A Rare Warhol 'Disaster' Painting Emerges

Sotheby's
Oct 8, 2013 5:21PM

By Roger Kamholz

The last privately owned work in an historic four-painting series depicting car crashes by celebrated pop artist Andy Warhol will go on sale as part of Sotheby's fall auction season. The large-scale Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) could fetch $60 million or more when it is offered at the Contemporary Art Evening sale on 13 November in New York.

Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), signed by Warhol and dated 1963, is the only one of four car crash paintings on this scale, from the artist’s seminal Death and Disasters series, that is not currently in a museum collection and by far the most reclusive; previous owners have included Gunter Sachs, Charles Saatchi and the famous Swiss dealer Thomas Ammann, but since 1989 it has remained in the same private collection and has been shown publicly only once in the past 26 years. The work goes on view at Sotheby's London gallery on 12 October in advance of a pre-auction exhibition in New York beginning 1 November.

Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art Tobias Meyer has likened Warhol's Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) to other monumental history paintings such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa." When I saw this painting for the first time, I was completely blown away," Meyer said in a recent interview." It's big, and it's powerful, and it makes you silent… It's like a great film."
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Images:
1. Andy Warhol. Photograph ©Steve Schapiro/Corbis.
2. Andy Warhol's Silver Car Crash [Double Disaster] will be offered at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening sale 13 November. Estimate on Request.
3. Edie Sedgwick, shown here with critic Henry Geldzahler, Warhol and studio assistant Gerard Malanga, starred in several of Warhol’s films. Photograph ©Steve Schapiro/Corbis.
4. Andy Warhol’s Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz), 1963 will be offered at the Contemporary Art Evening sale 13 November. 
Estimate $20,000,000-30,000,000.

Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York | 13 November 2013

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