Warhol’s ‘Silver Car Crash’ sells for record $105m

The last of four in a series of Andy Warhol paintings depicting car crashes shattered the pop artist’s auction record, selling for more than $105m (€78m), Sotheby’s said.

Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), signed and part of his 1963 Death and Disasters series, fetched $105,445,000 with three bidders vying for the buy in New York, the auction house said in a statement.

The 2.43-metre tall and 4m (over 8x13ft) wide work has two panels: to the left a series of 15 images of a car crash, and to the right, a large silvery rectangle. It is an imposing work experts describe as trailblazing and a cinematic allusion to death on a silver screen.

The previous top sale for the enigmatic pop artist and son of Polish immigrants, who was born Andrej Varhola in Pittsburgh, was $71.72m, Sotheby’s said.

The auction came just a day after a triptych by Irish painter Francis Bacon — Three Studies of Lucian Freud — sold for $142.4m, setting a new world record for the most expensive piece of art auctioned.

That work by Bacon had never before been put under the hammer until Christie’s flagship evening sale. It was bought by a New York gallery.