Andy Warhol's car crash painting sells for $85.4M at auction

Nov. 17 (UPI) -- A painting by the late pop artist Andy Warhol has been sold for a winning bid of $85.4 million at Sotheby's, making it one of his most expensive works ever sold at auction.

The work, titled White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times), features 19 of the same image of a car crash scene overlapping each other with imperfect alignment and differing tonal values. It is based on a photograph that ran in Newsweek magazine on June 3, 1963.

The colossal painting, made with silkscreen ink and graphite on a primed canvas in 1963, is more than 12 feet tall and nearly 7 feet wide and the largest of all of Warhol's car crash works.

It is part of his Death and Disaster series, which demonstrated his obsession with human mortality. Warhol began the series by screen-printing photographs of destruction he found in newspapers and magazines.

Only two other large-scale paintings from the series have been auctioned in the last 25 years, including the $105.4 million sale of Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) at Sotheby's in 2013. That work remains one of the few to have sold for more than $100 million.

Warhol's painting was previously expected to sell for more than $80 million, as the sale met expectations.

The auction on Wednesday also included works from renowned artists including a portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, which sold for $30 million, Jean-Michel Basquiat's Saxaphone from 1986, which sold for $14.2 million and a trio of works by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.

Warhol, a leading figure in the pop art movement in art history, has often been criticized for his use of photographs from news and popular culture and has faced lawsuits for copyright infringement even after his death.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would hear a copyright case stemming from Warhol's silk-screen prints of the late music icon Prince based on a portrait of the singer taken by renowned photographer Lynn Goldsmith.