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Andy Warhol’s ‘Silver Car Crash’ sells for $105 million at Sotheby’s

Andy Warhol, Silver Car Crash

Andy Warhol: Silver Car Crash [Double Disaster]
105 x 164 1/8 in., 1963
Sold for $105,445,000
Image Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich

Warhol’s ‘Silver Car Crash’ sells for $105M at Sotheby’s Andy Warhol’s ‘Silver Car Crash’ was sold for $105,445,000 at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening sale on November 13, 2013, smashing the previous auction record for the artist.]]>

November 14th 2013, source: Sotheby’s / theartwolf

The night truly belonged to Andy Warhol,” Tobias Meyer -Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s- commented after the auction.

Nothing to argue about: Andy Warhol‘s monumental “Silver Car Crash” was the star of the Contemporary Art evening sale at Sotheby’s, which realized $380,642,000. In addition, the beautiful “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” fetched $20,325,000; the large “Flowers (Five Foot Flowers)” went for $11,365,000; and “5 Deaths on Turquoise” realized $7,333,000.

Some weeks ago, Tobias Meyer had commented that “With “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” Warhol consciously created work of such scale and ambition that it takes its place alongside paintings such as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” and Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” as one of the definitive masterpieces of history painting.

Gerhard Richter‘s “A.B. Courbet” was sold for $26,485,000; the second highest price in the sale. “Untitled (Yellow Tar and Feathers)”, a yellow tour-de-force by Jean-Michel Basquiat, realized $25,925,000. “Poems to the Sea”, a 1959 painting by Cy Twombly, fetched $21,669,000 against a pre-sale estimate of just $6,000,000 — $8,000,000.

The sale realized a total of $380,642,000. 87% of sold works brought prices at or above their estimates.

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Warhol’s ‘Liz #5’ sells for $27 million at Phillips (news, May 2011)

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Andy Warhol's 'Silver Car Crash' sells for $105 million at Sotheby's