Andy Warhol painting, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” sold at Sotheby’s New York sale late Wednesday for a whopping $105.4 million, shattering the previous Warhol record set in 2007 when “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)” sold for $71.7 million.
Sotheby’s described the painting as, “a pivotal work from the artist’s ‘Death and Disaster’ series and the last of four works of its size and significance that was not currently in the collection of a museum.”
A late phone bidding war jacked up the price, in what Michael Frahm, a contemporary art adviser and partner at the London-based Frahm Ltd called, “the ultimate trophy hunting.”
“The demand for seminal works by historical important artists is truly unquestionable,” he told the Associated Press. “We will keep witnessing new records being broken.”
“Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” was not the only Warhol to sell this week. Another of Warhol’s iconic pieces, “Coca-Cola (3),” sold for $57.2 million on Tuesday at Christie’s auction house. Earlier in the day on Wednesday, his portrait of Elizabeth Taylor titled “Liz #1”, sold for $20 million.
However, the sale on Wednesday made that day Sotheby’s most successful one ever, they said in a statement. Records were set for more than just Andy Warhol, they were also set for a number of other famous artists including Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, Mark Bradford and Martin Kippenberger.
This astounding new Warhol record comes just one day after the most expensive work of art ever sold at an auction went for $142.4 million. That was Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, which sold after just six minutes of bidding at another auction house, Christie’s, beating the previous world record set last year when financier Leon Black paid nearly $120 million for Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
The buyer of “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” remains confidential.
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