Marilyn: Warhol’s Most Expensive Work

Next May, the famous auction house Christie’s will put up for sale in New York the iconic painting “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” by Andy Warhol. Estimated at $200 million, this artwork could become the most expensive work of the 20th century in history.

This iconic work could dethrone “Les Femmes d’Alger” (1955) by Pablo Picasso, sold for $179.4 million in 2015, from the top spot of the most expensive 20th-century works. Let us recall that the most expensive work in the world is the very famous “Salvator Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450 million in 2017.

It was after the death of Marilyn Monroe that Andy Warhol began producing silkscreens based on her portrait. Two years later, he developed a very complex reproduction technique that allowed him to achieve these famous colors. He thus created a very limited number of Marilyn portraits. This work became legendary, to the point of being studied years later by all art history students.

"Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is the absolute pinnacle of American pop culture and the promise of the American dream, encapsulating optimism, fragility, fame, and iconography," says Alex Rotter, one of Christie’s co-directors.

The painting has traveled the world, having been exhibited at the most prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.