An expose on the mysterious Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, inc. With Andy Warhol, Joe Simon, Alan Yentob, John Richardson, Paul Morrissey, Fred Hughes, Ronnie Cutrone, Chelsea Hotel, Tate Modern
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Andy Warhol Authentication 2 of 7
An expose on the secretive Andy warhol Art Authentication Board Inc. With Andy warhol, Ronnie Cutrone, Sam Green, Marcel Duchamp, Dia Beacon, Ivan Karp, Joe Simon, Paulette Goddard, 5,000 sheet of cow wallpaper
Andy Warhol Authentication 3 of 7
an account on the controversial Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. With Alan Yentob, Ron Spencer, Joe Simon, Peter falk, David Whitney, Sally King-Nero, Neil Prinz, Richard Dorment, Vincent Fremont, Mick Jagger, Robert Rosenblum, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol Authentication 4 of 7
a documentary on the secretive Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board Inc. With Andy Warhol, Richard Ekstract, Joe Simon, Paul Morrissey, John Richardson, Sam Green, Vincent Fremont, edie Sedgwick, Peter Stern
Andy Warhol Authentication 5 of 7
A documentary on the secretive Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. With Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Richard Dorment, John Richardson, Joe Simon, Mick Jagger, Ivan Karp, Ron Spencer, Horst Weber von Beeren
Andy Warhol Authentication 6 of 7
a documentary on the andy warhol art authentication board. with Andy warhol horst weber von beeren, Mick Jagger, Ivan Karp, Paul Morrissey, Joe Simon, Alan Yentob, paloma Picasso
Andy Warhol Authentication 7 of 7
a documentary on the andy warhol art authentication board. with andy warhol, alan yentob, paul morrissey, joe simon
Friday, 5 October 2007
Imagine: Andy Warhol Denied/ Telegraph
The controversy surrounding some of Andy Warhol's early works raises fundamental questions about the methods of one of the greatest artists of the last century, says Richard Dorment, who takes part in a BBC investigation to be shown tonight
The single most important thing you can say about a work of art is that it is real, that the artist to whom it is attributed made it. For, until you are certain that a work of art is authentic, it is difficult to say much else that is meaningful about it. Connoisseurship, the separation of the real from the fake, is the cornerstone on which our understanding of any artist's work is based.
That is why Andy Warhol: Denied, which is being shown tonight as part of the BBC's Imagine… series, is worth watching. Although the programme revolves around the authenticity of several of Warhol's early works, what is really being debated is the very nature of Warhol's artistic achievement. I took part in the programme because Warhol was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and the issues it treats are fundamental to understanding his genius.
Was he a traditional artist whose participation in the creation of a work of art was crucial to its authenticity? Or was he a very different and harder to categorise figure, one who mass-produced his paintings, each one an authentic Warhol, though he himself may never have touched it?
Tonight's programme documents the growing disquiet about the criteria by which the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, the committee set up to pronounce on the authenticity of Warhol's work, judge his work. Investigating the methods of attribution used by the board is difficult because it is notorious for its secrecy. No member of the panel would appear on the programme.
Before it will authenticate or reject a work, the board forces owners to sign a document saying that they have no right to challenge its verdict in court. Owners are not told the reason for the board's decision. And the board reserves the right to de-authenticate works it has already authenticated. I am acquainted with the work of several other authentication boards, and none of them operates in this way.
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Although a lawyer for the board says that no one forces applicants to submit a work to them, this does not tell the whole story. In fact, Christie's and Sotheby's will sell only works passed by the board, so any Warhol that has not been before the panel is worthless.
On the programme, we see a number of early paintings the board has declared not to be by Warhol because he did not personally take part in making them. In reply, studio assistants who worked with Warhol say that delegating the manual task of silk-screening an image on to canvas was Warhol's normal working method - indeed, this was the reason he called his place of work "The Factory" and not "The Studio
This way of working has many precedents in the history of art. Many 19th-century sculptors had very little to do with the production of their work, leaving the marble carving, bronze casting, and enlargement or reduction of their models to low-paid employees. So distant were some 19th-century artists from the actual manufacture of their art that production might be carried on after their death. In the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, for example, every single bronze in the collection is a posthumous cast, and yet each is an authentic Rodin.
Thus, while evidence of the artist's "hand" is suitable for an artist like Renoir, it diminishes a figure as protean in his originality as Warhol.
For example, one of the works the board has denied is a 1964 self-portrait, one of eight made as decorations for a party to celebrate the première of Warhol's first underground videos. Warhol gave the all-important image on acetate which is used in the stencilling process to a publisher named Richard Ekstract, who in turn sent it to a printer in New Jersey for silk-screening.
When the party was over, Warhol gave the self-portraits to Ekstract, who in turn presented most of them to people who had helped with the party. At this date, an original painting by Andy Warhol was not worth very much money, and anyway Warhol is known habitually to have exchanged his paintings for services such as dentist bills and legal fees. He seems to have thought of the gift to Ekstract as payment for the use of the enormously expensive equipment Ekstract had loaned him to make his groundbreaking videos.
Ekstract's story is corroborated by Paul Morrissey, who was Warhol's manager at the time - but the board refuses to talk to him, or, apparently, to take his testimony seriously. But what an opportunity is being lost if art historians don't listen to what people like Morrissey - or Warhol's assistants Gerard Malanga, Billy Name and Ronnie Cutrone - have to say about how he worked. Just think how much the memoirs of those in Picasso's inner circle have added to our knowledge of his life and work.
It is well known that in the 1970s Warhol ran several sweatshops where his paintings were mass-produced without any involvement from him, except for his signature. These the board accepts as authentic. But when did his practice of allowing his silk-screens to be printed off-site begin? Innovation has to start somewhere, and to me the 1964 self-portraits made without Warhol's intervention are critically important transitional works.
One of the most compelling things about the programme tonight is its refusal to oversimplify exceptionally complex issues regarding the way Warhol went about creating his work. Between the two extremes of an outright fake and a painting Warhol either painted himself or personally supervised, there exists a huge middle ground.
In tonight's show, we see paintings that he authorised others to make but he signed, works he made himself but had others sign for him, works he used as barter for goods he needed, and works he gave away to friends and employees. It is precisely this confusing and unprecedented situation that makes Warhol such a fascinating artist. The exclusion of these works from his oeuvre makes it easier to catalogue and sell Warhol's art, but it does nothing to enhance his stature in the history of art.
'Andy Warhol: Denied' is on BBC1 tonight
The single most important thing you can say about a work of art is that it is real, that the artist to whom it is attributed made it. For, until you are certain that a work of art is authentic, it is difficult to say much else that is meaningful about it. Connoisseurship, the separation of the real from the fake, is the cornerstone on which our understanding of any artist's work is based.
That is why Andy Warhol: Denied, which is being shown tonight as part of the BBC's Imagine… series, is worth watching. Although the programme revolves around the authenticity of several of Warhol's early works, what is really being debated is the very nature of Warhol's artistic achievement. I took part in the programme because Warhol was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and the issues it treats are fundamental to understanding his genius.
Was he a traditional artist whose participation in the creation of a work of art was crucial to its authenticity? Or was he a very different and harder to categorise figure, one who mass-produced his paintings, each one an authentic Warhol, though he himself may never have touched it?
Tonight's programme documents the growing disquiet about the criteria by which the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, the committee set up to pronounce on the authenticity of Warhol's work, judge his work. Investigating the methods of attribution used by the board is difficult because it is notorious for its secrecy. No member of the panel would appear on the programme.
Before it will authenticate or reject a work, the board forces owners to sign a document saying that they have no right to challenge its verdict in court. Owners are not told the reason for the board's decision. And the board reserves the right to de-authenticate works it has already authenticated. I am acquainted with the work of several other authentication boards, and none of them operates in this way.
advertisement
Although a lawyer for the board says that no one forces applicants to submit a work to them, this does not tell the whole story. In fact, Christie's and Sotheby's will sell only works passed by the board, so any Warhol that has not been before the panel is worthless.
On the programme, we see a number of early paintings the board has declared not to be by Warhol because he did not personally take part in making them. In reply, studio assistants who worked with Warhol say that delegating the manual task of silk-screening an image on to canvas was Warhol's normal working method - indeed, this was the reason he called his place of work "The Factory" and not "The Studio
This way of working has many precedents in the history of art. Many 19th-century sculptors had very little to do with the production of their work, leaving the marble carving, bronze casting, and enlargement or reduction of their models to low-paid employees. So distant were some 19th-century artists from the actual manufacture of their art that production might be carried on after their death. In the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, for example, every single bronze in the collection is a posthumous cast, and yet each is an authentic Rodin.
Thus, while evidence of the artist's "hand" is suitable for an artist like Renoir, it diminishes a figure as protean in his originality as Warhol.
For example, one of the works the board has denied is a 1964 self-portrait, one of eight made as decorations for a party to celebrate the première of Warhol's first underground videos. Warhol gave the all-important image on acetate which is used in the stencilling process to a publisher named Richard Ekstract, who in turn sent it to a printer in New Jersey for silk-screening.
When the party was over, Warhol gave the self-portraits to Ekstract, who in turn presented most of them to people who had helped with the party. At this date, an original painting by Andy Warhol was not worth very much money, and anyway Warhol is known habitually to have exchanged his paintings for services such as dentist bills and legal fees. He seems to have thought of the gift to Ekstract as payment for the use of the enormously expensive equipment Ekstract had loaned him to make his groundbreaking videos.
Ekstract's story is corroborated by Paul Morrissey, who was Warhol's manager at the time - but the board refuses to talk to him, or, apparently, to take his testimony seriously. But what an opportunity is being lost if art historians don't listen to what people like Morrissey - or Warhol's assistants Gerard Malanga, Billy Name and Ronnie Cutrone - have to say about how he worked. Just think how much the memoirs of those in Picasso's inner circle have added to our knowledge of his life and work.
It is well known that in the 1970s Warhol ran several sweatshops where his paintings were mass-produced without any involvement from him, except for his signature. These the board accepts as authentic. But when did his practice of allowing his silk-screens to be printed off-site begin? Innovation has to start somewhere, and to me the 1964 self-portraits made without Warhol's intervention are critically important transitional works.
One of the most compelling things about the programme tonight is its refusal to oversimplify exceptionally complex issues regarding the way Warhol went about creating his work. Between the two extremes of an outright fake and a painting Warhol either painted himself or personally supervised, there exists a huge middle ground.
In tonight's show, we see paintings that he authorised others to make but he signed, works he made himself but had others sign for him, works he used as barter for goods he needed, and works he gave away to friends and employees. It is precisely this confusing and unprecedented situation that makes Warhol such a fascinating artist. The exclusion of these works from his oeuvre makes it easier to catalogue and sell Warhol's art, but it does nothing to enhance his stature in the history of art.
'Andy Warhol: Denied' is on BBC1 tonight
New York Sun Oct 5 2007
Is Authentication a Game of Monopoly?
Art Around Town
By KATE TAYLOR_October 5, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/64026
Few art historical issues are as contentious, or have as dramatic and immediate effects in the marketplace, as those of attribution and authentication. In fact, lawsuits are so common that many experts require owners to sign a statement promising not to sue before they will even look at a work and offer an opinion.
Among those who require such a signed statement is the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Committee, which was set up in 1995 by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Still, that didn't stop Joe Simon-Whelan, a filmmaker who owns a painting that was rejected by the board, from suing the committee, the foundation, Warhol's estate, and the estate's sales agent in the United States District Court Southern District of New York in July. Last month, a decision by the Jean-Michel Basquiat authentication committee triggered another suit, though not against the committee itself. The dealer Tony Shafrazi and his client Guido Orsi sued Christie's, charging the auction house with fraud and false advertising for having in 1990 sold Mr. Shafrazi a painting attributed to Basquiat. Last year, the painting, now owned by Mr. Orsi, was rejected by the authentication committee.
Warhol and Basquiat are among a group of 20th-century artists whose work has recently appreciated dramatically. And one of the peculiarities of authenticating recent works — seized on by numerous plaintiffs — is that the "experts" are often people with a substantial interest in the valuation of the artist's oeuvre, like the artist's primary dealer, his heirs, or a foundation set up to extend his legacy.
In France, the principle of droit moral gives an artist — and his heirs, for 70 years — substantial control over his name and his works, including the right to challenge the authenticity of a work purporting to be his. But in America, no one, technically not even the artist himself, has a legal right to decide whether a work is authentic or not. Instead, the power of an expert or an appointed board of experts follows only from their general credibility and knowledge of the artist's oeuvre.
Mr. Simon-Whelan, in his suit, describes what he alleges is a "20-year scheme of fraud, collusion, and manipulation" to control the market in Warhol's artwork. He argues that the committee maintains a monopoly on the authentication of Warhol works and fraudulently rejects genuine works in order to limit the supply and thereby increase the value of works owned by the foundation. Mr. Simon-Whelan's work, an untitled self-portrait allegedly by Warhol, was, according to his suit, authenticated in the late 1980's — before the authentication board was set up — by both the sales agent for the estate, Vincent Fremont, and the then executor of the estate, Fred Hughes. In 2001, while offering the painting for sale for $2 million, Mr. Simon-Whelan submitted it to the board for authentication. They rejected it, twice — first in 2002, and then, after he re-submitted it with more documentary evidence, in 2003.
The relationship between the Warhol Foundation and the authentication board is complex. A recent article in the New York Times quoted the Warhol Foundation's chief financial officer, K. C. Maurer, as stating that the foundation is wholly separate from the authentication board, but that is not true. One of the board's five members, Sally King-Nero, is also an employee of the foundation. Ms. King-Nero and another board member, Neil Printz, are also co-editors of the catalogue raisonnée of Warhol's paintings and sculptures, which is being sponsored by the foundation. The editing of the catalogue raisonnée in essence constitutes a separate, parallel process of authentication.
imilar structures and authentication processes are in place for other 20th-century artists. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is, like the Warhol Foundation, a grant-giving institution. From around 1990 until 1996, there was also a Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, set up by the foundation and responsible for authenticating works by Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner.
The Alexander Calder Foundation, run by Calder's grandson, Alexander Rower, also authenticates works for the purpose of inclusion in the catalogue raisonnée. The works are examined by Mr. Rower and a group of five or six others.
