Over the years Playboy has commissioned a vast amount of art and photography by artists as diverse as Salvador Dali, Alberto Vargas, and Herb Ritts. Christie’s will sell 125 of these works, including a Dali watercolor of a reclining nude that adorned Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, on December 8th in New York.
“The Year of the Rabbit” sale includes 80 photographs, 24 cartoons, and more than a dozen contemporary art works. “Playboy helped to change the very direction of commercial art—breaking down the wall between fine art and commercial art,” said Hefner, now 84. Playboy maintains an archive in Chicago of 5,000 contemporary artworks and more than 20 million photographs. The offerings at Christie’s, said the archive’s curator Aaron Baker, is just “the tip of the iceberg.”
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