Warhol's Marilyn Monroe Portrait Sold for $195M at Auction

Andy Warhol's iconic painting "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn" has been auctioned for $195m, becoming the most expensive work of American art ever sold.

Ahead of the auction, Christie's wrote that the painting is "one of the rarest and most transcendent images in existence", with a selling price "in the region" of $200m. The auction ended with a sale price of $170m, which rose to $195m with taxes and fees taken into account.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s plan to sell more than $2 billion worth of art in the next two weeks.

The portrait was one of five versions in different color schemes that Warhol created in 1964, two years after Marilyn Monroe’s death.

With its bright colors and captivating expression, the paintings became some of Warhol’s most iconic and famous images. An orange version was recently sold to hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin for over $200 million.

The portraits were based on a poster photo of Monroe from the 1953 movie “Niagara”. The portraits became even more famous when, shortly after they were completed, a woman walked into Warhol’s Factory studio with a gun and shot at a stack of four of them.

The “sage blue” painting escaped damaged and the others were repaired, but the shooting added to their allure and became part of their titles.

"Shot Sage Blue Marilyn" was sold by a Swiss art dealer family, the Ammanns, who has owned it since the early 1980s.

The Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation in Zurich said the proceeds will go to charity to support health and education programs for children worldwide.

Aside from breaking the record for the most expensive work of American art ever auctioned, it is the second-most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, after Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” which sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $450 million and ahead of Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger,” which sold for $179 million in 2015.