There is potential for conflict of interest in all of these situations — although Mr. Rower said in an interview that "no one would ever suggest there was a conflict" if a board made everyone happy, by ruling that every object submitted was real.
Among the striking aspects of Mr. Simon-Whelan's suit is his assertion that the authentication board represents a "monopoly," in violation of New York State's antitrust law.
He is not the first to try such an argument. Last March, a collector from Singapore sued the estate and the daughters of the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza in New York State Supreme Court, for interfering in the collector's attempt to sell several paintings he claims are by Souza at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonham's. (One of the daughters contacted each auction house to say she did not believe the paintings were by Souza, and the auction houses withdrew them.) The suit charges the defendants with libel, product disparagement, and unfair competition, among other things, and argues that they are trying to destroy competition in order to increase the value of their own collection of Souza paintings.
In the mid-1990's, two plaintiffs brought antitrust claims against the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board. Both lost. The first case was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. In the second, the judge didn't accept that the board was a monopoly.
One basic problem with antitrust claims against an authentication board is this: In what, exactly, does the board have a monopoly? Not in the sale of the artist's work, since it doesn't sell work. Instead, plaintiffs claim that the board maintains a monopoly in the authentication of the artist's work. But, as the lawyer who represents the Warhol Foundation and authentication board, Ronald Spencer, points out in a motion to dismiss, in order to assert a monopolization claim, the plaintiff must be a competitor in the relevant market. Mr. Simon-Whelan, of course, is not a competitor in the authentication market, if such a thing even exists, but a would-be seller of a Warhol work.
Mr. Simon-Whelan's suit also raises the interesting question of what should constitute an authentic work, in the case of an artist who delegated so much to others. Mr. Simon-Whelan says that his painting was one of a series that Warhol, in around 1964, authorized a man named Richard Ekstract to create from an acetate he provided, as payment for some expensive video equipment.
In Mr. Ekstract's own account, which he gave to Vanity Fair in 2003, he said that Warhol delegated more of the work than usual, telling Ekstract to have the printer produce the painting from the silk screen, rather than doing this step himself, as he usually did. But Mr. Ekstract said that Warhol approved the work, and several of Warhol's former employees, dealers, and friends have said that they believe the Ekstract paintings should be considered authentic.
The authentication board apparently disagrees. "To be an authentic anything," Mr. Spencer said, "the artist has to be involved not just in the conception but in the supervision and the execution." He noted that, even assuming Mr. Ekstract's account is true, there is no evidence that Warhol specified how many were to be printed, what colors the image and the backgrounds should be, and what supports should be used.
In 2004, the authentication board sent Mr. Simon-Whelan a letter (included as an exhibit in his suit) enumerating the factors in their rejection of his painting. Comparing his painting and the other Ekstract paintings with 11 1964 self-portraits in the catalogue raisonnée, the board noted that the authenticated works are all slightly different, while the Ekstract paintings are all identical. The background in the former group is painted by hand, while in the latter group it is printed. The former group are all on linen, while the latter are all on cotton. Etc.
One outstanding question is what role, if any, Mr. Simon-Whelan's signed promise not to sue will play. The suit invokes the submission agreement as further proof of conspiracy, but in fact, such an agreement is quite common. And in one case against the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, a judge ruled that the agreement was enforceable, and besides throwing the suit out, required the plaintiff to pay damages, including the defense's legal costs.
The repeated attempts to charge authentication boards with monopolization reflects, not the logic of the claim (because there isn't any), but plaintiffs' feeling that such boards can wields an inappropriate, and perhaps arbitrary, power over the market in an artist's work. Mr. Simon-Whelan's complaint asserts that the Warhol Art Authentication Board plays favorites in its decisions, tending to validate works submitted by dealers who are on good terms with the foundation and Mr. Fremont.
Conversely, it argues, dealers and auction houses are reluctant to oppose the authentication board or the foundation, because they want to win to the right to do Warhol shows, or to secure commissions. Coincidentally or not, several museum curators declined to be interviewed for this article.
Art Around Town
By KATE TAYLOR_October 5, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/64026
Few art historical issues are as contentious, or have as dramatic and immediate effects in the marketplace, as those of attribution and authentication. In fact, lawsuits are so common that many experts require owners to sign a statement promising not to sue before they will even look at a work and offer an opinion.
Among those who require such a signed statement is the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Committee, which was set up in 1995 by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Still, that didn't stop Joe Simon-Whelan, a filmmaker who owns a painting that was rejected by the board, from suing the committee, the foundation, Warhol's estate, and the estate's sales agent in the United States District Court Southern District of New York in July. Last month, a decision by the Jean-Michel Basquiat authentication committee triggered another suit, though not against the committee itself. The dealer Tony Shafrazi and his client Guido Orsi sued Christie's, charging the auction house with fraud and false advertising for having in 1990 sold Mr. Shafrazi a painting attributed to Basquiat. Last year, the painting, now owned by Mr. Orsi, was rejected by the authentication committee.
Warhol and Basquiat are among a group of 20th-century artists whose work has recently appreciated dramatically. And one of the peculiarities of authenticating recent works — seized on by numerous plaintiffs — is that the "experts" are often people with a substantial interest in the valuation of the artist's oeuvre, like the artist's primary dealer, his heirs, or a foundation set up to extend his legacy.
In France, the principle of droit moral gives an artist — and his heirs, for 70 years — substantial control over his name and his works, including the right to challenge the authenticity of a work purporting to be his. But in America, no one, technically not even the artist himself, has a legal right to decide whether a work is authentic or not. Instead, the power of an expert or an appointed board of experts follows only from their general credibility and knowledge of the artist's oeuvre.
Mr. Simon-Whelan, in his suit, describes what he alleges is a "20-year scheme of fraud, collusion, and manipulation" to control the market in Warhol's artwork. He argues that the committee maintains a monopoly on the authentication of Warhol works and fraudulently rejects genuine works in order to limit the supply and thereby increase the value of works owned by the foundation. Mr. Simon-Whelan's work, an untitled self-portrait allegedly by Warhol, was, according to his suit, authenticated in the late 1980's — before the authentication board was set up — by both the sales agent for the estate, Vincent Fremont, and the then executor of the estate, Fred Hughes. In 2001, while offering the painting for sale for $2 million, Mr. Simon-Whelan submitted it to the board for authentication. They rejected it, twice — first in 2002, and then, after he re-submitted it with more documentary evidence, in 2003.
The relationship between the Warhol Foundation and the authentication board is complex. A recent article in the New York Times quoted the Warhol Foundation's chief financial officer, K. C. Maurer, as stating that the foundation is wholly separate from the authentication board, but that is not true. One of the board's five members, Sally King-Nero, is also an employee of the foundation. Ms. King-Nero and another board member, Neil Printz, are also co-editors of the catalogue raisonnée of Warhol's paintings and sculptures, which is being sponsored by the foundation. The editing of the catalogue raisonnée in essence constitutes a separate, parallel process of authentication.
imilar structures and authentication processes are in place for other 20th-century artists. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is, like the Warhol Foundation, a grant-giving institution. From around 1990 until 1996, there was also a Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, set up by the foundation and responsible for authenticating works by Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner.
The Alexander Calder Foundation, run by Calder's grandson, Alexander Rower, also authenticates works for the purpose of inclusion in the catalogue raisonnée. The works are examined by Mr. Rower and a group of five or six others.
There is potential for conflict of interest in all of these situations — although Mr. Rower said in an interview that "no one would ever suggest there was a conflict" if a board made everyone happy, by ruling that every object submitted was real.
Among the striking aspects of Mr. Simon-Whelan's suit is his assertion that the authentication board represents a "monopoly," in violation of New York State's antitrust law.
He is not the first to try such an argument. Last March, a collector from Singapore sued the estate and the daughters of the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza in New York State Supreme Court, for interfering in the collector's attempt to sell several paintings he claims are by Souza at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonham's. (One of the daughters contacted each auction house to say she did not believe the paintings were by Souza, and the auction houses withdrew them.) The suit charges the defendants with libel, product disparagement, and unfair competition, among other things, and argues that they are trying to destroy competition in order to increase the value of their own collection of Souza paintings.
In the mid-1990's, two plaintiffs brought antitrust claims against the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board. Both lost. The first case was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. In the second, the judge didn't accept that the board was a monopoly.
One basic problem with antitrust claims against an authentication board is this: In what, exactly, does the board have a monopoly? Not in the sale of the artist's work, since it doesn't sell work. Instead, plaintiffs claim that the board maintains a monopoly in the authentication of the artist's work. But, as the lawyer who represents the Warhol Foundation and authentication board, Ronald Spencer, points out in a motion to dismiss, in order to assert a monopolization claim, the plaintiff must be a competitor in the relevant market. Mr. Simon-Whelan, of course, is not a competitor in the authentication market, if such a thing even exists, but a would-be seller of a Warhol work.
Mr. Simon-Whelan's suit also raises the interesting question of what should constitute an authentic work, in the case of an artist who delegated so much to others. Mr. Simon-Whelan says that his painting was one of a series that Warhol, in around 1964, authorized a man named Richard Ekstract to create from an acetate he provided, as payment for some expensive video equipment.
In Mr. Ekstract's own account, which he gave to Vanity Fair in 2003, he said that Warhol delegated more of the work than usual, telling Ekstract to have the printer produce the painting from the silk screen, rather than doing this step himself, as he usually did. But Mr. Ekstract said that Warhol approved the work, and several of Warhol's former employees, dealers, and friends have said that they believe the Ekstract paintings should be considered authentic.
The authentication board apparently disagrees. "To be an authentic anything," Mr. Spencer said, "the artist has to be involved not just in the conception but in the supervision and the execution." He noted that, even assuming Mr. Ekstract's account is true, there is no evidence that Warhol specified how many were to be printed, what colors the image and the backgrounds should be, and what supports should be used.
In 2004, the authentication board sent Mr. Simon-Whelan a letter (included as an exhibit in his suit) enumerating the factors in their rejection of his painting. Comparing his painting and the other Ekstract paintings with 11 1964 self-portraits in the catalogue raisonnée, the board noted that the authenticated works are all slightly different, while the Ekstract paintings are all identical. The background in the former group is painted by hand, while in the latter group it is printed. The former group are all on linen, while the latter are all on cotton. Etc.
One outstanding question is what role, if any, Mr. Simon-Whelan's signed promise not to sue will play. The suit invokes the submission agreement as further proof of conspiracy, but in fact, such an agreement is quite common. And in one case against the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, a judge ruled that the agreement was enforceable, and besides throwing the suit out, required the plaintiff to pay damages, including the defense's legal costs.
The repeated attempts to charge authentication boards with monopolization reflects, not the logic of the claim (because there isn't any), but plaintiffs' feeling that such boards can wields an inappropriate, and perhaps arbitrary, power over the market in an artist's work. Mr. Simon-Whelan's complaint asserts that the Warhol Art Authentication Board plays favorites in its decisions, tending to validate works submitted by dealers who are on good terms with the foundation and Mr. Fremont.
Conversely, it argues, dealers and auction houses are reluctant to oppose the authentication board or the foundation, because they want to win to the right to do Warhol shows, or to secure commissions. Coincidentally or not, several museum curators declined to be interviewed for this article.
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Warhol by John Richardson and Sam Green
Art historian John Richardson and Warhol curator Sam Green discuss Andy Warhol
Art historians appointed to help judge Warhol attributions artnewspaper
From News:
Art historians appointed to help judge Warhol attributions
By Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted
Andy Warhol’s self-portrait: many of his works defy easy authentication
NEW YORK. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has appointed art historians Judith Goldman and Trevor Fairbrother to the Warhol Authentication Board, in succession to David Whitney who died earlier this year. Foundation president Joel Wachs told The Art Newspaper he made the appointments based on the recommendations of the existing board members—Neil Prinz, Sally King-Nero, and Robert Rosenblum—who suggested including a fifth person.
The Authentication Board was established by the foundation in 1995 to judge the authenticity of Warhol-related works submitted for its review, a function formerly performed by the Estate of Andy Warhol. The committee meets periodically to review submissions, with members receiving $500 per meeting. The next session is scheduled for 10 February 2006, says Mr Wachs.
Instead of candidates such as Warhol Museum director Thomas Sokolowski and Whitney curator Donna de Salvo, both of whom have direct experience of assembling exhibitions of Warhol’s work, the foundation has opted for two former curators. Ms Goldman was curator of prints at the Whitney Museum from 1976 to 1991, and Mr Fairbrother was curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from 1983 to 1996, and curator of modern art at the Seattle Art Museum from 1996 to 2001. It remains to be seen if their backgrounds will help the controversy that surrounds the Authentication Board.
Ms Goldman’s expertise in prints and Pop Art should be an asset in dealing with the prickly issues related to Warhol graphics. She has contributed catalogue texts for Warhol exhibitions such as “The Warhol look: glamour, style, fashion” at the Warhol Museum and the Whitney in 1997, and others for recent shows at Paul Kasmin and Gagosian Gallery in New York.
Mr Fairbrother, though best known for his work on John Singer Sargent, organised “Beuys and Warhol” for the MFA Boston 14 years ago. He also published an interview with Warhol in Arts Magazine in 1987, an essay about Warhol’s early career in the catalogue of a 1989 show at Grey Art Gallery, and, most relevant to matters of connoisseurship, wrote “Form and ideology: Warhol’s techniques from blotted line to film” for the Dia’s 1989 “Discussions in contemporary culture #3: the work of Andy Warhol”. No member of the board was willing to comment on the issues facing the board.
Since 2003, the board has been under fire from owners of rejected works and members of the artist’s circle who claim their knowledge of Warhol’s practice is ignored. The board has routinely denied the authenticity of silkscreens made without Warhol’s direct supervision, but his former associates argue that to reject such works contradicts Warhol’s practice of having works of art printed without his direct oversight. Scholars point out that it was precisely Warhol’s blurring of authorship and his adoption of modes of mass production that mark his significance in the history of art. There is growing consensus in the field that, rather than exclude such works from the catalogue raisonné being compiled by the foundation, they should be included, allowing the market to decide their value.
