Andy Warhol's Elvis 2 Times
Courtesy of Sotheby's
Fourteen choice lots from the collection of the fourth generation Texas rancher and storied art patron Anne Marion, who died last year at age 81, fetched $134.4m ($157.2m with fees) at Sotheby’s single-owner sale last night in New York. But Marion’s sophisticated eye seems to have encountered some blind spots in a changing market more attuned to lighter weight, contemporary fare.
The venue was certainly appropriate in that the heiress was married to John L. Marion, the onetime chairman and star auctioneer of Sotheby’s. The collector didn’t just use her inherited fortune to buy art—she was the driving patron behind the $65m expansion of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (designed by Tadao Ando) and with her husband John L. Marion, formed the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe New Mexico in 1997.