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£7.7m price tag is put on £125 Marilyn
By Mike Tait, Metro 20.03.07
Warhol's Lemon Marilyn is put on display in London yesterday
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Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portrait - once sold for about £125 - is likely to change hands for £7.7million.
The cult artist's picture, Lemon Marilyn, was unveiled in London yesterday ahead of the sale at Christie's in New York in May.
The owner hopes to sell it for 60,000 times more than he paid for it 45 years ago in 1962, the year of the Hollywood star's death.
Warhol was obsessed with the concept of celebrity and, after Monroe died, he used a photograph from the star's 1953 film Niagara for inspiration and created 13 portraits of her.
Warhol - who began his career designing advertisements for women's shoes - became the high priest of pop art with his trademark image of a Campbell's soup can in 1961.
He survived being shot in 1968 by the fanatical Valerie Solanas, who once worked at the Factory, his celebrated New York studio.
He died, aged 60, in 1987 from complications following a gall bladder operation. The newly released film Factory Girl, starring Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce, is about Warhol's relationship with his protegÈ Edie Sedgwick.
Last year, his 1964 portrait of Mao Tse-Tung set a world record for a Warhol of £9million. The work fetched marginally more than another Monroe portrait, Orange Marilyn.
At a separate sale at Christie's in London in April 5, Warhol's set of three images of a Volkswagen Beetle, created in 1977 when it was the world's most popular car, could fetch £300, 000.
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