“It is just bad art history and folly not to draw on the contemporaries who actually knew the artist,” says art critic Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph in London, a commentator in a BBC documentary on the controversy, scheduled to air in late January. “They are saying he worked like an Old Master and that his touch was very important,” says Mr Dorment, “but he is a conceptual artist, the main descendant of Duchamp”.
There also have been unsubstantiated allegations of conflicts of interest in an authentication board funded by the Warhol Foundation, which is also custodian of a large body of Warhol’s work that it offers for sale. Critics also condemn the board’s refusal to disclose the reasons that lead to rejection of a work. The board claims that to do so would provide a road map for forgers, but this has frustrated owners of rejected works who must abide by another of the board’s policies that requires owners to sign a waiver of their right to challenge rejections in court.
The board’s legal counsel Ronald Spencer says the board is not considering altering any of its policies, and that no lawsuits are pending or threatened.
Art historians appointed to help judge Warhol attributions
By Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted
Andy Warhol’s self-portrait: many of his works defy easy authentication
NEW YORK. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has appointed art historians Judith Goldman and Trevor Fairbrother to the Warhol Authentication Board, in succession to David Whitney who died earlier this year. Foundation president Joel Wachs told The Art Newspaper he made the appointments based on the recommendations of the existing board members—Neil Prinz, Sally King-Nero, and Robert Rosenblum—who suggested including a fifth person.
The Authentication Board was established by the foundation in 1995 to judge the authenticity of Warhol-related works submitted for its review, a function formerly performed by the Estate of Andy Warhol. The committee meets periodically to review submissions, with members receiving $500 per meeting. The next session is scheduled for 10 February 2006, says Mr Wachs.
Instead of candidates such as Warhol Museum director Thomas Sokolowski and Whitney curator Donna de Salvo, both of whom have direct experience of assembling exhibitions of Warhol’s work, the foundation has opted for two former curators. Ms Goldman was curator of prints at the Whitney Museum from 1976 to 1991, and Mr Fairbrother was curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from 1983 to 1996, and curator of modern art at the Seattle Art Museum from 1996 to 2001. It remains to be seen if their backgrounds will help the controversy that surrounds the Authentication Board.
Ms Goldman’s expertise in prints and Pop Art should be an asset in dealing with the prickly issues related to Warhol graphics. She has contributed catalogue texts for Warhol exhibitions such as “The Warhol look: glamour, style, fashion” at the Warhol Museum and the Whitney in 1997, and others for recent shows at Paul Kasmin and Gagosian Gallery in New York.
Mr Fairbrother, though best known for his work on John Singer Sargent, organised “Beuys and Warhol” for the MFA Boston 14 years ago. He also published an interview with Warhol in Arts Magazine in 1987, an essay about Warhol’s early career in the catalogue of a 1989 show at Grey Art Gallery, and, most relevant to matters of connoisseurship, wrote “Form and ideology: Warhol’s techniques from blotted line to film” for the Dia’s 1989 “Discussions in contemporary culture #3: the work of Andy Warhol”. No member of the board was willing to comment on the issues facing the board.
Since 2003, the board has been under fire from owners of rejected works and members of the artist’s circle who claim their knowledge of Warhol’s practice is ignored. The board has routinely denied the authenticity of silkscreens made without Warhol’s direct supervision, but his former associates argue that to reject such works contradicts Warhol’s practice of having works of art printed without his direct oversight. Scholars point out that it was precisely Warhol’s blurring of authorship and his adoption of modes of mass production that mark his significance in the history of art. There is growing consensus in the field that, rather than exclude such works from the catalogue raisonné being compiled by the foundation, they should be included, allowing the market to decide their value.
“It is just bad art history and folly not to draw on the contemporaries who actually knew the artist,” says art critic Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph in London, a commentator in a BBC documentary on the controversy, scheduled to air in late January. “They are saying he worked like an Old Master and that his touch was very important,” says Mr Dorment, “but he is a conceptual artist, the main descendant of Duchamp”.
There also have been unsubstantiated allegations of conflicts of interest in an authentication board funded by the Warhol Foundation, which is also custodian of a large body of Warhol’s work that it offers for sale. Critics also condemn the board’s refusal to disclose the reasons that lead to rejection of a work. The board claims that to do so would provide a road map for forgers, but this has frustrated owners of rejected works who must abide by another of the board’s policies that requires owners to sign a waiver of their right to challenge rejections in court.
The board’s legal counsel Ronald Spencer says the board is not considering altering any of its policies, and that no lawsuits are pending or threatened.
International Herald Tribune July 16, 2007
Art owner alleges Andy Warhol estate conspiracy to control art market
The Associated Press
Monday, July 16, 2007
NEW YORK: The owner of a silkscreen self-portrait of Andy Warhol sued the late artist's estate on Monday, saying it conspired for 20 years to control the market for Warhol's work with authority to stamp "DENIED" on any work it claimed was fake.
In a $20 million (€14.51 million) lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Joe Simon-Whelan said the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board force owners of each Warhol work to sign contracts giving them a "perpetual veto right over its authenticity."
He accused them of engaging in a two-decade scheme of fraud, collusion and manipulation that caused them to twice deny the authenticity of his 24-by-20-inch (61-by-51-centimeter) silkscreen even though it had been authenticated multiple times before by the estate or its related entities.
As a result, anyone who buys a Warhol painting that has been authenticated by the board risks having the authenticity revoked at any time, says the lawsuit, which seeks at least $20 million (€14.51 million) in damages and class action status.
Simon-Whelan, a U.S. film writer and producer who lives in London, accused the foundation and the board of providing "a facade of corporate credibility obscuring a deeply corrupt enterprise that enables defendants to benefit from Warhol's art and reputation."
He said they had adopted a policy of rejecting as many works as possible to induce artificial scarcity in the market for Warhol's creations.
The foundation's chief financial officer, K.C. Maurer, said Monday she had not seen the lawsuit and couldn't comment. A telephone message left with the authentication board was not immediately returned.
Simon-Whelan said he bought the silkscreen, called "Double Denied" in his court papers, for $195,000 (€141,500) in 1989, two years after Warhol died.
The work was one of several created in 1964 at Warhol's direction from an acetate personally created and chosen by him, the lawsuit said. It was going to be sold in December 2001 for $2 million (€1.45 million) until the authentication board without explanation stamped "DENIED" on the back of it in red ink, which bled through to the front, according to the lawsuit.
Simon-Whelan submitted it a second time in 2003 only to get rejected again, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said "Double Denied" is one of a small series of paintings created by Warhol so he could exchange them for rare and expensive video cameras, video recorders and other equipment that could be used in his filmmaking.
The Associated Press
Monday, July 16, 2007
NEW YORK: The owner of a silkscreen self-portrait of Andy Warhol sued the late artist's estate on Monday, saying it conspired for 20 years to control the market for Warhol's work with authority to stamp "DENIED" on any work it claimed was fake.
In a $20 million (€14.51 million) lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Joe Simon-Whelan said the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board force owners of each Warhol work to sign contracts giving them a "perpetual veto right over its authenticity."
He accused them of engaging in a two-decade scheme of fraud, collusion and manipulation that caused them to twice deny the authenticity of his 24-by-20-inch (61-by-51-centimeter) silkscreen even though it had been authenticated multiple times before by the estate or its related entities.
As a result, anyone who buys a Warhol painting that has been authenticated by the board risks having the authenticity revoked at any time, says the lawsuit, which seeks at least $20 million (€14.51 million) in damages and class action status.
Simon-Whelan, a U.S. film writer and producer who lives in London, accused the foundation and the board of providing "a facade of corporate credibility obscuring a deeply corrupt enterprise that enables defendants to benefit from Warhol's art and reputation."
He said they had adopted a policy of rejecting as many works as possible to induce artificial scarcity in the market for Warhol's creations.
The foundation's chief financial officer, K.C. Maurer, said Monday she had not seen the lawsuit and couldn't comment. A telephone message left with the authentication board was not immediately returned.
Simon-Whelan said he bought the silkscreen, called "Double Denied" in his court papers, for $195,000 (€141,500) in 1989, two years after Warhol died.
The work was one of several created in 1964 at Warhol's direction from an acetate personally created and chosen by him, the lawsuit said. It was going to be sold in December 2001 for $2 million (€1.45 million) until the authentication board without explanation stamped "DENIED" on the back of it in red ink, which bled through to the front, according to the lawsuit.
Simon-Whelan submitted it a second time in 2003 only to get rejected again, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said "Double Denied" is one of a small series of paintings created by Warhol so he could exchange them for rare and expensive video cameras, video recorders and other equipment that could be used in his filmmaking.
Time Magazine July 18 2007
Make It Real (Or Just Forget About It)
We're having a big week in the art attribution field. First there was the Italian conservator who decided that a canvas she's been examining, and which has long been considered a copy of a Caravaggio, is the real thing.
Then there was the mysterious canvas sold at auction last week in Leicestershire, England. At the time it was represented as an 18th century portrait of a man by an anonymous artist and offered at the anybody-can-afford-this estimate of $300 to $400. The auctioneers should have known something was different about this lot when inexplicably fierce bidding pushed the final price to $410,000, a sum that reportedly left the astonished seller very happy. But maybe not for long. This week the British papers report that the canvas may actually be a Titian, something those competing bidders obviously knew. Possible market value: $10 million.
Portrait of a Man (detail), Attribution pending
But the best story comes out of the U.S., where a London-based film maker has filed suit in a New York court against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. That's the organization that, among other things, directs people who think they own a Warhol to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which in turn examines would be Warhols to determine whether they're "real" Warhols, the kind you can sell for real Warhol prices. The film maker, Joe Simon-Whelan, has been at war with the Board for years after they twice rejected a purported 1964 Warhol self-portrait that Simon-Whelan bought in 1989 for $195,000.
Simon-Whelan accuses the Board of acting fraudulently to keep the pool of authenticated Warhols artificially small, which would keep prices high for the recognized Warhols, many of which the Foundation owns and sometimes sells. Well, keeping the pool of an artist's work smaller than it might otherwise be is the inevitable byproduct of any authentication board's work. There are a lot fewer acknowledged Rembrandts in the world today then there were before the Rembrandt Research Project started combing through his output 39 years ago.
So the main hurdle for Simon-Whelan will be to prove that the Board has acted "fraudulently." At the very least, if the court decides that his claim has enough substance to bring the suit to trial, it will be interesting to learn more about just how the Board authenticates work by an artist whose whole philosophy revolved around mass production of imagery and the elimination of the artist's unique touch. Is a Warhol silk screen less authentic if he went to the bathroom and left Gerard Malanga to pull the page? What if he didn't even show up at the Factory that day? As Andy himself once said: "If someone faked my art, I couldn't identify it."
I can't wait til they form The Damien Hirst Authentication Board. by Richard Lacayo
We're having a big week in the art attribution field. First there was the Italian conservator who decided that a canvas she's been examining, and which has long been considered a copy of a Caravaggio, is the real thing.
Then there was the mysterious canvas sold at auction last week in Leicestershire, England. At the time it was represented as an 18th century portrait of a man by an anonymous artist and offered at the anybody-can-afford-this estimate of $300 to $400. The auctioneers should have known something was different about this lot when inexplicably fierce bidding pushed the final price to $410,000, a sum that reportedly left the astonished seller very happy. But maybe not for long. This week the British papers report that the canvas may actually be a Titian, something those competing bidders obviously knew. Possible market value: $10 million.
Portrait of a Man (detail), Attribution pending
But the best story comes out of the U.S., where a London-based film maker has filed suit in a New York court against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. That's the organization that, among other things, directs people who think they own a Warhol to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which in turn examines would be Warhols to determine whether they're "real" Warhols, the kind you can sell for real Warhol prices. The film maker, Joe Simon-Whelan, has been at war with the Board for years after they twice rejected a purported 1964 Warhol self-portrait that Simon-Whelan bought in 1989 for $195,000.
Simon-Whelan accuses the Board of acting fraudulently to keep the pool of authenticated Warhols artificially small, which would keep prices high for the recognized Warhols, many of which the Foundation owns and sometimes sells. Well, keeping the pool of an artist's work smaller than it might otherwise be is the inevitable byproduct of any authentication board's work. There are a lot fewer acknowledged Rembrandts in the world today then there were before the Rembrandt Research Project started combing through his output 39 years ago.
So the main hurdle for Simon-Whelan will be to prove that the Board has acted "fraudulently." At the very least, if the court decides that his claim has enough substance to bring the suit to trial, it will be interesting to learn more about just how the Board authenticates work by an artist whose whole philosophy revolved around mass production of imagery and the elimination of the artist's unique touch. Is a Warhol silk screen less authentic if he went to the bathroom and left Gerard Malanga to pull the page? What if he didn't even show up at the Factory that day? As Andy himself once said: "If someone faked my art, I couldn't identify it."
I can't wait til they form The Damien Hirst Authentication Board. by Richard Lacayo
artnet
Art Market Guide
by Richard Polsky
As most art world aficionados now know, the November issue of Vanity Fair features a major article, by Michael Shnayerson, on the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The gist of the article is about the committee's all-powerful yet mysterious ways. Basically, there has been talk of inconsistency when it comes to whose Warhols get the seal of approval and whose don't. A similar version of this story is also a page-one topic of the Art Newspaper, published in England. Without recounting each piece, the articles have received so much attention that they are worth commenting on.
Late last year, I received a phone call from London from a friendly gentleman who identified himself as Joe Simon. He then shared his reason for calling. Apparently, I was included in the provenance of a Warhol painting that he now owned but couldn't sell because it had been declared a fake! This is the one phone call that every art dealer dreads. No matter how honest you are, or how perfectly you construct a deal, if you do this long enough (I'm entering my 25th year in the industry), something's bound to go wrong eventually.
After a mild rush of panic, I was relieved to hear Simon explain that he wasn't coming after me. He merely wanted my help with any information that I had about the painting. The work in question was a red Warhol Self-Portrait from 1964 -- the same pose that appeared on the U.S. postage stamp honoring Warhol. Back in the late 1980s, I had brokered the red Self-Portrait from a Los Angeles dealer to a New York dealer, who in turn sold it to Joe Simon for approximately $195,000. According to my memory of the painting, although it was unsigned, it did bear a stamp of authenticity from Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager. The picture also came with all of the necessary paperwork.
