Dy Warhol’s masterpiece, White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times), has sold for £72 million, one of the highest ever auction prices for a work by the artist.
The rare work from the American artist’s celebrated Death And Disaster series raised almost a third of the total amount raised during an evening of contemporary sales at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night.
Takes place in New Yorkthe sale totaled £265 million, the auction house said.
Said to be fixated on themes of death and mortality, the pop art titan printed 19 images of a fatal car accident in black and white tones to match the newspapers from which he drew inspiration to create White Disaster (White Car). Crash 19 Times ).
The 1963 piece is regarded as one of the most provocative and haunting artistic achievements of the 20th century and “perhaps the most significant achievement of his career”, according to Sotheby’s.
The work, which has been held in a private collection for 25 years, is the first major painting from Warhol’s Death And Disaster series to go up for auction since 2013, when Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) was sold for $105.4 million (£91 million). ) – a record for the artist at the time.
Prior to that, the only other work from the series to come to auction in the last 15 years, it also set an auction record for the artist in 2007 when Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car) sold for $71.7 million (£62 million). .
At 10 feet high, it is the largest of all of Warhol’s single-panel Car Crash works.
Wednesday’s Sotheby’s auction also saw strong prices for works from celebrated collections, including the de Kooning Family Collection, The Collection of Geraldine and Harold Alden, The Mallin Collection and The Collection of William S Paley.