Sotheby’s announces their marquee lots for the New York Contemporary sale in Carol Vogel’s column. Following the success of Warhol’s 100 Dollar Bills last year, Sotheby’s is going back to the well with Warhol:

And this fall Sotheby’s is selling two important Pop paintings in its contemporary art sale in New York on Nov. 9. An image of a single Coca-Cola bottle that Warhol painted in 1962 will be featured on the sale catalog’s front cover and a glass of bubbling soda from the same year by Lichtenstein will be on the back. When they’re side by side, it almost looks as if the Coke has been poured into the glass.

“The synchronicity is amazing,” Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department, said on Tuesday, both canvases occupying a wall in his office. “Pop works like this speak a global language.” […]

The painting was bought by the collectors Michael and Elizabeth Rea at a Christie’s auction in 1983 for $143,000. Now Mrs. Rea is selling it (her husband died in 1996), and Sotheby’s expects the work to bring $20 million to $25 million.

“Ice Cream Soda” was one of Lichtenstein’s cartoonlike images, this one a blue-and-white canvas of a frothy glass of soda. The New York collector Myron Orlofsky bought the painting from a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery the year it was made. He died, but it has stayed in his family. Sotheby’s expects it to bring $12 million to $18 million.

Inside Art: Pop (as in Soda) Auction (New York Times)