How high can the art market go? We may be about to find out.

An iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol is expected to fetch $200 million at Christie’s in May. It’s the highest estimate ever recorded for a work of art at auction.

Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) is being sold by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation in Zürich, Switzerland, and all the proceeds will go to charitable causes, particularly those benefiting children and health. Just one painting, the offering represents the largest philanthropic sale since the Rockefeller auction in 2018, according to Christie’s.

The Marilyn “is poised to become the most expensive painting of all time,” Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of 20th and 21st century art, said at a press conference, unveiling the work at the company’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in New York.

For that to happen, the Warhol’s price would have to more than double its estimate and surpass the $450.3 million paid for Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017. That work was estimated at $100 million.

After its debut in New York, the painting will travel to Hong Kong and Taipei for previews. In a risky move, it does not have a guarantee.

The sale will be a test of the masterpiece market. Warhol, once a proxy for the contemporary art trade at large, has seen prices decline in recent years as taste shifted toward new, younger talents and supply of the Pop artist’s work on the auction market dried up.

In 2021, Warhol generated $347.6 million at auction, according to the Artnet Price Database, down 34 percent from the peak in 2015. (Meanwhile, Warhol’s protégé, Jean-Michel Basquiat, accounted for $439.6 million in sales, second only to Pablo Picasso.) Warhol’s auction record hasn’t been challenged since 2013m when Silver car crash (Double disaster) (in 2 parts) (1963) fetched $105 million at Sotheby’s.

Siblings Doris and Thomas Ammann founded Thomas Ammann Fine Art, a legendary gallery that showed a wide range of blue-chip art, in 1977. After Thomas died in 1993, his sister Doris—a steely, chic presence in auction salesrooms and top international art fairs—remained at the helm. She died in April 2021. Read More