28 June 2017: Moments ago at Sotheby’s in London, a work from Andy Warhol’s very first series of self-portraits just sold for £6 million / $7.7 million. The work appeared at auction for the first time this evening, 30 years after the artist’s death in 1987.

“In the age of Instagram, Warhol’s fabled prediction that ‘in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’ has never felt more prophetic, and the artist’s first self-portraits - created using a strip of photographs taken in a New York dime store photo-booth - have never felt more relevant to contemporary culture. This is a work of immense art historical importance that marks the watershed moment when Warhol joined the canon of the greatest self-portraitists.” - James Sevier, Senior Specialist, Contemporary Art

After achieving renown for his candid portrayals of luminaries including Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor in the early 1960s, Self-Portrait represents the moment that Warhol stepped out from behind the camera and into the glare of its flashbulb.  This painting belongs to the very first sequence of self-portraits created by Warhol. Based on the first image in a strip of photo booth portraits, this work is effectively Wahrol’s first-ever selfie. The use of such unconventional source material was, at this time, fiercely innovative, adding to the aura of technical invention that already surrounded the artist. Warhol had previously used the same photo-booth medium to create an extraordinary portrait of the famous New York collector Ethel Scull. The resultant painting is now one of the most celebrated works of Warhol’s early career, jointly owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Warhol considered his first engagements with self-portraiture a consummate success. He revisited the genre throughout the 1960s, and periodically in the ensuing decades. More than any artist before him, Warhol’s image, identity, and constructed public persona, were inextricably bound to his art. The self-portraits thus became the richest and most fertile sites for his invention. Starting with the present painting, he commodified himself into an icon – as immediately identifiable as Elvis, Marilyn, or Liz. In Self-Portrait, as much as in any of the self-portraits that followed, Warhol presents himself as a constructed fiction. We are reminded of the artist’s 1967 statement: “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, my movies and me and there I am: there’s nothing in between”. Further details on the work are available here.

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening sale is still underway in London. 
Full results will be available later this evening.
3,308,750
(4,235,531 USD

In summary
Other important results from tonight’s sale so far:

Roy Lichtenstein, Two Paintings with Dado (1983) sells for £3.3 million / $4.24 million (est. £2.4-3 million)
From the very outset, Roy Lichtenstein dedicated his career to making art about art, transforming scenes from comic books into high-art paintings, and imagery from art history into his idiosyncratic hard-edged graphic style. Of all the modernist canons that inspired him it was Picasso that proved the most vital for Lichtenstein. Indeed, it was Picasso’s own borrowing from art history that first impelled Lichtenstein to do the same.
In Two Paintings with Dado, Lichtenstein assimilates a series of art historical tropes, including his own 1963 version of Picasso’s Woman with a Flowered Hat (1939-40) and a geometric abstraction resembling a Jasper Johns flagstone work. Not only is Lichtenstein copying Picasso, he is copying himself copying Picasso. Akin to Warhol, who at the time was also revisiting his 1960s heyday, Lichtenstein began appropriating and remixing his own back catalogue during the 1980s. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1983) sells for £6.5 million / $8.3 million (est. £4-6 million)
Recalling the sequential progression of a classical frieze, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled demonstrates the artist’s reimagining of the weighted genre of history painting. With a typically post-modern flair, Basquiat brands his series of three canvases with myriad commercial and historical words, signs, and symbols, blurring the lines between consumer culture and fine art. Painted during Basquiat’s rapid rise to fame, the work comes from 1983, the year Basquiat’s institutional recognition was solidified when he partook in the Whitney Biennial, and when he first famously began his collaborative paintings with Andy Warhol. 
2,408,750
(3,083,441 USD)