Over time, the Self-Portrait appreciated tremendously. During the Warhol boom of the last few years, Simon was offered $2 million for it. He agreed to the deal, pending one condition -- the buyer wanted to submit the painting to the Warhol authentication board for its seal of approval. To everyone's surprise, despite all of the stamps on the back of the painting and proper paperwork, the board turned the work down. As you can imagine, Simon was livid -- and out $2 million.
He decided to take action. Apparently, he had enough media connections to convince Vanity Fair to do an article on his experience. If you read the article, you get an inkling of why his Warhol was turned down. Still, given the conceptual framework behind how Warhol made pictures, it seems pretty obvious that Simon's painting should have been judged authentic.
I then began to think about what constitutes an authentic work of art. There's a classic story about how Willem de Kooning, when he was living in the Hamptons, once painted an outhouse toilet seat. It was essentially a wooden bench with three holes in it. Some enterprising soul got a hold of it and tried to sell it as a genuine de Kooning. However, even though de Kooning decorated it, he didn't actually consider the toilet seat a work of art. It all comes down to the artist's intent.
When it comes to Andy Warhol, you can imagine all of the cardboard Brillo boxes, Campbell's soup cans and posters that he signed during his career. Are these works of art? Of course not. They are items of memorabilia. Now, can you imagine all of the above items that have made their way to the Warhol authentication board? It must be an extraordinary number and a tremendous waste of time for the board.
While I can easily side with Joe Simon, as well as the legendary Ivan Karp, who also had a painting rejected, I can also appreciate what the board must go through. I am of the feeling that despite cries of favoritism as to whose Warhols pass muster, the board basically seems to be doing a good job. It was set up to protect the value and integrity of those works which are undoubtedly real. As someone who has seen and dealt a lot of Warhols, I can only recall seeing a couple of fakes -- and they were so blatant that you didn't need the board to tell you so.
It is my hope that in the future the board will give Warhol paintings like the one owned by Simon the benefit of the doubt while coming down hard on those works which are obviously fraudulent. Once again, given Warhol's philosophy of wanting to be a "machine," any work of art that he made or authorized should be considered real -- as long as it was intended to be a work of art. It's simply a matter of common sense.
RICHARD POLSKY is the author of the newly released book, I Bought Andy Warhol (Abrams).
by Richard Polsky
As most art world aficionados now know, the November issue of Vanity Fair features a major article, by Michael Shnayerson, on the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The gist of the article is about the committee's all-powerful yet mysterious ways. Basically, there has been talk of inconsistency when it comes to whose Warhols get the seal of approval and whose don't. A similar version of this story is also a page-one topic of the Art Newspaper, published in England. Without recounting each piece, the articles have received so much attention that they are worth commenting on.
Late last year, I received a phone call from London from a friendly gentleman who identified himself as Joe Simon. He then shared his reason for calling. Apparently, I was included in the provenance of a Warhol painting that he now owned but couldn't sell because it had been declared a fake! This is the one phone call that every art dealer dreads. No matter how honest you are, or how perfectly you construct a deal, if you do this long enough (I'm entering my 25th year in the industry), something's bound to go wrong eventually.
After a mild rush of panic, I was relieved to hear Simon explain that he wasn't coming after me. He merely wanted my help with any information that I had about the painting. The work in question was a red Warhol Self-Portrait from 1964 -- the same pose that appeared on the U.S. postage stamp honoring Warhol. Back in the late 1980s, I had brokered the red Self-Portrait from a Los Angeles dealer to a New York dealer, who in turn sold it to Joe Simon for approximately $195,000. According to my memory of the painting, although it was unsigned, it did bear a stamp of authenticity from Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager. The picture also came with all of the necessary paperwork.
Over time, the Self-Portrait appreciated tremendously. During the Warhol boom of the last few years, Simon was offered $2 million for it. He agreed to the deal, pending one condition -- the buyer wanted to submit the painting to the Warhol authentication board for its seal of approval. To everyone's surprise, despite all of the stamps on the back of the painting and proper paperwork, the board turned the work down. As you can imagine, Simon was livid -- and out $2 million.
He decided to take action. Apparently, he had enough media connections to convince Vanity Fair to do an article on his experience. If you read the article, you get an inkling of why his Warhol was turned down. Still, given the conceptual framework behind how Warhol made pictures, it seems pretty obvious that Simon's painting should have been judged authentic.
I then began to think about what constitutes an authentic work of art. There's a classic story about how Willem de Kooning, when he was living in the Hamptons, once painted an outhouse toilet seat. It was essentially a wooden bench with three holes in it. Some enterprising soul got a hold of it and tried to sell it as a genuine de Kooning. However, even though de Kooning decorated it, he didn't actually consider the toilet seat a work of art. It all comes down to the artist's intent.
When it comes to Andy Warhol, you can imagine all of the cardboard Brillo boxes, Campbell's soup cans and posters that he signed during his career. Are these works of art? Of course not. They are items of memorabilia. Now, can you imagine all of the above items that have made their way to the Warhol authentication board? It must be an extraordinary number and a tremendous waste of time for the board.
While I can easily side with Joe Simon, as well as the legendary Ivan Karp, who also had a painting rejected, I can also appreciate what the board must go through. I am of the feeling that despite cries of favoritism as to whose Warhols pass muster, the board basically seems to be doing a good job. It was set up to protect the value and integrity of those works which are undoubtedly real. As someone who has seen and dealt a lot of Warhols, I can only recall seeing a couple of fakes -- and they were so blatant that you didn't need the board to tell you so.
It is my hope that in the future the board will give Warhol paintings like the one owned by Simon the benefit of the doubt while coming down hard on those works which are obviously fraudulent. Once again, given Warhol's philosophy of wanting to be a "machine," any work of art that he made or authorized should be considered real -- as long as it was intended to be a work of art. It's simply a matter of common sense.
RICHARD POLSKY is the author of the newly released book, I Bought Andy Warhol (Abrams).
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. aug 2007
http://www.faz.net/s/RubBC09F7BF72A2405A96718ECBFB68FBFE/Doc~E32E26321F7F940EC896019716CD5E52D~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html
translation:
The Swedish daily paper „Expressen has uncovered in a series of articles that some of Andy Warhol's famous Brillo Boxes are most likely fakes and were manufactured in the year 1990, three years after the death of the artist. Approximately one hundred soapbox sculptures are in circulation on the international art market. Even if it is agreed on the fact that Warhol need not have touched a work to be considered as authentic, the catalogue raisonne of the artists work must be rewritten. Only recently a work by Warhol created attention in New York, when the American film producer Joe Simon Whelan sued the Andy Warhol art Authentication board for twenty million dollars plus damages, because they had twice rejected his Warhol self portrait for not being authentic.
This first Brillo Boxes of Andy Warhol (1929 to 1987) are plywood crates, were silk screened with the trademark Brillo's red-blue Design. These sculptures originated in 1964 and exhibited in the spring of the same year in the New Yorker Stable Gallery as well as others box Sculptures " by Warhol, among them „Campbell's Tomato Juice ", „Kellogg's Cornflakes "and „Heinz Tomato Ketchup ".
Replaced for Cost reasons:
The young Kasper Koning, currently director of the Cologne museum Ludwig, was impressed by the exhibition in New York's Stable gallery. Thus Koning proposed to the legendary Swedish museum director Pontus Hultén (1924 to 2006) a concept for a Warhol exhibition in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which would include Electric Chair paintings, Warhols films, silver helium balloons and screen print paintings of Warhol’s Ten Foot Flowers as well as Brillo boxes. In order to save costs, however cardboard boxes manufactured by the Brillo factory in Brooklyn were exhibited and not plywood Sculptures from Warhol’s Factory in New York. In 1968, The Brillo factory sent 500 of the folded up cardboard Brillo packing cases directly to Sweden and installed in the Moderna Museet for the exhibition.
Hultén recalls in his 2004 book „The Pontus Hultén Collection, how he had manufactured one hundred wooden crates in Sweden for the show. Warhol apparently asked „Why don't you make them there? ", And gave his consent to have them produced in Sweden. Hultén wrote the wooden boxes were piled up in the entrance area of the museum for the exhibition. Stacked on top of these were the additional cardboard boxes made by the Brillo factory. After the exhibition, according to Hultén, Warhol personally gave him these crates. He wrote in his book they were stored in the depot of the Stockholm Moderna Museet - even years after his departure from the museum in 1973. ___94 crates „Stockholm type "in circulation"___The Warhol catalogue raisonne of works of 2004 specifies 94 wooden boxes of 1968 as „Stockholm type ". They differ from the boxes made in 1964 by the fact that they are not made from plywood, as by the Warhol Factory, but from fiberboards, and that the white underground is not painted, but printed. In addition the Design contains the additive „of PAD Giant "over „the O "from Brillo. While the most expensive individual Brillo box created in 1964 sold for 710,000 dollars in November 2006 with Christie's in New York, the later Stockholm types of 1968 on auctions recently reached prices between 100.000 and 200,000 dollars. The Expressen revealed "that in 1968 in the Moderna Museet no wooden boxes were exhibited only exclusively the cardboard boxes created and directly sent by the Brillo company.
The Swedish newspaper refers to statements of the Co-curators of the show, Olle Granath, as well as to Paul Morrissey, the manager at that time of Warhol’s Factory, as well as other witnesses. Also Kasper Koning doesn't know anything about wooden crates being exhibited in Sweden. However he did not also see the exhibition( although Paul Morissey had attended) : At that time Koning preferred to cash in the prepaid flight to Sweden and remained in New York. The press spokeswoman of the Moderna Museet, Paulina Sokolow, confirms, that after the exhibition in the same year 1968 Hulten made ten Brillo boxes of wood: „ “Most likely with Andy Warhol’s permission, but so far no documents have emerged which confirms this.” Of this small edition Olle Granath received three, which he sold decades later to the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.
Approximately one hundred crates from the year 1990. The Expressen reports “Three years after Warhol’s death Pontus Hultén manufactured approximately one hundred of the new wooden Brillo Boxes in a workshop in Malmo, with the date 1968.” The newspaper quotes the director of the Museum Malmö and other witnesses, who remember that in 1990 Hultén found suitable craftsman and sent a cardboard Brillo box as a sample to Malmö. Approximately one hundred of the new 1990 wooden boxes were shown in an exhibition in St Petersburg and fifty in the autumn of the same year in the Danish Louis IANA museum. It is clarified that these fifty were returned to Pontus Hultén after the show. Now the suspicion arises that these 1990 crates with the date 1968 infiltrated the art market as well as the Warhol catalogue raisonne. But where are they? Hultén gave 1995 six Brillo boxes to the Moderna Museet. Their provenance according to Sokolow, is currently being examined. (according to the Warhol catalalogue raisonne funded by the Warhol Foundation: Lord Palumo, who was a member of the Warhol Foundation Board of directors at the time, owns a 1990 authenticated wooden sculpture as well; others are owned by well known art dealer/ clients of the Warhol Foundation. The Warhol art authentication board refuse to accept first hand testimony from those who actually worked with Warhol, such as Paul Morrissey, Gerard Malanga, Sam Green, Billy name and others, but the testimony of a powerful art world figure turned dealer such as Pontues Hulten is accepted. )
Other arrived by Hultén into the collections of the artist OD Kienholz and the collector Stavros Merjos. The Antwerp art dealer Ronny van de Velde bought forty Brillo boxes from Hultén for $240,000 in 1994 - with its written, but no longer convincing explanation, that the crates were exhibited in the modenta museet in 1968. In retrospect, Kasper Koning cannot imagine that Pontus Hultén created the crates with the intention of selling them later: “most likely, he manufactured them for the exhibition in St Petersburg, afterwards they were stored in a house in France, with coffee stains, and finally probably someone asked it whether they were for sale. I am sorry that his reputation is now questioned, but I am sure that was not his intention. "
Confirmed by the Authentication board
In the year 2004 the London again art dealer Brian Balfour Oates bought 22 boxes from Hulten. Every one of them was confirmed as genuine by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication board.
In Feb of this year one of the forged examples was supposedly auctioned by Christies in London for 96,000 pounds by the art dealing family Mugrabi, who specializes in Warhol's. Upon request, Christies said they are not commenting on this. The New Yorker Gallerist Paula Cooper is in her own estimation not a Warhol expert but she says: “ in 1990 one already knew that you be careful must be careful with Warhol" Seven years ago, when he retired, Granath offered her three wooden Brillo Boxes, she first started an investigation. The confirmation of the Authentication board convinced her.
Report in preparation
The New Yorker attorney Seth Redniss is putting pressure on the Authentication board with a class action lawsuit, in totally different cases, in which authentication has been refused. On the Brillo boxes listed in the catalogue raisonne, he addresses two possibilities regarding the brillo boxes listed in the catalogue raisonne „"Either the publishers did poor work, or they intentionally put the wrong crates in the catalogue in order to provide advantages to those who are important people in the art scene" On request of this newspaper has the Andy Warhol Art Authentication board commented that the committee and the publishers of the catalogue raisonne are investigating to examine the serious accusations regarding „the Stockholm type "the Brillo Boxes: „A report will be published, as soon as the investigations are final. "
Thus, note: All owners of crates from the year 1964 can draw a deep breath, but each Brillo box of 1968 is a potential soap powder barrel. Kasper Koning is lucky. He has 1968 a Brillo box from Warhol as a personal gift: “I still use it today. My television stands on it.”
(according to the Warhol cataloge raisonne, andy warhol authorized 100 boxes to be made in California for the collection of the Pasadena Art Museum and to remain. These were not made by Andy Warhol but authenticated by the board. Although Warhol specifically stated that only 100 were to be made, the board have authenticated a further 13 of these box sculptures, worth over a million dollars, which are owned by prominent Warhol dealers and collectors.)
translation:
The Swedish daily paper „Expressen has uncovered in a series of articles that some of Andy Warhol's famous Brillo Boxes are most likely fakes and were manufactured in the year 1990, three years after the death of the artist. Approximately one hundred soapbox sculptures are in circulation on the international art market. Even if it is agreed on the fact that Warhol need not have touched a work to be considered as authentic, the catalogue raisonne of the artists work must be rewritten. Only recently a work by Warhol created attention in New York, when the American film producer Joe Simon Whelan sued the Andy Warhol art Authentication board for twenty million dollars plus damages, because they had twice rejected his Warhol self portrait for not being authentic.
