Judd Tully has some news on the Contemporary art sales. This one comes from David Ganek who bought it as recently as 2010 from Pace, according to Tully:
Sotheby’s New York will be offering Andy Warhol’s large-scaled and wildly colored “Big Electric Chair” from 1967-68 at an estimate of $18-25 million.
Measuring 54 by 74 inches, only 14 canvases of the fatal image depicting an empty electric chair centered in a minimally appointed chamber and appropriated from a black and white newspaper photograph of the deadly contraption at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, were created in the large format.
Of those, at least half reside in major museums and private collections, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Eli Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Stefan Edlis collection in Chicago.
Perhaps more strikingly, this example is the only one in which Warhol radically divided the canvas in three distinct fields of uniform color and silkscreened the surface twice in jarring shades of purple and forest green. It appears as a kind of oscillating flag, creating an all-over Technicolor field, and a grim one at that.
Sotheby’s Reels in a Warhol for May (Blouin Artinfo)
More from Art Market Monitor
Twombly Foundation to Sell Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenberg, Nauman Works at Christie’s in November
Native Speaker
Fontana in Black and White
James Rosenquist’s “finger-in-your-face and finger-in-the-pie irony”
Warhol Coke Bottle from First Use of Silk Screening in Christie’s Oct. 3 Up Close Sale
Dispute Over the Extent of Damage to Brant’s $60m Warhol Electric Chair Set
