Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis is Big Winner at Christie’s Auction

The 1963 painting by the Pittsburgh native beat out 79 other works and sold for nearly $82 million.

Photo: 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, via Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol and the King of Rock and Roll got art bidders all shook up Wednesday night.

Warhol’s “Triple Elvis,” painted from a publicity shot for the 1960 movie “Flaming Star,” earned the top price at Christie’s, selling for nearly $82 million. It had been expected to go for around $60 million, according to The New York Times.

Another Warhol work, “Four Marlons,” from 1966, based on the 1953 movie “The Wild One,” sold for nearly $70 million.

Both paintings were bought by unidentified telephone bidders from West Speil, a government-controlled German casino company, the Times reported.

Eighty works were included in the contemporary art auction; only five works did not sell. At the end of the night, the grand total was $852.9 million.

“It’s our highest total ever,” Brett Gorvy, Christie’s worldwide chairman of postwar and contemporary art, told the Times. “We saw a lot of new bidders tonight from the Middle East and Asia, but the biggest and most powerful buyers were still from America.”