D on’t call Elvis a biopic. Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming film about the King of Rock ’n’ Roll — with Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker and Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley — is more about Elvis Presley’s role as an icon than it is about the man♈ himself. In po♏int of fact, Elvis’s music is reinterpreted throughout the movie, including in a rap remix of “Hound Dog” by Doja Cat.

“As it turns out, I’ve just made a film called Elvis which isn𒁏’t even really about Elvis,” Luhrmann told S🧔otheby’s. “It’s really about America in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Elvis was at the center of pop culture in all three decades — the good, the bad and the ugly.”

It makes sense, then, that Luhrmann would relate to 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Andy Warhol, whose own fascination with Elvis grew out of the artist’s obsession with the cult of celebrity. Warhol made a number of works appropriating a promotional photo of Elvis from the 1960 film Flaming Star. In 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:a 1963 silkscreen from the series (he’d perfected this printing technique just one ye♈ar earlier), he transposed the image on to a shimmering background recalling Hollywood’s silver screen.

The work is a paradigm of Pop Art — one ꦛicon depicting another.

That silkscreen is coming to auction next week as part of the 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Contemporary Evening Auction, where it’s expected to fetch between 15 and 25 million US dollars. (A 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:double Elvis achieved over $37 million last May.) On the Wed♛nesday evening before the auction, Luhrmann was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Sotheby’s, where he rubbed elbows with stars like Tessa Thompson, Kevin Love and Ferdinando Verderi.

“My film is also about the relationship between the grand sell and one of the other great things about America: the brand new,” the Australian filmmaker said. “That conflict and tension is something Andy Warhol really understood — s🌺o much so that he was quite ironic about the way he flipped the relationship between art and commerce.”

The 🤪image of Elvis that Wa♑rhol used came from a critical flop — Elvis’s years as an actor are often considered a low point of his career. Yet Warhol’s pictures of the musician are now among his best-known works, catapulting his gun-slinging persona into the zeitgeist even decades later.

“How inte𒊎resting it is that Warhol took what we now perceive to be a cheesy film,” Luhrmann said, “and made it iconic.”

Past Auction

Contemporary Evening Auction

19 May 2022 | 7:00 PM EDT | New York

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Olivia DeJonge, is out now.