Some Like It Hot: Warhol’s “Marilyn” Underperforms at Christie’s While Bolstering Prices for Trendy Co-Stars

As a strategy for boosting bidding for works priced in the five- to six-figure range, the incongruous star turn of Warhol‘s nine-figure Shot Sage Blue Marilyn in Christie’s Monday evening sale (the Collection of Thomas and Doris Ammann) of 35 less iconic works, many by lesser-known artists, can be deemed a partial success.

Estimated to bring a total hammer price of $284-420 million, the auction fetched a hammer total of $273.07 million, 60% of which was accounted for by this glamor queen:

Some works impressively sold for multiples of their presale estimates, starting with the lead-off lot by Mike Bidlo, setting the rapid-fire pace by hammering at $1 million, mocking its estimate of $60,000-80,000 and prompting me to coyly ask (on my Twitter feed) whether bidders thought that “Not Picasso” was really by Picasso:

But two works with seven-figure estimates—a Polke and a Marden—failed to find buyers, and “Marilyn”s” celebrity may have been somewhat dimmed by her strange bedfellows.

Although she was estimated by the auction house to bring a hammer price of about $200 million, speculation had suggested that “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” might fetch as much as $400 million, which would have put it into Salvator Mundi territory. Not even close: The gavel of auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen thumped good-bye (good buy?) to Norma Jean at $170 million ($195 million with fees), after a smattering of halting bids (a couple of which appeared to emanate from the “chandelier”).

“And selling to the third row!” Jussi announced when the bidding petered out. That would be the guy in the image below, with white hair and the shiny forehead who (unlike his fellow attendees) turned to see where the next bid (on an earlier lot) was coming from—fielded on the phone (in the foreground) by Max Carter, Christie’s head of Impressionist and modern art (aka Graydon‘s son):

Not for lack of inquiries by many journalists (including me), Larry declined to disclose whether he was buying “Marilyn” for his own account or for a client. The painting’s underachieving performance (notwithstanding its status as a record auction price for an American work) exemplified a problematic trend pervading Christie’s first two evening sales (with two more to come today and tomorrow)—the failure of some of the most highly hyped works (bearing the heftiest estimates) to fulfill expectations. Those underachievers included another Warhol and works by Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter.

Here’s what veteran art-market journalist Katya Kazakina tweeted about the Richter:

Her signature chirpy image accompanying that tweet is plucked from one of the breakout works that sold for astonishing multiples of their presale estimates. The outlandish discrepancy in estimates vs. final prices, seen below, is not a misprint:

By positioning the late Ammanns’ instantly recognizable Andy Warhol at the end of a sale of works embodying considerably less fame (let alone sex appeal), Christie’s experienced the opposite of the “Warhol effect” that it had generated when it had incongruously inserted Leonardo da Vinci‘s “Salvator Mundi” into its November 2017 Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, inviting comparisons to this monumental work during the presale exhibition:

Warhol’s “60 Last Suppers” displayed near the Leonardo gets a “mere” $56m vs. estimate “in the region of $50m.” Everything now is anticlimax? pic.twitter.com/tRlyi6bqyK

— Lee Rosenbaum (@CultureGrrl) November 16, 2017

That Warhol had been deployed as a bidder-magnet, helping to attract attention (and megabucks contemporary-art collectors) to what became the world record-holder (and still champion) for any work at auction.

Gagosian’s winning bid on Monday for the Warhol marked its (temporary?) return to his custody. Although you wouldn’t know it from the provenance posted on the Ammann catalogue page, Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, had acquired the painting through Gagosian Gallery in 1986.

Here’s an image, courtesy of Katya Kazakina‘s Twitter feed, of what the Warhol page in the hardcopy catalogue looked like:

That was subsequently amended online to add Gagosian’s role.

Something else appears to be missing from the catalogue entry: In perusing the “Literature” section, which contains an exhaustive list of books and other publications that reference “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” I was surprised to see no mention of Blake Gopnik‘s exhaustive 2020 biography of the artist. A possible reason for that omission is suggested in Gopnik’s NY Times opinion piece, published online Monday (updated Tuesday), in which he described the “Marilyn” sold by Christie’s as not one of “the original Marilyns from 1962,” but as “a ‘retread’ of those earlier works, ordered up from the artist a full two years later by the art entrepreneur Ben Birillo, for resale to the Pop collector Leon Kraushar.” Blake contrasted that later rendering with the “sad, tough versions from 1962”—the year of her death.

Any quibbles regarding the dispersal of works from the Ammanns’ foundation are overridden by its altruistic purpose: Proceeds will “benefit charities providing urgent medical and educational services to children.”

In her NY Times report about the Ammann dispersal, Robin Pogrebin claimed that “the 36 works in the sale, which brought a total of $318 million…bore out the truism that top-quality works sell for top prices, however tumultuous the state of the world.” But that bromide doesn’t reflect the reality of this sale: One superstar painting, luring megabucks major collectors to eyeball a sale’s less stellar offerings, can help float all boats.

At Christie’s “21st Century” sale, held on the night after “Ammann,” many lesser-known artists achieved auction records. (It’s easy to set an “auction record” for emerging artists whose works have rarely appeared at auction.) But two works by a previous art-market darling, Basquiat, were withdrawn at the very last minute, inducing much murmuring among the attendees. This one, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict,” 1982, was the signature image for Tuesday night’s sale, and as of this writing, it unaccountably remains in its starring role for the May 10 sale on the auction results page:

As noted by Pogrebin in her NY Times recap of the sale, such withdrawals are “typically an indication that the reserve price would not be met.” (For further details about Christie’s 21st-century sale, I commend to you Kazakina’s in-depth report for Artnet.)

As it happens, another high-profile Basquiat, famously acquired by Japanese e-commerce entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa in 2016, is being offered next week at Phillips, New York, estimated to bring $70 million. As CultureGrrl readers may remember, Maezawa had set an auction record not only for Basquiat but for any American artist in 2017, when he bought at Sotheby’s another work—the 1982 “Untitled” skull—for $110.5 million. His market maneuvers lend credence to my comments in my 2018 “Pay-to-Play” post, in which I questioned whether the Brooklyn Museum should have accepted money from Maezawa to show another of his Basquiats.

But back to Christie’s: In her postsale remarks last night, Ana Maria Celis, Head of the 21^st-Century Evening Sale, made this sweeping pronouncement:

We are seeing a generational shift in the art market toward a new normal that champions diversity and inclusion. Of the ten artist records set, six of them were by women and artists of color. This truly represents the new shape the art market will take in the 21^st Century and beyond.”

The “new shape” of the art market? Time will tell…

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