Bidding begins at $10 million for a portray of Conan the Barbarian that Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett purchased from artist Frank Frazetta for $1 million in 2009. The work, titled Conan the Berserker (1967), served as cowl artwork for a paperback version of Robert E. Howard’s novel Conan the Conqueror, and is being supplied up in Heritage Auctions’ “Hollywood/Leisure Signature Public sale” December 9–10.
Conan appears to be like greater than just a little triumphant within the portray, together with his rippling arms stretched broad as he stares down at some heated battle motion in opposition to a fiery sky. A skeleton with an ax reaches up towards him, and his horse is incomes its hay by seeming to fly above the scrum.
All of that’s appropriate subject material for Hammett, who joined Metallica as lead guitarist in 1983, two years after the heavy-metal band’s founding, and has shredded intensely ever since. He has additionally collected memorabilia and artwork—sufficient so {that a} e book, Too A lot Horror Enterprise: The Kirk Hammett Assortment, was revealed in 2012. Conan the Berserker featured within the e book in addition to in “It’s Alive! Basic Horror and Sci-Fi Artwork from the Kirk Hammett Assortment,” an exhibition on the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2017.
Hammett purchased the Conan portray instantly from Frazetta, whom Heritage Auctions describes as “unquestionably probably the most important illustrator of the second half of the twentieth century—a Norman Rockwell of the id whose surreal, menacing, and but hauntingly lovely visions of violence and chaos stand among the many most profitable business artworks ever created.” The worth of $1 million was excessive on the time; per Heritage Auctions, “To place that staggering worth in perspective, quickly after the artist’s passing in 2010, Frazetta’s unique pen-and-ink comedian e book cowl for Bizarre Science-Fantasy #29—extensively thought-about to be the best comedian e book cowl of all time—offered for simply $380,000, which itself was way over any comedian artwork had offered for beforehand.”
As reported by Artnet Information, the upcoming public sale follows a record-breaking Frazetta sale in September, when the artist’s oil portray Man Ape (1966) offered at Heritage for $13.5 million, greater than double his earlier $6 million file set in 2023.
In a video previewing the sale, Hammett speaks extremely of Conan the Berserker—and artwork basically. “Artwork has a lifetime of its personal. We don’t actually personal artwork,” he says. “We’re simply fortunate sufficient to journey by life with it for a short while as caretakers. It’s time for this legendary piece to discover a new residence, a brand new story, a brand new caretaker, and a brand new life.”
