Advantageous Auctions: Auction Update from Sotheby's - Andy Warhol's Self Portrait from 1986 Sells for a Record $32.6 million
Sotheby's Evening Sale of Contemporary Art finished not long ago in New York and a number of exceptional prices have already been achieved:
- A new auction record for a self portrait by Andy Warhol was set when the artist’s iconic and rare Self Portrait from 1986 sold for $32,562,500, more than double the pre-sale high estimate $15 million*. The monumental canvas, measuring 108 x 108 in., was sought-after by at least six different bidders before selling to a client bidding over the telephone. The work was executed in 1986 just prior to Warhol’s unexpected death the following year and comes from his final series of Self Portraits - widely acknowledged as the most important of his career.
- Mark Rothko’s radiantly beautiful and monumental masterpiece Untitled from 1961 brought $31,442,500, also above the high estimate (est. $18/25 million). As with many of his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rothko adopts a monumental scale (93 x 80 in.) for his compositions to achieve a powerful sense of harmony and order. Red was a color that fascinated Rothko from his earliest works and was the focus of his greatest and most monumental paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
- Jackson Pollock’s rare and exuberant Number 12A, 1948: Yellow, Gray, Black, dating from his most creative and transformative period, sold for $8,762,500 (est. $4/6 million). Number 12A, 1948 was one of three works illustrated in the infamous August 8, 1949 Life magazine article titled “Jackson Pollock – Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” that proclaimed Pollock’s early and eternal role as a leading figure in American art.
