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Warhol Family to Sell ‘Double Marilyn’

Paul and Anne Warhola with Warhol’s ‘Double Marilyn’

Double Marilyn (or Two Marilyns), originally a gift from Andy Warhol to his late brother, is to be sold as part of the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale this Thursday (May 17) at the Phillips auction house on Park Avenue, NYC, with an estimate of $3-4 million, as Marylynne Pitz reports for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“Seven of the artist’s nieces and nephews, who range in age from 58 to 75, will share the proceeds. They are the children of Paul Warhola, who died in 2014, and his wife, Anne, who died in 2016.

Until last fall, ‘Double Marilyn’ and 10 early Warhol artworks owned by the Warhola family hung at The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side. James Warhola, who lives in Long Island City in the New York borough of Queens, took them back after he was unable to arrange a sale or trade with museum director Patrick Moore.

‘My dad was the oldest brother,’ said James Warhola, a 63-year-old artist. ‘He saved the early works when my uncle left for New York. They have been in the family ever since as well as the “Double Marilyn” silkscreen. That was part of our household for close to 60 years.’

He said The Andy Warhol Museum ‘would have loved for us to have donated the collection’ but that was not possible.

‘My uncle’s estate went to a foundation. We didn’t get anything from the foundation. We’re not the Rockefellers. It was my dad’s main asset,’ Mr. Warhola said.

Pre-sale estimates are not always indicators of a painting’s actual auction price. Warhol’s works often sell for more than the pre-sale estimate. A 1962 ‘White Marilyn’ silkscreen by Warhol was estimated to sell for $12 million to $18 million in 2014. It fetched slightly more than $41 million at a Christie’s auction on May 13, 2014.

In this case, Phillips auction house has a third-party guarantee on ‘Double Marilyn.’ This means that one bidder has guaranteed a price of $3 million for the painting if no one bids higher.”

UPDATE: ‘Double Marilyn’ has been sold at Phillips for $3.6 million, as reported in an editorial for the Post-Gazette.

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Marilyn’s ‘Noir Night Out’ in Pittsburgh

Marilyn with Jean Hagen and Sterling Hayden in a promotional shot for ‘The Asphalt Jungle’

The Asphalt Jungle will be screened at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall in Carnegie, Pittsburgh on April 6. Doors open at 6 pm for this ‘Noir Night Out’, with a chili dinner plus drinks on offer, and the movie starts at 7 pm. Tickets can be purchased here.

The event is hosted by the former Friends of the Hollywood Theater, as the Dormont venue was purchased by the Theatre Historical Society of America in February – a contentious move, as the FOTH had been raising funds and making improvements  in the hope of buying it, Maria Sciullo reports for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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Warhol Museum Curator on Marilyn

Eric Shiner, curator at Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum, has spoken about the current Marilyn: Life as a Legend exhibition.

“‘She had so many layers under that facade of beauty, that facade of fame and celebrity,’ said Eric Shiner, a curator at the Warhol. ‘And it’s great that these things are finally coming to light. It’s great to see who she was as a real person.’

Aside from Warhol, Marilyn Monroe: Life as a Legend features work by such top-drawer luminaries as photographer Richard Avedon, Sgt. Pepper album-cover designer Peter Blake, abstract expressionist painter Willem De Kooning and photographer and filmmaker Bert Stern. De Kooning is represented through ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ a swirling, colorful interpretation of the former Norma Jean Baker that rarely escapes from the Neuberger Museum of Art in upstate New York.

Perhaps the works that prompt the most comment are Stern’s nude images of Monroe that were taken about six weeks before she died of an overdose of prescription medicine in August 1962. It’s possible to look at them and think that she appears a little careworn, a little forlorn. ‘That’s our human compulsion to do that,’ Shiner pointed out.

‘You want to read into what you’re seeing and want to find justification there. And every time I’ve taken groups through the show, standing in front of these pictures, almost everyone tries to read into her eyes. There’s sadness there, there’s some sort of hint of what’s to come.’

Warhol identified with Monroe, Shiner added, not only because of her celebrity, a perennial obsession with him, but also with her vulnerability and the turmoil in her private life. Newspaper clippings on her death pulled from Warhol’s collection are in the exhibit, as are his silkscreen prints of Monroe, which are among his most famous works.”

Observer Reporter

Video

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Sugar Takes the Prize

Some Like it Hot comes third in The Guardian‘s Top 25 Comedies, beaten by (ahem) Borat, and Annie Hall.

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, film critic Barry Paris, who co-authored Tony Curtis’s first autobiography, celebrates Marilyn’s sizzling screen career ahead of the Life as a Legend exhibit and movie season at the Andy Warhol Museum.

“It took a smart cookie to play the ultimate dumb blonde — and become the pop culture’s most fragile, enduring icon in the process. Marilyn Monroe’s spectacular beauty and sexuality stoked America’s collective imagination, captivating and defining her era.

Chief among the MM pix, of course, is Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, pretty unanimously considered the all-time best movie comedy. Tony Curtis, in and out of drag, falls hopelessly in love with her, and so do we. In Sugar Kane (nee Sugar Kowalczyk), we get her euphoric screen presence at its best, secretly battling her offscreen demons at their worst.

Hollywood’s most alluring sex goddess was also its most dysfunctional actress. All the good, bad and ugly aspects of working with Marilyn — more precisely, of Marilyn working — would converge during the making of Some Like It Hot…

…On the other hand, Mr. Wilder shrugged, ‘My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual on the set, never hold up production, and know her lines forwards and backwards — but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?'”