Warhol classic 'Four Marlons,' featuring Hollywood star sold for £44.1m
Record for a Warhol work was £66m for 'Silver Car Crash', sold last year
Andy Warhol's 'Triple Elvis' (left) and 'Four Marlons' are displayed during Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale, in New York. They sold for a combined total of £96m
Pop-art legend Warhol's 'Triple Elvis' - a 1963 silkscreen depicting three images of the King of Rock and Roll posing as a gunslinging cowboy - sold for $81.9m (£52m) at the Christie's sale yesterday.
The striking seven-foot tall work, derived from a publicity still for the 1960 Don Siegel-directed Western 'Flaming Star,' had been estimated to fetch $60 million.
Andy Warhol's 'Triple Elvis' (left) and 'Four Marlons' are displayed during Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale, in New York. They sold for a combined total of £96m
The final sale price topped out at more than $20 million above the estimate after six minutes of frenzied bidding.
It was a similar story for the other Warhol classic, 'Four Marlons,' a giant set of four images of the legendary actor taken from his 1953 motorcycle gang classic 'The Wild One', and sold for $69.6m (£44.1m).
Andy Warhol's work broke records at the auction
Both of Wednesday's auction prices however were well short of the all-time record for a Warhol work set by 'Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster),' which fetched $105.4 (£66m) in November last year at Sotheby's.A flurry of bids also greeted the sale of Cy Twombly's 'Untitled' from his blackboard series, which went under the hammer for the first time.
The painting - a series of energetic looping spirals resembling chalk scribblings on a school blackboard - sold for $69.6m (£44m), the highest amount ever paid for a work by the American, who died three years ago in Italy.
Several world records were set for masterpieces sold on Wednesday, including $30.4m (£19m) raised for 'Smash' by Ed Ruscha, regarded as one of the leading lights of the American pop-art movement.
American photographer Cindy Sherman, 60, also set a record with her 'Untitled Film Stills,' which fetched $6.8m (£4.3m).
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's 'White No. 28' earned $7.1m (£4.5m), smashing its estimate of between $1.5m and $2m.
Revered British artist Francis Bacon's 'Seated Figure' meanwhile sold for $44.96m (£28m), in the lower range of price estimates set between $40m and $60m.
A Bacon triptych - 'Three Studies of Lucian Freud' - sold for $142.4m (£90m) last year, the highest ever price for a work of art sold at auction, surpassing the previous best of $119.9m (£76m) raised for the fourth print of Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' set in May 2012.
Reflection: Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein's 'Girl in Mirror' also appeared at the auction
'Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)' by Andy Warhol sold for £66m) in November last year at Sotheby's
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