This first Brillo Boxes of Andy Warhol (1929 to 1987) are plywood crates, were silk screened with the trademark Brillo's red-blue Design. These sculptures originated in 1964 and exhibited in the spring of the same year in the New Yorker Stable Gallery as well as others box Sculptures " by Warhol, among them „Campbell's Tomato Juice ", „Kellogg's Cornflakes "and „Heinz Tomato Ketchup ".
Replaced for Cost reasons:
The young Kasper Koning, currently director of the Cologne museum Ludwig, was impressed by the exhibition in New York's Stable gallery. Thus Koning proposed to the legendary Swedish museum director Pontus Hultén (1924 to 2006) a concept for a Warhol exhibition in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which would include Electric Chair paintings, Warhols films, silver helium balloons and screen print paintings of Warhol’s Ten Foot Flowers as well as Brillo boxes. In order to save costs, however cardboard boxes manufactured by the Brillo factory in Brooklyn were exhibited and not plywood Sculptures from Warhol’s Factory in New York. In 1968, The Brillo factory sent 500 of the folded up cardboard Brillo packing cases directly to Sweden and installed in the Moderna Museet for the exhibition.
Hultén recalls in his 2004 book „The Pontus Hultén Collection, how he had manufactured one hundred wooden crates in Sweden for the show. Warhol apparently asked „Why don't you make them there? ", And gave his consent to have them produced in Sweden. Hultén wrote the wooden boxes were piled up in the entrance area of the museum for the exhibition. Stacked on top of these were the additional cardboard boxes made by the Brillo factory. After the exhibition, according to Hultén, Warhol personally gave him these crates. He wrote in his book they were stored in the depot of the Stockholm Moderna Museet - even years after his departure from the museum in 1973. ___94 crates „Stockholm type "in circulation"___The Warhol catalogue raisonne of works of 2004 specifies 94 wooden boxes of 1968 as „Stockholm type ". They differ from the boxes made in 1964 by the fact that they are not made from plywood, as by the Warhol Factory, but from fiberboards, and that the white underground is not painted, but printed. In addition the Design contains the additive „of PAD Giant "over „the O "from Brillo. While the most expensive individual Brillo box created in 1964 sold for 710,000 dollars in November 2006 with Christie's in New York, the later Stockholm types of 1968 on auctions recently reached prices between 100.000 and 200,000 dollars. The Expressen revealed "that in 1968 in the Moderna Museet no wooden boxes were exhibited only exclusively the cardboard boxes created and directly sent by the Brillo company.
The Swedish newspaper refers to statements of the Co-curators of the show, Olle Granath, as well as to Paul Morrissey, the manager at that time of Warhol’s Factory, as well as other witnesses. Also Kasper Koning doesn't know anything about wooden crates being exhibited in Sweden. However he did not also see the exhibition( although Paul Morissey had attended) : At that time Koning preferred to cash in the prepaid flight to Sweden and remained in New York. The press spokeswoman of the Moderna Museet, Paulina Sokolow, confirms, that after the exhibition in the same year 1968 Hulten made ten Brillo boxes of wood: „ “Most likely with Andy Warhol’s permission, but so far no documents have emerged which confirms this.” Of this small edition Olle Granath received three, which he sold decades later to the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.
Approximately one hundred crates from the year 1990. The Expressen reports “Three years after Warhol’s death Pontus Hultén manufactured approximately one hundred of the new wooden Brillo Boxes in a workshop in Malmo, with the date 1968.” The newspaper quotes the director of the Museum Malmö and other witnesses, who remember that in 1990 Hultén found suitable craftsman and sent a cardboard Brillo box as a sample to Malmö. Approximately one hundred of the new 1990 wooden boxes were shown in an exhibition in St Petersburg and fifty in the autumn of the same year in the Danish Louis IANA museum. It is clarified that these fifty were returned to Pontus Hultén after the show. Now the suspicion arises that these 1990 crates with the date 1968 infiltrated the art market as well as the Warhol catalogue raisonne. But where are they? Hultén gave 1995 six Brillo boxes to the Moderna Museet. Their provenance according to Sokolow, is currently being examined. (according to the Warhol catalalogue raisonne funded by the Warhol Foundation: Lord Palumo, who was a member of the Warhol Foundation Board of directors at the time, owns a 1990 authenticated wooden sculpture as well; others are owned by well known art dealer/ clients of the Warhol Foundation. The Warhol art authentication board refuse to accept first hand testimony from those who actually worked with Warhol, such as Paul Morrissey, Gerard Malanga, Sam Green, Billy name and others, but the testimony of a powerful art world figure turned dealer such as Pontues Hulten is accepted. )
Other arrived by Hultén into the collections of the artist OD Kienholz and the collector Stavros Merjos. The Antwerp art dealer Ronny van de Velde bought forty Brillo boxes from Hultén for $240,000 in 1994 - with its written, but no longer convincing explanation, that the crates were exhibited in the modenta museet in 1968. In retrospect, Kasper Koning cannot imagine that Pontus Hultén created the crates with the intention of selling them later: “most likely, he manufactured them for the exhibition in St Petersburg, afterwards they were stored in a house in France, with coffee stains, and finally probably someone asked it whether they were for sale. I am sorry that his reputation is now questioned, but I am sure that was not his intention. "
Confirmed by the Authentication board
In the year 2004 the London again art dealer Brian Balfour Oates bought 22 boxes from Hulten. Every one of them was confirmed as genuine by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication board.
In Feb of this year one of the forged examples was supposedly auctioned by Christies in London for 96,000 pounds by the art dealing family Mugrabi, who specializes in Warhol's. Upon request, Christies said they are not commenting on this. The New Yorker Gallerist Paula Cooper is in her own estimation not a Warhol expert but she says: “ in 1990 one already knew that you be careful must be careful with Warhol" Seven years ago, when he retired, Granath offered her three wooden Brillo Boxes, she first started an investigation. The confirmation of the Authentication board convinced her.
Report in preparation
The New Yorker attorney Seth Redniss is putting pressure on the Authentication board with a class action lawsuit, in totally different cases, in which authentication has been refused. On the Brillo boxes listed in the catalogue raisonne, he addresses two possibilities regarding the brillo boxes listed in the catalogue raisonne „"Either the publishers did poor work, or they intentionally put the wrong crates in the catalogue in order to provide advantages to those who are important people in the art scene" On request of this newspaper has the Andy Warhol Art Authentication board commented that the committee and the publishers of the catalogue raisonne are investigating to examine the serious accusations regarding „the Stockholm type "the Brillo Boxes: „A report will be published, as soon as the investigations are final. "
Thus, note: All owners of crates from the year 1964 can draw a deep breath, but each Brillo box of 1968 is a potential soap powder barrel. Kasper Koning is lucky. He has 1968 a Brillo box from Warhol as a personal gift: “I still use it today. My television stands on it.”
(according to the Warhol cataloge raisonne, andy warhol authorized 100 boxes to be made in California for the collection of the Pasadena Art Museum and to remain. These were not made by Andy Warhol but authenticated by the board. Although Warhol specifically stated that only 100 were to be made, the board have authenticated a further 13 of these box sculptures, worth over a million dollars, which are owned by prominent Warhol dealers and collectors.)
Monday, 1 October 2007
Trust me its a fake
"Trust me, this is a fake"
01/07/2004
A lawyer suggests that the decisions of expert committees should not be beyond the reach of the law
Auction houses will generally decline to auction a work of art if it does not feature in the artistIs catalogue raisonnshift right, which is generally perceived to be the definitive and exhaustive catalogue of an artistIs work. The inclusion of a work of art in the catalogue raisonnshift right serves to authenticate the work; if it is not included, it suggests that it is not authentic. Similarly, auction houses will often decline to auction a work of art if it is not approved by the committee recognised by the market as holding ultimate authority over the authentication of an artistIs work. Such committee may either be appointed by the holder of the artistIs moral rights, or it may be self-proclaimed. It often holds some or all of the artistIs archives, and includes one or more experts on the work of the artist it represents.
When an artist dies, the holder of his moral rights is generally regarded as the definitive authority on whether a work is by the artist or not. Moral rights may vest in the spouse, the children or a personal representative of the artist. The two relevant moral rights in this context are the right to prevent false attribution, and the right of paternity, which, in the UK, are expressly recognised in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right to prevent false attribution is to be able to stop a work of art from being falsely attributed to the artist; the right of paternity is the right to be positively identified as its author.
Moral rights are not perpetual. The right of paternity lasts as long as copyright, currently 70 years from the date of the artistIs death; the right to prevent false attribution, on the other hand, expires 20 years after death.
Moral rights have a longer tradition in continental Europe, where they have been recognised since the 19th century. The artistIs heirs inherit the custodianship of his/her moral rights and this generally lasts as long as the copyright in the artistIs work. In contrast, limited moral rights legislation was only enacted by several States in the US as late as the 1980s. At federal level, the Visual Artists Rights Act adopted in 1990 now regulates the right of paternity in works of visual art such as paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and photographs. The right of paternity includes that of preventing the artistIs name being used as the author of a work he/she did not create. Under the Act, the duration of the right of paternity for works created before 1 June 1991 is the life of the artist plus 50 years: moral rights to works created on or after 1 June 1991 expire on the artistIs death.
In the case of artists active in the second half of the 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, the market has come to view one or two experts, or groups of experts, as the leading authorities on particular artistsI work. Although the authentication of a work of art is not the sole prerogative of the holder of the artistIs moral rights, holding such rights will give him/her precedence over other experts. Where moral rights have expired, the inclusion of a work in the artistIs catalogue raisonnshift right and the opinion of the expert with access to the artistIs archives will be paramount. Auction houses and art dealers are generally unwilling to sell works of art without the blessing of the prime expert: if they do, they may risk having to cancel the sale and return the purchase price to the buyer, sometimes without recourse against the seller.
In most cases, the refusal by the prime expert to authenticate a work of art has the drastic consequence of rendering it worthless. The owner may find other experts who say the work is genuine; he may be able to provide good provenance, or even conduct scientific analyses to demonstrate that the work is by the artist. Nonetheless, if the prime expert refuses to agree with the attribution, his opinion will make the work almost unsaleable.
A dispute has recently arisen between the Warhol Authentication Board and owners of works of art purchased as original Warhols (The Art Newspaper, No. 140). The Board has refused to authenticate the works, sparking claims that its refusal is motivated by reasons other than authenticity (or lack thereof). Owners have voiced their anger at the BoardIs decisions, claiming in some cases that the Board authenticated a work and then changed its mind, and complaining that the Board would not give reasons for its decisions. It has been reported that the Board declines to share its reasoning because its decisions are often based on subjective criteria that are not susceptible to proof, and it maintains that, if reasons were given, forgers would find out how to fake Warhol works. But this absence of evidence is precisely why owners resent the unsubstantiated opinions issued by the Board and other committees representing deceased artists. However, in certain circumstances, the Warhol Authentication Board will give reason for its opinion. The Board does not say when those circumstances arise but it seems that the serious threat of a lawsuit by the angry owner of a rejected work will deliver results. Indeed, last month, the Board wrote to collector Joe Simon to give its reasons for rejecting a silkscreen painting in the wake of Mr SimonIs threat to take the Board to court.
The refusal to provide a reasoned opinion is not the only compaint: the lack of transparency in the authentication process can raise suspicions, and artistsI committees are generally unregulated. Some have to contend with conflicts of interest, for example where committee members have ties with collectors or dealers in the artist they represent. It has also been alleged that artistsI committees may have an interest in limiting the number of works by the artist available on the market in order to boost the value of works held by their members or an affiliated body.
In their defence, artistsI committees argue that they have their reputation to preserve and they will not therefore accept or reject a work of art without good reason. They also point out that, like other experts, they may incur liability for negligence or other torts if they do not follow a proper methodology when assessing whether a work is authentic or not. The row over works by Andy Warhol is not isolated. Other examples include the committee assembled by the widow of artist Francis Picabia, which battled with an art collector following its refusal to authenticate a series of collages; and the Van Gogh Museum, criticised for failing adequately to support its opinion that a painting representing two diggers was a genuine Van Gogh.
What possible recourse is there against the expert?
An aggrieved owner, unconvinced by the negative opinion of the prime expert and in possession of other expert opinions supporting his view that the work is genuine may be tempted to seek redress through the courts.
Under English law, there are several possible heads of claim, one of which is slander of goods. An action here will lie where the defendant maliciously publishes a false
statement on the claimantIs property and where the publication causes the claimant to suffer special damage. The claimant must show that the statement was both false and malicious: in order to show malice, the claimant must prove that the defendant had
a dominant improper motive to cause him injury.
The owner may also have a claim for negligent misstatement, which is the making of an erroneous statement (often a professional opinion or advice) to another person in circumstances where the giver of the statement owes a duty of care to the recipient of it. In order to succeed, the owner/claimant must prove both that the statement was false and that it was made negligently. Therefore, in order to avoid liability for negligence, an expert must apply his expertise diligently: he may be liable if his opinion proves to be wrong or if he applied his expertise badly, for example, in failing to draw the proper conclusions from comparative analyses, or if his reasoning was flawed. The claimant must also prove that the defendant owed him a duty of care. An artistIs committee may have assumed a duty of care, although this is by no means certain, and it is important to appreciate that the duty may be expressly disclaimed by the committee either before or at the time the opinion was expressed.
Fraud is another possible head of claim, albeit a tough one to prove.
