Warhol's $71 Million Car Crash

Andy Warhol's painting "Green Car Crash," which graphically shows a car accident that includes the car's driver hanging impaled from a nearby street post, sold for $71.72 million Wednesday night to an anonymous buyer. The work was sold at Christie's in New York as part of an auction of postwar and contemporary art that took in a total of nearly $385 million, making it the second-most lucrative art auction ever held, according to the auction house.

"It was one of the most remarkable sales I've ever seen," Christie's honorary chairman Christopher Burge, who also served as auctioneer, told Reuters. "The market wasn't just hungry, it was ravenous." Only four of 78 works on offer failed to sell. Christie's had estimated that the Warhol would sell for $25 million to $35 million.

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Warhol stole the show at Christie's. His 1962 painting of Marilyn Monroe, known as "Lemon Marilyn" for its color, was expected to fetch $18 million but sold for $28 million. A similar work called "Orange Marilyn" sold for $16.5 million in November. The previous auction record for a Warhol work was $17.4 million, which was set when Christie's sold Warhol's iconic image of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong for $17.4 million.

But the real showstopper was "Green Car Crash," part of a series of Warhol works that drew on photographs of fatal accidents. Silkscreened over a green background, the painting uses a news photograph of a grisly crash in Seattle. It had been in a private collection for decades, the auction house said. Sandy Heller, who advises collectors on purchases, said that while it "is a great piece," it is also "a very tough image" that some might find hard to live with. "It's hard to put an image of impaled figure in a burning car in a home where you have little kids," Heller said.