[intro]Warhol Jackson Portrait Sells for $1m, They Say[/intro]

The Vered Gallery was all too happy to feed the hype around their sale of Andy Warhol’s painting commission for a Time Magazinec cover in the early 1980s. But after offering the painting, withdrawing it and then putting it up for an online auction, where the press was speculating it could sell for as much as $10m based on . . . , um, not much, the painting finally sold for the price they’d been hinting at all along.

Or did it. Philip Boroff covers the sale on Bloomberg:

Vered Gallery said it sold the painting to an anonymous phone bidder and declined to give the exact transaction price. The 1984 artwork had fetched $278,500 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on May 13. “A speculator outbid the collectors,” said Janet Lehr, a partner in the Vered Gallery.

Michael Jackson Portrait by Warhol Fetches $1 Million at Sale (Bloomberg)