Bidding 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’s novel Conan the Conqueror, and is being offered up in Heritage Auctions’ “Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction” December 9–10.Conan 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.All of that is suitable subject matter for Hammett, who joined Metallica as lead guitarist in 1983, two years after the heavy-metal band’s founding, and has shredded intensely ever since. He has also collected memorabilia and art—enough 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 “It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection,” an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2017.Hammett bought the Conan painting directly from Frazetta, whom Heritage Auctions describes as “unquestionably the most significant illustrator of the second half of the 20th century—a 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.” The price of $1 million was high at the time; per Heritage Auctions, “To put that staggering price in perspective, soon after the artist’s passing in 2010, Frazetta’s original pen-and-ink comic book cover for Weird Science-Fantasy #29—widely considered to be the greatest comic book cover of all time—sold for just $380,000, which itself was far more than any comic art had sold for previously.”As reported by Artnet News, the upcoming auction follows a record-breaking Frazetta sale in September, when the artist’s oil painting Man Ape (1966) sold at Heritage for $13.5 million, more than double his previous $6 million record set in 2023.In a video previewing the sale, Hammett speaks highly of Conan the Berserker—and art in general. “Art has a life of its own. We don’t really own art,” he says. “We’re just lucky enough to travel through life with it for a short time as caretakers. It’s time for this legendary piece to find a new home, a new story, a new caretaker, and a new life.”