**Move over Picasso. Mass appeal pushes Warhol to the top of art market
**A fine Art reject, Depressed and desperate failure of the 50’s; could be the American Picasso? Warhol gained his fame when some one suggested that he should paint anything he loved. Even money…
His contribution to the present art is a changed visual construction.
Self portrait
At his creative peak Andy Warhol was the master of mass production art, churning out prints for sale at less than princely sums.
His early Marilyn Monroe portraits would sell for less than a colour television while assistants in his “sweatshops” worked around the clock to turn out “authentic” reproductions.
But despite the glut of works circulating worldwide, the 15-minutes-of-fame Pop artist has now become the second-highest-grossing artist after Pablo Picasso.
Indeed, auction houses are discovering that the world’s art-collecting glitterati are happy to pay several million pounds for “original” Warhols.
Collectors are cashing in on the insatiable demand for the paintings, of which there are estimated to be about 100,000 worldwide.
A series of ten portraits of sports stars, including Muhammad Ali and Pelé, signed by both artist and athlete, is being offered for £14.2 million at Martin Summers Fine Art in London. Each of the ten agreed to be photographed by Warhol, who used the images to produce portraits that are to be sold by Richard Weisman, an American collector, who has plenty of other Warhols to spare.
Angus Maguire, its head of contemporary art, said that the art world was finally catching on to Warhol’s importance.
“With his massproduced images he took away the exclusivity of fine art and made it available to everybody on any level of understanding, from the academic to the everyday,” he said.
** “The art world has been slow to catch on. Warhol is the most important international artist of the 20th century. Conceptually, he is more important than Picasso.” **