If the expert committee is a public body and therefore subject to public law, its decisions may be susceptible to judicial review. In the UK, a court may not overturn a decision taken by an expert committee simply because it disagrees with it. Instead, the Court will consider whether there has been any illegality (ie; whether the public body has misdirected itself at law), whether the decision was irrational (ie; whether the decision was so outrageous that no reasonable person would have made it) or whether there was some procedural impropriety. It is far from certain whether the English courts would accept jurisdiction over the decisions of a public body authenticating works of art: this would depend, in part, on whether such body performs a public duty and whether the rights of citizens are affected by its decisions. Courts may be inclined to exercise their powers of judicial review if they find that decisions by such bodies are not otherwise open to challenge. A parallel may be drawn from the decision of the Court of Appeal to allow judicial review over a decision of the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers (R. v Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, ex-parte Datafin plc and another [1987] QB 815).
In the US, owners have claimed violation of anti-trust laws on a few occasions, for example the anti-trust allegation made against the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, SothebyIs and ChristieIs (Kramer v Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, Inc, SothebyIs, Inc and Christie, Manson & Woods International, Inc, 890 F. Supp. 250 [S.D.N.Y 1995]). Here, the claimant submitted that there was an anti-trust conspiracy designed to exclude authentic Pollock pieces from the market in an attempt to increase the value of Pollock paintings owned by the Foundation and auctioned by SothebyIs and ChristieIs.
The court dismissed the claim because the claimant failed adequately to identify the relevant market where the anti-trust violation had allegedly taken place. Furthermore, the court considered that the claimant had failed to prove that the auction houses had participated in a conspiracy, noting that they had good reasons for declining to offer paintings for sale that might well have proved to be forgeries. The anti-trust claim is ingenious, but it is probably too far-fetched to have any real chances of success.
It must be said that aggrieved owners face a difficult task. Each head of claim places a heavy burden on the claimant to make good the contention that the prime expert got it wrong. If it is accepted that decisions on attribution and authenticity are expressions of opinion, then the English courts are unlikely to overturn the expertIs opinion, unless the claimant can show that it is irrational: but the claimant may be unable to do so unless the expert has disclosed the reasons for his decisionUand many experts do not.
Other European legal systems consider expertsI statements on attribution and authenticity as binding: they are treated more as statements of fact than expressions of opinion and the courts are more willing to challenge the expert and call on their own experts to render judgment on the authenticity or attribution of a particular work.
In 1995, ChristieIs declined to include a painting by Kees Van Dongen in an auction because the Wildenstein Institute had indicated that it would not be included in its forthcoming catalogue raisonnshift right. The owner started proceedings against the Institute in the French courts, as he had bought the painting a few years earlier with a certificate of authenticity from Paul PetridAs, the acknowledged expert.
The French court appointed two independent experts, who concluded that the painting was genuine. The court held that the Institute could not refuse to include the painting in its forthcoming catalogue raisonnshift right unless there were new material changes in connoisseurship: indeed, if the painting were not included in the catalogue raisonnshift right, the Institute would not be able to claim that its catalogue was an exhaustive compilation of the artistIs work (as it had done). The court added that the author of a catalogue raisonnshift right would be liable if he negligently or intentionally excluded a work from the catalogue, despite the contrary opinion of acknowledged experts (Dumshift rightnil v. Wildenstein Institute and Others, Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, 16 September 1999,
unpublished). Since then, the Wildenstein Institute has been sued by another collector in
the French courts, this time for refusing to include a Modigliani drawing in its forthcoming catalogue
raisonnshift right.
It is arguable that expert committees hold too much power over economic interests to remain unregulated for much longer. Any such regulation might be imposed by statute; alternatively, committees might subject themselves to self-regulation. One would expect any regulations to require that members of the expert committee be acknowledged experts in their field, and, to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, neither the committee itself, nor any of its members, should have an economic interest in the market for works by the artist. The committee should publish a clear methodology for authenticating works by the artist and provide reasons for any decision to refuse authentication by reference to the methodology. Moreover, the committeeIs decisions should be subject to review by the courts or by an independent supervisory body.
Pierre Valentin
Head of the Art & Cultural Assets Group at Withers LLP, London
_Features_Authentication issues
01/07/2004
A lawyer suggests that the decisions of expert committees should not be beyond the reach of the law
Auction houses will generally decline to auction a work of art if it does not feature in the artistIs catalogue raisonnshift right, which is generally perceived to be the definitive and exhaustive catalogue of an artistIs work. The inclusion of a work of art in the catalogue raisonnshift right serves to authenticate the work; if it is not included, it suggests that it is not authentic. Similarly, auction houses will often decline to auction a work of art if it is not approved by the committee recognised by the market as holding ultimate authority over the authentication of an artistIs work. Such committee may either be appointed by the holder of the artistIs moral rights, or it may be self-proclaimed. It often holds some or all of the artistIs archives, and includes one or more experts on the work of the artist it represents.
When an artist dies, the holder of his moral rights is generally regarded as the definitive authority on whether a work is by the artist or not. Moral rights may vest in the spouse, the children or a personal representative of the artist. The two relevant moral rights in this context are the right to prevent false attribution, and the right of paternity, which, in the UK, are expressly recognised in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right to prevent false attribution is to be able to stop a work of art from being falsely attributed to the artist; the right of paternity is the right to be positively identified as its author.
Moral rights are not perpetual. The right of paternity lasts as long as copyright, currently 70 years from the date of the artistIs death; the right to prevent false attribution, on the other hand, expires 20 years after death.
Moral rights have a longer tradition in continental Europe, where they have been recognised since the 19th century. The artistIs heirs inherit the custodianship of his/her moral rights and this generally lasts as long as the copyright in the artistIs work. In contrast, limited moral rights legislation was only enacted by several States in the US as late as the 1980s. At federal level, the Visual Artists Rights Act adopted in 1990 now regulates the right of paternity in works of visual art such as paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and photographs. The right of paternity includes that of preventing the artistIs name being used as the author of a work he/she did not create. Under the Act, the duration of the right of paternity for works created before 1 June 1991 is the life of the artist plus 50 years: moral rights to works created on or after 1 June 1991 expire on the artistIs death.
In the case of artists active in the second half of the 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, the market has come to view one or two experts, or groups of experts, as the leading authorities on particular artistsI work. Although the authentication of a work of art is not the sole prerogative of the holder of the artistIs moral rights, holding such rights will give him/her precedence over other experts. Where moral rights have expired, the inclusion of a work in the artistIs catalogue raisonnshift right and the opinion of the expert with access to the artistIs archives will be paramount. Auction houses and art dealers are generally unwilling to sell works of art without the blessing of the prime expert: if they do, they may risk having to cancel the sale and return the purchase price to the buyer, sometimes without recourse against the seller.
In most cases, the refusal by the prime expert to authenticate a work of art has the drastic consequence of rendering it worthless. The owner may find other experts who say the work is genuine; he may be able to provide good provenance, or even conduct scientific analyses to demonstrate that the work is by the artist. Nonetheless, if the prime expert refuses to agree with the attribution, his opinion will make the work almost unsaleable.
A dispute has recently arisen between the Warhol Authentication Board and owners of works of art purchased as original Warhols (The Art Newspaper, No. 140). The Board has refused to authenticate the works, sparking claims that its refusal is motivated by reasons other than authenticity (or lack thereof). Owners have voiced their anger at the BoardIs decisions, claiming in some cases that the Board authenticated a work and then changed its mind, and complaining that the Board would not give reasons for its decisions. It has been reported that the Board declines to share its reasoning because its decisions are often based on subjective criteria that are not susceptible to proof, and it maintains that, if reasons were given, forgers would find out how to fake Warhol works. But this absence of evidence is precisely why owners resent the unsubstantiated opinions issued by the Board and other committees representing deceased artists. However, in certain circumstances, the Warhol Authentication Board will give reason for its opinion. The Board does not say when those circumstances arise but it seems that the serious threat of a lawsuit by the angry owner of a rejected work will deliver results. Indeed, last month, the Board wrote to collector Joe Simon to give its reasons for rejecting a silkscreen painting in the wake of Mr SimonIs threat to take the Board to court.
The refusal to provide a reasoned opinion is not the only compaint: the lack of transparency in the authentication process can raise suspicions, and artistsI committees are generally unregulated. Some have to contend with conflicts of interest, for example where committee members have ties with collectors or dealers in the artist they represent. It has also been alleged that artistsI committees may have an interest in limiting the number of works by the artist available on the market in order to boost the value of works held by their members or an affiliated body.
In their defence, artistsI committees argue that they have their reputation to preserve and they will not therefore accept or reject a work of art without good reason. They also point out that, like other experts, they may incur liability for negligence or other torts if they do not follow a proper methodology when assessing whether a work is authentic or not. The row over works by Andy Warhol is not isolated. Other examples include the committee assembled by the widow of artist Francis Picabia, which battled with an art collector following its refusal to authenticate a series of collages; and the Van Gogh Museum, criticised for failing adequately to support its opinion that a painting representing two diggers was a genuine Van Gogh.
What possible recourse is there against the expert?
An aggrieved owner, unconvinced by the negative opinion of the prime expert and in possession of other expert opinions supporting his view that the work is genuine may be tempted to seek redress through the courts.
Under English law, there are several possible heads of claim, one of which is slander of goods. An action here will lie where the defendant maliciously publishes a false
statement on the claimantIs property and where the publication causes the claimant to suffer special damage. The claimant must show that the statement was both false and malicious: in order to show malice, the claimant must prove that the defendant had
a dominant improper motive to cause him injury.
The owner may also have a claim for negligent misstatement, which is the making of an erroneous statement (often a professional opinion or advice) to another person in circumstances where the giver of the statement owes a duty of care to the recipient of it. In order to succeed, the owner/claimant must prove both that the statement was false and that it was made negligently. Therefore, in order to avoid liability for negligence, an expert must apply his expertise diligently: he may be liable if his opinion proves to be wrong or if he applied his expertise badly, for example, in failing to draw the proper conclusions from comparative analyses, or if his reasoning was flawed. The claimant must also prove that the defendant owed him a duty of care. An artistIs committee may have assumed a duty of care, although this is by no means certain, and it is important to appreciate that the duty may be expressly disclaimed by the committee either before or at the time the opinion was expressed.
Fraud is another possible head of claim, albeit a tough one to prove.
If the expert committee is a public body and therefore subject to public law, its decisions may be susceptible to judicial review. In the UK, a court may not overturn a decision taken by an expert committee simply because it disagrees with it. Instead, the Court will consider whether there has been any illegality (ie; whether the public body has misdirected itself at law), whether the decision was irrational (ie; whether the decision was so outrageous that no reasonable person would have made it) or whether there was some procedural impropriety. It is far from certain whether the English courts would accept jurisdiction over the decisions of a public body authenticating works of art: this would depend, in part, on whether such body performs a public duty and whether the rights of citizens are affected by its decisions. Courts may be inclined to exercise their powers of judicial review if they find that decisions by such bodies are not otherwise open to challenge. A parallel may be drawn from the decision of the Court of Appeal to allow judicial review over a decision of the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers (R. v Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, ex-parte Datafin plc and another [1987] QB 815).
In the US, owners have claimed violation of anti-trust laws on a few occasions, for example the anti-trust allegation made against the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, SothebyIs and ChristieIs (Kramer v Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, Inc, SothebyIs, Inc and Christie, Manson & Woods International, Inc, 890 F. Supp. 250 [S.D.N.Y 1995]). Here, the claimant submitted that there was an anti-trust conspiracy designed to exclude authentic Pollock pieces from the market in an attempt to increase the value of Pollock paintings owned by the Foundation and auctioned by SothebyIs and ChristieIs.
The court dismissed the claim because the claimant failed adequately to identify the relevant market where the anti-trust violation had allegedly taken place. Furthermore, the court considered that the claimant had failed to prove that the auction houses had participated in a conspiracy, noting that they had good reasons for declining to offer paintings for sale that might well have proved to be forgeries. The anti-trust claim is ingenious, but it is probably too far-fetched to have any real chances of success.
It must be said that aggrieved owners face a difficult task. Each head of claim places a heavy burden on the claimant to make good the contention that the prime expert got it wrong. If it is accepted that decisions on attribution and authenticity are expressions of opinion, then the English courts are unlikely to overturn the expertIs opinion, unless the claimant can show that it is irrational: but the claimant may be unable to do so unless the expert has disclosed the reasons for his decisionUand many experts do not.
Other European legal systems consider expertsI statements on attribution and authenticity as binding: they are treated more as statements of fact than expressions of opinion and the courts are more willing to challenge the expert and call on their own experts to render judgment on the authenticity or attribution of a particular work.
In 1995, ChristieIs declined to include a painting by Kees Van Dongen in an auction because the Wildenstein Institute had indicated that it would not be included in its forthcoming catalogue raisonnshift right. The owner started proceedings against the Institute in the French courts, as he had bought the painting a few years earlier with a certificate of authenticity from Paul PetridAs, the acknowledged expert.
The French court appointed two independent experts, who concluded that the painting was genuine. The court held that the Institute could not refuse to include the painting in its forthcoming catalogue raisonnshift right unless there were new material changes in connoisseurship: indeed, if the painting were not included in the catalogue raisonnshift right, the Institute would not be able to claim that its catalogue was an exhaustive compilation of the artistIs work (as it had done). The court added that the author of a catalogue raisonnshift right would be liable if he negligently or intentionally excluded a work from the catalogue, despite the contrary opinion of acknowledged experts (Dumshift rightnil v. Wildenstein Institute and Others, Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, 16 September 1999,
unpublished). Since then, the Wildenstein Institute has been sued by another collector in
the French courts, this time for refusing to include a Modigliani drawing in its forthcoming catalogue
raisonnshift right.
It is arguable that expert committees hold too much power over economic interests to remain unregulated for much longer. Any such regulation might be imposed by statute; alternatively, committees might subject themselves to self-regulation. One would expect any regulations to require that members of the expert committee be acknowledged experts in their field, and, to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, neither the committee itself, nor any of its members, should have an economic interest in the market for works by the artist. The committee should publish a clear methodology for authenticating works by the artist and provide reasons for any decision to refuse authentication by reference to the methodology. Moreover, the committeeIs decisions should be subject to review by the courts or by an independent supervisory body.
Pierre Valentin
Head of the Art & Cultural Assets Group at Withers LLP, London
_Features_Authentication issues
commercial printer
My name is Norman Lassiter. From 1976 - 1988, I owned a screen-printing
studio, Editions Lassiter-Meisel, that was located at 54 Thomas Street,
lower-Manhattan. This studio worked with various artists to allow them to
create graphic images of their work.
