If you ever wanted to buy an Andy Warhol, now is your chance. This fall, thousands of works by the Pop icon will hit the market when the artist’s foundation deaccessions its entire collection through a combination of sales and donations. The paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, and printed graphic material — which range in price from over $1 million to under $10,000 — will be sold through Christie’s in a series of single-artist live auctions on November 12 and a spate of online sales beginning February 2013. Private sales of the material will be conducted throughout the season. The entire cache is expected to bring in about $100 million.
The sale marks a shift for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which since 1987 has slowly sold off a handful of artworks per year to finance its grantmaking activities. “We have now chosen to mark the Foundation’s 25th anniversary year by expanding the scope of our art sales in order to increase our future grant-making capacity,” Michael Straus, chairman of the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation, said in a statement. At this point, few major works remain in the collection, but the sum total represents a massive cache of Warhol works never before seen by the public. (This also explains its relatively low price point considering the number of works on offer — a total of 20,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.) Christie’s will take varying commissions on each sale, the New York Times reports.
For the complete article by Julia Halperin please visit ArtInfo.