ‘Fuck you.’ You have to say, ‘Thank you.’”
CORRECTION: When first published, this story misidentified Doris Ammann’s relation to Thomas Ammann. She was his sister.
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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