The involvement of the artist with the screen-printing process was
essential. At various points, certain procedures were coordinated with the
artists through third parties. The artists or their representatives
dictated all aesthetic decisions.
Editions Lassiter-Meisel worked with a host of artists, among them: Richard
Anuskiezwicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Audrey
Flack, Paul Jenkins, Theodore Stamos and Frank Stella.
A quick overview of the screen-printing process as performed at Editions
Lassiter-Meisel:
_ Screen-printing is a stencil medium.
_ The process involves the creation of a stencil from artwork prepared by
the artist.
_ The artwork usually consists of a transparent overlay (either
photographic or drawn) used to expose a light-sensitive screen
material to produce a stencil.
_ This stencil is used to apply an ink to paper, board, canvas or other
surfaces.
In the case of Andy Warhol, Rupert Smith or Smith's representative
brought a transparency(acetate) to my studio. We would produce a stencil
from that transparency( acetate) and, normally, the stencil would be taken
back to Mr. Smith"s studio where it was used in proofing, printing and
painting
Andy Warhol's work.
At some point, when work was backed up at Rupert Smith"s studio we assisted
Mr. Smith
in the printing process. All colors were mixed by Mr. Smith , Robert , Stephen
and Jean-Paul. When we were doing the printing, Rupert
Smith or one of his representatives would check the work when we finished.
Normally, several proofs were produced from each image
and those were used to create the final piece of art. It is my
understanding that Mr. Smith or his
reps would show the work to Andy Warhol for approval.
The staff at Editions Lassiter-Meisel never made decisions as to
color or image. At all times when we were involved in the printing
process, all creative decisions were forwarded and
coordinated by Rupert Smith or his assistants.
All separations and other artwork used in the preparation of stencils,
proofs, prints and paintings were returned to Rupert Smith. All stencils
printed
at Editions Lassiter-Meisel were destroyed.
At no time did the staff at Editions Lassiter-Meisel ever have any direct
professional contact with Mr. Andy Warhol.
At no time did Andy Warhol ever visit Editions Lassiter-Meisel to watch his
work being created.
studio, Editions Lassiter-Meisel, that was located at 54 Thomas Street,
lower-Manhattan. This studio worked with various artists to allow them to
create graphic images of their work.
The involvement of the artist with the screen-printing process was
essential. At various points, certain procedures were coordinated with the
artists through third parties. The artists or their representatives
dictated all aesthetic decisions.
Editions Lassiter-Meisel worked with a host of artists, among them: Richard
Anuskiezwicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Audrey
Flack, Paul Jenkins, Theodore Stamos and Frank Stella.
A quick overview of the screen-printing process as performed at Editions
Lassiter-Meisel:
_ Screen-printing is a stencil medium.
_ The process involves the creation of a stencil from artwork prepared by
the artist.
_ The artwork usually consists of a transparent overlay (either
photographic or drawn) used to expose a light-sensitive screen
material to produce a stencil.
_ This stencil is used to apply an ink to paper, board, canvas or other
surfaces.
In the case of Andy Warhol, Rupert Smith or Smith's representative
brought a transparency(acetate) to my studio. We would produce a stencil
from that transparency( acetate) and, normally, the stencil would be taken
back to Mr. Smith"s studio where it was used in proofing, printing and
painting
Andy Warhol's work.
At some point, when work was backed up at Rupert Smith"s studio we assisted
Mr. Smith
in the printing process. All colors were mixed by Mr. Smith , Robert , Stephen
and Jean-Paul. When we were doing the printing, Rupert
Smith or one of his representatives would check the work when we finished.
Normally, several proofs were produced from each image
and those were used to create the final piece of art. It is my
understanding that Mr. Smith or his
reps would show the work to Andy Warhol for approval.
The staff at Editions Lassiter-Meisel never made decisions as to
color or image. At all times when we were involved in the printing
process, all creative decisions were forwarded and
coordinated by Rupert Smith or his assistants.
All separations and other artwork used in the preparation of stencils,
proofs, prints and paintings were returned to Rupert Smith. All stencils
printed
at Editions Lassiter-Meisel were destroyed.
At no time did the staff at Editions Lassiter-Meisel ever have any direct
professional contact with Mr. Andy Warhol.
At no time did Andy Warhol ever visit Editions Lassiter-Meisel to watch his
work being created.
VANITY FAIR
JUDGING ANDY
Signed by the artist, certified by his estate - it’s got to be an original Andy Warhol, right? Not unless the Warhol authentication board says so. But dealers and collectors are crying foul over the four-member board’s perplexing verdicts, which have turned high-priced art into wall decoration
BY MICHAEL SHNAYERSON
They tend to look nervous as they come, bearing their packages, to the red-brick warehouse on far-west 20th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Up on the seventh floor of the Andy Warhol estate building, they add prints and paintings to the pile that gathers there three times a year. Soon enough, they get a telltale letter from the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Some return to pick up their works with obvious relief, but many, many others storm back in grief or rage. “It’s a depressing job,” admitted a young elevator man on duty to a stunned collector on the way down not long ago. “People have so much hope, and they come out just crushed.”
In the netherworld of great artists’ estates, some panel of experts is usually on tap to determine the authenticity of once humble paintings that now sell for millions of dollars. They may debate, they may equivocate. None, though, has seemed so capricious as the Andy Warhol board. None has stirred such indignation, such loathing, and such fear.
Much of the fault lies with the artist himself. Sixteen years after his untimely death at 58 from complications following gallbladder surgery, Warhol is the hottest name, by far, in modern art. His silkscreened prints, with their globally recognized images, have doubled in value in the last three to five years. Prices for his important paintings have risen as much as tenfold in that period.
But as demand has increased, so has the number of forgeries. “Warhol is the most famous artist in America,” says Manhattan art dealer John Woodward, “and the most faked.” Forgers have a field day because Warhol was also among the world’s most prolific artists - hundreds of paintings, thousands of prints - thanks to his pioneering production of “mechanized” art, for which he employed helpers both inside and outside his “Factory” sites. Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals. Often, as a result, the Warhol board is simply blamed as the messenger of bad news to hoodwinked buyers.
For some time, though, disturbing stories have wafted out from that red-brick building into the art world. Gallery owners and dealers have submitted works signed by Warhol or authenticated by the executors of the artist’s estate, only to have the board declare them, in its words, “not the work of Andy Warhol.” Works that Warhol discussed or produced in the company of Factory assistants have been denied despite multiple affidavits from those assistants. The board has even reversed its own judgments, creating huge confusion.
Unlike some such boards - sculptor Alexander Calder’s, for example - the Warhol board never officially explains why it’s denied authenticity to a work. That would help the forgers. So an owner is left to come up with his own theory for why the painting he bought in good faith for perhaps several hundred thousand dollars or more is now worthless.
Nor do the owners have any recourse: to have their works reviewed, they have to sign a contract by which they forgo any right to a legal appeal. The contract says the board will issue “merely an opinion,” but the board’s opinion is, like a king’s, the only one that counts, and so over this huge domain of the global art market the board’s power is absolute.
To a wide range of disgruntled gallery owners, dealers, and collectors contacted by Vanity Fair, those opinions are suspect. Few such boards, they observe, are linked to a foundation that has had troves of the late artist’s work to sell - a potential conflict of interest. Critics say the board plays favorites: the same painting may be authenticated when submitted by one dealer, they suggest, but denied if submitted by a less established one.
Underlying many of the stories is an issue more philosophical than financial. When the board declares work “not the work of Andy Warhol,” does it just mean actual fakes? Or does it, as many of the stories suggest, often mean works that were by Warhol, but not in the board’s opinion intended by the artist to be shown or sold in art?
And if so, how do the board’s members have the gall to judge that?
Joe Simon, a U.S.-born filmmaker and British art-world habitué, has spent most of the last two years pondering that very question. His harrowing odyssey with the Warhol authentication board began soon after July 2001, when he found a buyer, through a London gallery, for a Warhol painting he’d bought in 1989. Simon had paid $195,000 for the work, a red silkscreened self-portrait done in 1965. His buyer had agreed to pay $2 million. The only condition was that Simon submit the work to the Warhol authentication board.
(The buyer was told by Georg Frei, a consultant for the Warhol Authentication Board that it was best if the painting was submitted to the authentication board. Mr. Simon was told by the board that it would add interest to the painting if it was submitted and included in the new catalogue raisonne which the board are involved in)
Simon did so without hesitation, signing the legal waiver that explained, among other matters, the board’s rating system: “A” for “work of Andy Warhol,” “B” for “not the work of Andy Warhol,” and “C” for “not able at this time to form an opinion.” Shortly after, Simon was faxed a letter with the verdict: a B. He was floored.
As far as Simon could see, the painting had an impeccable provenance. Before his purchase of it from the Lang & O’Hara gallery in New York, the 24-by-20-inch work (synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas) had been handled by Christie’s auction house and by Ronald Feldman, a well-known Manhattan dealer long associated with the artist. It had also been examined by Fred Hughes, Warhol’s executor and the late chairman of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, who wrote and signed an authentication on the back of the painting. “And before I bought it, having known Fred forever, I rang him at home and discussed it with him,” Simon recalls. “the irony is that he owned one of the portraits himself.”
Simon had moved in Warhol circles since coming to New York as a teenager and landing a job as an assistant for Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (as well as Jacqueline Kennedy at Doubleday). Handsome and charming, he slid easily into the factory crowd and knew Warhol personally. Over the years, as he became a movie producer (Richard III), various artists, including David Hockney, painted portraits of him. When the board denied his Warhol self-portrait in early 2002, Simon was trying to produce a sequel to the 1994 drag-queen camp classic The Adventured of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Appalled at what he felt to be a gross injustice, he put his work aside and embarked on a full-time campaign to prove his painting was real. It was a campaign that would immerse him in the creative chaos of Warhol’s early Factory years, even as it deepened his suspicions of the authentication board.
By the late summer of 1965, as Simon already knew, Warhol at 37 had made the leap from commercial designer to Pop-art pioneer, and all but burned out as he did. His first canvases - comic-book characters, Campbell’s-soup cans - had been painstakingly hand-painted, but he soon moved on to silkscreening, which hardly any other artist had tried. Not only was it faster and more profitable, but the assembly-line process of silkscreening seemed perfect for the iconic images he was producing.
By now Warhol’s passion had also shifted from painting to moviemaking. It was easier - and more fun. The Factory had become a Pop version of a Hollywood studio, with Warhol-named “starts” - Baby Jane Holzer, Viva, Ultra Violet - making mind-numbingly long films of people sleeping or kissing. Warhol was also using a new handheld tape recorder to “write” a novel called A: A Novel. On the fringe of this scene, as Simon learned, was a young magazine publisher names Richard Ekstract, who’d just struck a deal with the artist. In exchange for having Warhol sit the cover interview for his trade magazine Tape Recording, Ekstract called an executive he knew over at Norelco and persuaded him to lend Warhol one of the world’s first video recorders and cameras - a $15,000 novelty.
Warhol was thrilled: how much easier to make movies with it than with a 16-mm. camera! When the short tryout period ended, Ekstract says, Warhol asked to keep the camera and recorder, with plenty of videotape, for six more months. In return, he would give silkscreened self-portraits to Ekstract himself and half a dozen others who’d made possible the extended loan and a related party to celebrate Warhol as an underground filmmaker. Such were the origins, Ekstract explained to Joe Simon, of Simon’s own painting.
Because Warhol was so busy, Ekstract added, and because the self-portraits were for barter, not cash, Warhol delegated more of the creative work than usual. Typically, Warhol sent the image he’d chosen to a downtown studio to have a silkscreen made. When the silkscreen came back to the Factory, Warhol and an assistant produced the painting from it. This time, however, Warhol told Ekstract to have a silkscreen printer do that final step with Andy’s guidance. The point, Ekstract said with a laugh, was to save money. “He was too cheap to do it himself!”
Up at the Factory, Ekstract recalled, Warhol approved the paintings. Ekstract, who paid for the silkscreening, kept one for himself. One of the others went to an advertising man. That one, Simon determined after more sleuthing, was the one he’d bought in 1989.
Ekstract, 72, has come a long way since the early days of Tape Recording. He’s published some 20 trade and consumer magazines, including the new Hamptons Cottages & Gardens. He’s an art collector, keeps an apartment on Gracie Square in New York, and has a radically contemporary home on seven and a half acres in Sagaponack, Long Island, that looks like a lunar-landing module. As Simon recounted his frustrations with the board, Ekstract began to seethe. The authentication board had denied his own self-portrait some years before, but he’d shrugged off the slight: Warhol had given him the painting, and he wanted to keep it. Since then, however, more than one of his old cronies had tried to sell their paintings and, like Simon, had had them denied by the board. Ekstract encouraged Simon to keep on with his research. If he prevailed, all seven owners would benefit. If the board turned him down again, Ekstract might be willing to foot a lawsuit.
Simon kept digging. He spoke to Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s Factory film director in the 1960s, who remembered the Ekstract deal and wrote a letter of support. Billy Name, the Factory’s photographer at that time, corroborated Morrissey’s version. Perhaps the most authoritative of the early Factory affidavits came from Warhol’s Factory assistant Gerard Malanga , who helped the artist produce nearly all his early silkscreened paintings.
“The Ekstract situation was an anomaly,” Malanga admits. “We never farmed out another job at that point.” But, he says, “it’s still valid.” After all, he notes, Warhol was always experimenting with different methods. Just because this method was different at the time, he says, “how can the board say Joe’s painting is not real?”
Along with Factory workers, Simon sought out three of Warhol’s early dealers and champions: Sam Green, Irving Blum, and Ivan Karp. All of these art-world figures agreed that Simon’s self-portrait was real. Karp was especially supportive: he, too, had had a Warhol painting denied by the board.
“I was his first art dealer, in 1961, and I was dedicated to his good cause!” the twinkly-eyed Karp, 77, declares of Warhol from the office of his venerable West Broadway gallery, called OK Harris. So Karp was stunned when a buyer to whom he’d sold a two-panel self-portrait by Warhol informed him that the then newly formed authentication board had declared it “not the work of Andy Warhol.”
