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 wife, 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.