{"id":290984,"date":"2025-11-14T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T11:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/290984\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T11:05:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T11:05:09","slug":"metallica-guitarist-sells-painting-of-conan-the-barbarian-with-a-10-m-asking-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/290984\/","title":{"rendered":"Metallica Guitarist Sells Painting of Conan the Barbarian\u2014With a $10 M. Asking Price"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBidding starts at $10 million for a painting of Conan the Barbarian that Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett bought from artist Frank Frazetta for $1 million in 2009. The work, titled Conan the Berserker (1967), served as cover art for a paperback edition of Robert E. Howard\u2019s novel\u00a0Conan the Conqueror, and is being offered<\/a> up in Heritage Auctions<\/a>\u2019 \u201cHollywood\/Entertainment Signature Auction\u201d December 9\u201310.<\/p>\n

\n\tConan looks more than a little triumphant in the painting, with his rippling arms stretched wide as he stares down at some heated battle action against a fiery sky. A skeleton with an ax reaches up toward him, and his horse is earning its hay by seeming to fly above the scrum.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Andy<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of that is suitable subject matter for Hammett, who joined Metallica as lead guitarist in 1983, two years after the heavy-metal band\u2019s founding, and has shredded intensely ever since. He has also collected memorabilia and art\u2014enough so that a book, Too Much Horror Business: The Kirk Hammett Collection, was published in 2012. Conan the Berserker featured in the book as well as in \u201cIt\u2019s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection,\u201d an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2017.<\/p>\n

\n\tHammett bought the Conan painting directly from Frazetta, whom Heritage Auctions describes as \u201cunquestionably the most significant illustrator of the second half of the 20th century\u2014a Norman Rockwell of the id whose surreal, menacing, and yet hauntingly beautiful visions of violence and chaos stand among the most successful commercial artworks ever created.\u201d The price of $1 million was high at the time; per Heritage Auctions, \u201cTo put that staggering price in perspective, soon after the artist\u2019s passing in 2010, Frazetta\u2019s original pen-and-ink comic book cover for\u00a0Weird Science-Fantasy\u00a0#29\u2014widely considered to be the greatest comic book cover of all time\u2014sold for just $380,000, which itself was far more than\u00a0any\u00a0comic art had sold for previously.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs reported<\/a> by Artnet News, the upcoming auction follows a record-breaking Frazetta sale in September, when the artist\u2019s oil painting Man Ape (1966) sold at Heritage for $13.5 million, more than double his previous $6 million record set in 2023.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a video<\/a> previewing the sale, Hammett speaks highly of Conan the Berserker\u2014and art in general. \u201cArt has a life of its own. We don\u2019t really own art,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re just lucky enough to travel through life with it for a short time as caretakers. It\u2019s time for this legendary piece to find a new home, a new story, a new caretaker, and a new life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bidding starts at $10 million for a painting of Conan the Barbarian that Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett bought…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,68538],"class_list":{"0":"post-290984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-heritage-auctions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}