Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] Auction History

Painted in 1963 for Warhol’s Ferus Gallery project, with the 'Ferus Type' Elvis images produced from a silver-painted canvas roll and installed edge-to-edge in Los Angeles [3].

By 2009 the work was publicly identified with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection through SFMOMA’s partnership announcement, and SFMOMA’s object page lists it as part of the Fisher Collection (FC.556) [2][1].

The painting has been actively lent and exhibited, including at the Whitney Museum’s 2018–19 Warhol retrospective, and it continues to be presented at SFMOMA; no auction record or public sale price for this specific picture has been published [3][1][4].

Within Warhol’s market, the life-size, silver-ground celebrity images from 1963—Elvis and the Death and Disaster works—are among the most coveted. Although the SFMOMA/Fisher Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] has no public auction record, another unique Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] achieved $81.9 million at Christie’s in 2014, a headline result that underscored demand for prime early Warhols; that example was consigned by WestSpiel and is a different painting from SFMOMA’s [6][5]. Media coverage of a 2016 display incident at SFMOMA often referenced that $82 million benchmark to convey value context, but it pertained to the WestSpiel canvas, not the Fisher work [4].

Further series-level depth is evident: Double Elvis [Ferus Type] realized $53,000,000 at Christie’s in 2019, and Elvis 2 Times sold for $37,032,000 at Sotheby’s in 2021 [7][8]. Beyond the Elvis images, the broader 1963 silver-ground corpus has remained a bellwether, with White Disaster [White Car Crash 19 Times] selling for $85,350,500 in 2022, and Warhol’s overall market achieving a landmark with Shot Sage Blue Marilyn at $195,000,000 the same year [9][10].

These benchmarks position the Fisher-owned Triple Elvis as a canonical, museum-grade example of an A+ Warhol theme. Its long-term placement within the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA effectively reduces near-term supply of top-tier Elvis works, reinforcing scarcity at the very high end of the market even as comparable results affirm sustained demand for early 1962–64 Warhols [1][2]. Collectors and institutions treat such works as trophies; when comparable examples surface, they can command market-defining prices, while museum-held counterparts like this one anchor the artist’s historical and cultural significance.