Andy Warhol's “White Disaster” (White Car Crash 19 Times)
, the gigantic screen print of two cars smashed in a road accident multiplied 19 times, has been
sold at Sotheby's in New York for $85.4 million,
a definite sum" monumental" from the auction house.
The 1963 painting reproduces 19 times the black and white shot of the cars at the center of the accident
and belongs to the
"Death and Disasters"
series , created in a period in which the artist was obsessed with macabre images: the cloud of a atomic bomb, electric chairs, and how these
were widely reproduced in the media
, with the effect of numbing the public.
"White Disaster", more than three and a half meters high,
is the largest painting Warhol created for this series
.
According to
David Galperin
, the auction house's contemporary art expert, the scale of the work relates it to
the great altarpieces of Catholic churches
, also because Warhol was born and raised a Catholic and critics believe there is a
religious current in his work
: it is often said, for example, that the portraits of celebrities who made him famous (Mao, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy)
echo the icons that Warhol as a boy had seen in the Byzantine rite church
his family attended in Pittsburgh.
The "Death and Disasters" series coincides chronologically with that of the
Marilyns created by the artist after the actress's death in 1962.