Life and legacy of Andy Warhol

Most of the world’s top contemporary art collections will undoubtedly house an Andy Warhol almost as a rite of passage. As a top-selling, blue-chip artist, his work is unmissable when recounting 20th century art. This has been continuously proven over the last decade, with him topping the global auction charts with a $590 million USD in hammer‐price turnover in 2022, making him the world’s best‐selling artist that year. Approximately 2,100 Warhol works were also sold at the auction in 2022, up from roughly 200 per year a decade earlier, underscoring both his prolific output and extraordinary liquidity. These 2022 figures far exceed the $380.3 million Warhol achieved in 2012, and push his all-time auction total well past the $2.9 billion mark recorded in 2012, cementing his role as the true bellwether of the post-war art market.

Charting his legacy

The artist was born as Andrew Warhola on the 6th of August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), graduating in 1949 and then, moved to New York City. In his initial years, Warhol gained acclaim as a Commercial Illustrator, for whimsical ink drawings, magazine covers and ad campaign art for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and department stores. 

Warhol’s artistic breakthrough materialised in late 1961/early 1962 with his first solo exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Here’s how it unfolded:

• Concept and Context: Warhol had been experimenting with elevating everyday commercial imagery into fine art. By painting 32 nearly identical 20×16″ canvases, each bearing the label of a different variety of Campbell’s Soup, he both celebrated and critiqued America’s burgeoning consumer culture.
• The Ferus Gallery Show (November 1962): Although Warhol completed the canvases in 1961, the exhibition officially opened in November 1962. Unlike traditional gallery installations, Warhol hung the cans salon-style (in a single row around the walls), mimicking how grocery shelves display products.
• Immediate Impact: Many painters and abstract-expressionist stalwarts scoffed at the flat, commercial subject matter. But the art press couldn’t ignore it: critics recognized that Warhol had radically upended what “fine art” could look like. The sheer audacity of treating a mundane supermarket staple as high art made headlines.
• Aftermath: Virtually overnight, Warhol became the face and lightning rod of what came to be called Pop Art. Dealers, collectors, and galleries clamored to show and buy his work, and major museums began acquiring his pieces. Within a year he was exhibiting in New York’s Stable and Castelli galleries and firmly installed at the vanguard of the new movement.

Museum of Modern Art describes the soup cans as “made during the moment when Warhol was trying to transform himself from a commercial artist to a fine artist, right before he became a beacon of Pop art in the 1960s”. In 1996, MOMA acquired all 32 paintings of the varieties of cans, which the director of Ferus Irving Blum, managed to keep together. 

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962). Photograph of a postcard bought at Tate Modern, © Rhea Mathur.

Warhol across the decades

The Marilyn Diptych (1962) was produced just weeks after Monroe’s death. Warhol’s work played with the idea of iconography, the glorification of celebrities and consumer culture with Monroe’s image in every magazine and newspaper at the time. While a variant of the diptych was acquired by Tate in 1980, another was sold for $80 million at Christie’s New York in November 2022, well above its $50 to $70 million estimate, underscoring how collectors prize this early silkscreen masterpiece.

Warhol was enamoured by the uncanny uniformity that the silkscreen brought. It mirrored mass production and “erased” his hand, emphasising the American consumer culture. He made silkscreen works with Jackie Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor arranging multiple identically silk-screened portraits in grid formats, shifting colour or scale to emphasise their iconography. In 2004, a four-panel Liz silkscreen sold for $15 million and while it would be estimated that this value would decrease over time, it more than doubled and was sold for $37 million in 2021. 

The best-known Warhol silkscreen of all time - Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), one of five variants in the diptych series achieved $195 million at Christie’s in May 2022, cementing the silkscreen’s power both conceptually and financially. Today, serious collectors hunt for unique trial proofs and colour-variant silkscreens (e.g. Monroe prints in unusual hues), paying premiums of 20 - 30% over standard editions of 250 - proof that even within mass production, rarity reigns supreme. His print edition of 150, Cow (F. & S. II.12), made in 1971 is currently available to purchase on Artscapy at £28,000. Rated for its high investability and liquidity as well as low risk, over the years, the market has proven time and again that a Warhol is always a good choice. 

Fifty-plus years on, Warhol’s silkscreen remains synonymous with Pop Art’s challenge to authorship, craft, and consumer spectacle and each high-profile sale reminds the market that the marriage of process and icon can still break new ground in value.