LONDON.- Sotheby’s announced that it will offer Portrait of John McEnroe and Tatum O'Neal by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) in its Evening Sale of Contemporary Art on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008. The work is estimated at £250,000-300,000, and its proceeds will benefit the philanthropic organisation Habitat for Humanity, which provides not-for-profit housing through the help of volunteers.

Andy Warhol's Portrait of John McEnroe and Tatum O'Neal is the perfect archetype of the artist’s socalled 'society' portraits, presenting the incarnation of the golden celebrity couple. Here we have McEnroe and O'Neal during their mid-1980s prime and fully in the glow of the zeitgeist glamour that provided the source for so much of Warhol's most important work. Both of these protagonists had been child prodigies. O'Neal, the daughter of movie star Ryan, was a hugely successful child actor who won an Academy Award for her role in the 1973 film Paper Moon, which at just 10 years old made her the youngest ever winner of an Oscar. McEnroe was a world number one professional tennis player who went on to win seven Grand Slam titles: three at Wimbledon and four at the U.S. Open. He had taken the tennis world by storm when he reached the semi-finals of Wimbledon in 1977 as a mere eighteen year-old. Although he was subsequently beaten by Jimmy Connors, it was the best ever performance by a qualifier and set off a stunning career related to that prestigious tournament. He also won the US Open in 1979, the youngest player to do so for over thirty years. Particularly remarkable were his epic encounters with Björn Borg, such as their first final at Wimbledon that McEnroe eventually won in the last set by eighteen games to sixteen.

McEnroe and O'Neal were married on 1st August 1986. This occasion appeared to offer a perfect convergence of youth, beauty, talent, success and glamour: themes that had occupied the oeuvre of Andy Warhol for well over 20 years, from his world-renowned depictions of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe to his corpus of society portraits that portrayed world-famous celebrities of the 1970s and 1980s. In its subject, composition, style and execution, the present work is characteristic of Warhol's late style. In addition, it is also typical of Warhol's iconographic intelligence, depicting with the process of replication that facilitates fame two figures that are at once so recognisable and familiar at the same time as embodying the fresh-faced innocence of youth.

As McEnroe wrote in his autobiography: “Was I overly impressed? A bit star struck? Maybe. Maybe Tatum was too. It's a funny thing when two well-known people meet: There's an immediate magnetism, because you seem to have so many things in common – not the least of which is that you both instantly feel liberated from what the rest of the world usually demands.” (John McEnroe, Serious, London 2002, p. 188)