Warhol `Marilyn' fetches pounds 10m

BUYERS at Sotheby's in New York on Thursday night were stunned when Andy Warhol's 1964 silk-screen print Orange Marilyn sold for an astonishing $17.3m (pounds 10.6m), more than four times the highest previous price paid for a Warhol and five times the pre-sale expectation.

An anonymous buyer purchased the work. Two men bidding over the telephone fought for the orange background portrait of the film star. It had been expected to fetch between $4m and $6m. The previous record paid for a Warhol was $4.1m, Sotheby's said.

Also setting a record was Lucian Freud's Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau), which fetched $5.8m (pounds 3,572,410). The sale far surpassed the previous record paid for a Freud, which was $1.5m. The work, a group portrait painted between 1981 and 1983, had been expected to sell for $2.5m to $3.5m. Both records were set at Sotheby's spring sale of contemporary art.

The Warhol silk-screen was based on a 1952 publicity still photograph of Marilyn Monroe and is one of Warhol's best-known images. A spokesman for the auction house called the Warhol sale "poetic".

"I'm extremely happy but not surprised," the Sotheby's spokesman said. He described the Warhol as "one of the key icons of the 20th century and could some day be worth as much as a de Kooning or a Picasso." The Warhol silk-screen print was owned by German collector Karl Stroher.

Sales at the evening auction totalled $35.7m, the strongest opening-night sale of contemporary art at Sotheby's since 1990, the auction house said. Other sales included works by Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.