Playboy Art To Be Sold At Christie's

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Nov 8th 2010 at 9:00PM

Playboy is selling off part of its art collection in an auction through Christie's New York on December 8 in an auction titled "The Year of the Rabbit." The 125-piece offering will include a Dali watercolor of a reclining nude that hung in Hugh Hefner's bedroom. The sale features 80 photographs, many of which appeared in the magazine and more than a dozen contemporary works and 24 cartoons.

Among the offerings (shown in the gallery below) are a photograph of comedian Dan Aykroyd in a conehead costume with Pamela Anderson, an early Brigitte Bardot photo, an oil painting of of a scarlet-lipstick mouth by pop artist Tom Wesselmann and a 1970 portrait of Hefner in his signature smoking jacket and pipe. Wesselmann's "Mouth No. 8" is estimated at $2 million to $3 million.

The art represents just a small amount of the Playboy Art Collection which has an archive of 5,000 contemporary artworks and more than 20 million photographs. The auction also features centerfolds of women whose careers were made by Playboy including Anna Nicole Smith, Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson.

Gallery: Playboy Art Up For Auction