Karp had bought the painting in the 1960s, knowing full well that its creation had been atypical. A Michigan art professor had contacted Warhol to say that his class wished to produce a Warhol silkscreen, and could the artist advise them? Warhol blithely obliged. When the students were done, Warhol went to visit the class, pronounced himself delighted by the two square panels, one on top of the other, each of which bore his silkscreened image - one in silver, one in blue - and signed the upper one of them. When the professor offered to sell Karp the work, the dealer snapped it up, convinced it was merely another of the artist’s experiments in method, no less legitimate than any of his other works.
To Karp, the proof was in the penmanship. “The signature was the confirming act on the part of the artist!” he declares. “That meant this is what he meant it to be!” As Karp knew, the lack of a signature on a Warhol work meant nothing: the artist produced works in such volume that he often waited until they were sold before signing them. But when Warhol did sign a work, and the signature could be confirmed, how could the board ignore it? “To be uninterested in the signature is extraordinary,” Karp fumes. “That’s the whole thing for authenticators of classical paintings, after all. In my 46 years in the business, I’ve never come across anything like this.”
Karp had no choice but to take the painting back and refund the buyer his $40,000. After stewing for a while, he decided to submit the painting himself. “I figured when I submitted it under my name, from my loyalty to Warhol’s career . . . That they would honor that,” Karp says. It came back with the DENIED stamp on the back of the canvas. Furious, Karp discarded that one and hung the unspoiled panel in his office.
“There it is,” Karp says, gesturing to the wall behind him. As salable work, Karp figures, the small panel would be worth about $90,000. Now it’s just a decorative wall hanging. “And you know what?” Karp says, fuming again at the memory. “I found a paper in my files, from Vincent Fremont, confirming the picture.”
Behind a big wooden desk in his loft-like Manhattan office at One Union Square, framed by rows of art books behind him, Vincent Fremont at 53 has the rumpled, shambling look of a college art professor, and a casual, self-deprecating charm to match. Yet he holds a post of high power in the art world, one that makes a lot of art dealers nervous. As exclusive agent for the Warhol foundation, which was formed in 1987, Fremont decides which galleries and museums will get Warhol shows, and which dealers will get works to sell. From all paintings, drawings, and sculpture that the foundation sells, he gets a commission: originally 10 percent, now 6 percent. Since its inception, the foundation has sold about $150 million worth of Warhol’s art. Fremont, who showed up as a worshipful teenager at the Factory in 1969 to sweep the floors, is now a multimillionaire.
Fremont readily admits that in the tumultuous period after Warhol’s death he authenticated Karp’s double-panel self-portrait. In the absence of any authentication board at that time, he and Fred Hughes took on the thankless job, as he puts it, of judging works that came in for review. “You wouldn’t believe the stories that some people brought, huge packages of stories that were totally fabricated,” Fremont recalls. “It’s much more complicated than you’d think.” In the case of the Karp self portrait, he remembers the circumstances: the Michigan art class, Warhol’s visit. How then could the board later reverse his judgment? “The present board is its own body,” Fremont says evenly. Did the board decide that work done off-site was invalid, despite Warhol’s approval of it? That impression, he says without elaboration, is “understandable but not correct.”
Hughes did most of the authenticating until his eyesight began to fail from multiple sclerosis. As Hughes’s condition worsened, Fremont became the estate’s chief authenticator. (After a protracted and painful decline, Hughes dies in 2001.) Dealers began muttering that this created, at the least, an apparent conflict of interest - one that might lead Fremont to reject works presented by outsiders in order to promote sales of the foundation’s own stock, for which he would get his sales commission. Fremont denies that. “It was never about commerce,” he says of the authenticating. “It was about the integrity of the artist’s work.”
Eight years after Warhol’s death, the authentication board was formed. It would be an expert panel wholly separate from, but underwritten by, the Warhol foundation, which would continue to sell Warhol’s art. One member was David Whitney, a Warhol acquaintance who had once hung a show of Warhol drawings at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. (No relation to the museum’s founding family, he was, and is architect Philip Johnson’s companion.) Another, Neil Printz, was a well-regarded academic, while Georg Frei worked at the Thomas Ammann Fine Art gallery in Switzerland. Interior designer Jed Johnson, a close friend of Warhol’s for many years, was a fourth member, though he would serve for little more than a year - a victim of the crash of TWA Flight 800. There was briefly one other member of the board: Vincent Fremont.
Early on, Fremont says, he realized he was once again in a tricky position: both on the authentication board and selling art as the foundation’s exclusive agent. “That’s when it dawned on me that I should step off,” he says. “I didn’t want the perception of conflict to arise, so . . . I removed myself.”
With Johnson’s tragic death, Fremont’s resignation, and Frei’s decision to work instead on the catalogue raisonné, the board assumed its current roster: Whitney, Printz, New York University professor Robert Rosenblum, and former foundation curator Sally King-Nero. These were the judges who began to gather three times a year, reviewing up to 100 submissions each time. These were the ones whose judgments began to roil the art world.
When paintings and prints from Warhol’s well-known series were denied - the Flower series, for example - one could assume the board thought them fakes. But dealers began to believe that if they submitted several from the same series at once - seemingly from the same source - a certain percentage appeared to get turned down as a matter of course.
“I bought 14 Warhol’s from a major wholesaler,” recounts one dealer. “These were 70s silkscreens. I bought and paid for them without written agreement because the works were not only purchased from the Andy Warhol estate but stamped with the Andy Warhol stamp - a circle - and with serial numbers from the estate. I submitted five to the authentication board. Four of the five got an A. But the fifth got a B. Now what do I do about the other nine?”
Some dealers felt the board was cutting down on outside stock on general principles: the less stock out there, the higher the value of what the foundation still owned. Others worried that the board was making decisions based on quality. “Lets say you have two Marilyns, and one is in better condition,” hypothesized one dealer. “So they’ll say, ‘We’ll authenticate this one, but not that one.’ But that’s not their position to take.”
Dealers became accustomed to having the board deny paintings from well-known series that Fremont, or Hughes, or both, had authenticated on behalf of the estate in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The Karp double-panel self-portrait was a perfect example. In cases like this, dealers wondered if the board had new information, or was quietly correcting misjudgments made by Fremont and Hughes. But how to explain when the board reversed its own rulings, going from A to B - within months?
One dealer submitted two silkscreened paintings to the board and had both approved. “Three months later I sold the first painting for about $300,000. After a few months I consigned the second to Christie’s.” To the dealer’s mystification, Christie’s kept the painting awhile, then returned it without explanation. “Then I consigned it to Sotheby’s. After 15 days, they said they didn’t want to deal with it. It turned out that the authentication board had faxed both Christie’s and Sotheby’s to say that the painting was fake . . . less than a year after they gave it an A rating.”
One dealer passed on to Vanity Fair a letter written by the board’s lawyer, Ronald Spencer, to a New York Gallery owner. In the letter, Spencer called attention to a work being exhibited in a show of Warhol paintings and drawings. Spencer acknowledged that the board had given that work an A, but then informed the gallery owner, “A little more that thirteen months thereafter . . . the authentication board wrote the [painting’s] owner ot advise that the authentication board’s opinion had changed by reason of circumstances coming to its attention.” Now the work was “not by Andy Warhol,” Spencer advised, and it’s a should be immediately changed to a B.
One well-known New York dealer recounts getting an unsolicited letter recently from the authentication board about a Warhol painting the dealer had bought in the 1980s and kept in her personal collection. The letter advised that the painting had been overlooked in the first volume of the catalogue raisonné. “However, if I wanted to resubmit, I was welcome to do that,” the dealer recounts. “The next thing I knew, the painting was stamped DENIED on top of Fred Hughes authentication!
“The value isn’t the point,” says the outraged dealer. “The point is that I made a purchase based on the green light that Fred gave me. Fred was the only person at that point who could authenticate it. Sixteen years later, to be told that it’s a fake - It’s just not acceptable. I want them to be deposed, but more than that, I can’t say. I’ll leave it to my lawyer.”
In the gossipy world of art dealers, no one heard of such rude surprises happening to the long-established inner circle of major Warhol dealers - Larry Gagosian (with galleries in New York, Los Angeles and London), Zurich’s Bruno Bischofberger, et al. (In Gagosian’s case, that’s because, as a gallery spokesperson says, Gagosian didn’t feel the need to submit painting with a clear provenance for review. Bischofberger could not be reached for comment.) And so charger of favoritism arose, charger which one dealer outside the circle decided to put to the test. He bought a Flower painting in Italy, he says, and paid $120,000 for it - “today it would be worth $500,000” - on the condition that the board approve it. He bought it back to New York and submitted it; it was returned with a B rating. So the dealer showed the painting to a more powerful dealer in New York, one who has frequent dealings with the estate. The second dealer agreed it was real, and offered to become a half-owner of it for $60,000. The painting was then submitted under the second dealer’s name.
It came back an A.
Irving Blum, the dealer whose erstwhile Ferus gallery staged a seminal Warhol show in 1963, believes that who submits a painting definitely affects what the board will say. “My sense is that if it’s a charmed member of the inner circle they’re inclined to accept it. And if it comes from another source they’re inclined not to. It’s arbitrary, I believe.”
One well-known collector with longtime ties to Warhol says, “I think the thing is deeply sinister. It’s not that they’re uninformed. It has to do with manipulating an art market: by denying any and every Warhol they can, they only increase the value of what they’ve got.”
Fremont for one, rolls his eyes at this theory, “The authentication board does not have any art to sell,” he says. “It is a separate animal from the foundation. And the foundation’s running out of work. So that’s not a factor.”
By intent or not, says one aggrieved dealer, the board’s penchant for changing its mind about works submitted by outsiders has another, subtler effect on the market. “A major museum will probably choose not to buy from an outside dealer because the authentication board may change its rating on an artwork from A to B,” the dealer observes. “Whereas if it buys from the estate, that’s a guarantee.” The same guarantee, he suspects, comes with paintings sold by the inner circle of dealers.
As he kept up his lonely campaign, Joe Simon heard stories like these. They only made him more determined. The board’s assistant secretary, Claudia Defendi, had offered him one of the well-lawyered lines she says to all owners when they’ve been denied: “You’re welcome to resubmit your work with more documentation.” Later, she would draw a blank when asked to come up with the name of just one owner - one owner in the board’s eight-year history - who had, in fact, submitted more documentation and had his B rating changed to an A. (Actually, V.F. came up with one: Billy Name, the Factory photographer.) But Simon took her words to heart.
Fremont had been encouraged, too. “He invited me to lunch,” Simon recalls. “He advised me to try to trace the history of the piece. I never realized that he knew everything about the painting.” In fact, Fremont had participated in the estate’s authentication of the Ekstract self-portrait, as well as Simon’s, back in the late 1980s. “It didn’t even come to my mind,” Fremont says now with exasperation. “Anyway, I authenticated it with a qualifier. At that point in time, since we didn’t have a lot of information when Ekstract brought it to the estate . . . a letter was attached to the effect that there might be a need to revisit the situation.” ( Mr. Simon discussed at his portrait at length via email, telephone and in person with Fremont before he submitted his painting. The denied stamp and waiver only protected Fremont from his previous authentication)
Simon collected dozens of affidavits from anyone remotely relevant. He got transcripts of Warhol himself discussing the making of the painting. The transcript was provided by Matt Wrbican, an archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both Wrbican and Tom Sokolowski, the museum’s director, were sympathetic to his plight, even though the museum has received grants from the foundation that also funds the board.
All this, along with the painting itself, was tendered to the board for its next review meeting. One day in late February 2003, Simon’s mobile phone rang. It was Paul Morrissey, one of the many affidavit writers. Morrissey had just spoken to Fremont, who remains a consultant to the board, though not a voting member.
The painting had been denied again.
Once more, the board refused to explain its decision. And when approached by Vanity Fair, none of the board members chose to speak for himself. After some hesitation, however, Claudia Defendi consented to an interview at the red-brick building on West 20th Street; Ronald Spencer, the board’s lawyer, would also be in attendance.
Wherever the tens of millions of dollars earned by the estate on the sale of Warhol art over the last 16 years has gone, it certainly hasn’t produced any luxuries visible on the ground floor of 525 West 20th Street. When Spencer and Defendi usher a guest into a tiny office with three tiny chairs around a tiny white table, the effect is rather like pulling open the Wizard of Oz’s curtain.
Usually, one would prefer that a lawyer not be present at an interview, Defendi, however, seems almost incapable of saying anything other than her standard lines, “The board is more than happy to re-review a work if the owner is unhappy and feels the judgment in unfair,” she says. Asked on what basis the board authenticates work, she says, “The board authenticates work if it’s authentic.”
Spencer, a dapper veteran of art-world law, is at least more voluble. “All works that are ‘not by Warhol’ are not all fakes,” he clarifies. “That is to say, a fake is a work created with an intent to deceive. Historically, you have all kinds of work that were not created by the artist but were not created to deceive. They might have been copies; they might have been misattributions.” Just as likely, the board might see works Warhol did create - but not as art. “It has to do with the intent of the artist,” Spencer explains. “If the artist intends to create art, that’s one thing. If the artist intended to sign a baseball cap to give someone his signature, that’s not art.”
Intention is the key, Spencer confirms, no matter how the art is made. “If Warhol conceived the idea, and he then directed someone else to prepare a silkscreen, and he then supervised the process of production and in effect signed off on it, whether or not he signed his name to it, as long as he said, ‘That’s good, that’s what I wanted,’ Warhol created that work,” Spencer says. “no matter whether there were three, four, or five assistants working under his direction.”
The Ekstract and Simon self-portraits would seem to fall squarely within that definition. But Spencer says no. “Ekstract’s story, if I understand you correctly, is that in return for giving him the acetates, Ekstract was going to have produced a certain number of silkscreened paintings - six or seven,” Spencer says. “Why not 156 or 157? Did you ask him that? I suggest you do. Who said six or seven? Did Warhol say that to Ekstract? Is that Ekstract’s story?”
Ekstract has heard this from the board before. “I said, ’These are the people you can trace; these are the people who were connected with this event, who I felt should have them because of their contribution,’” he recalls telling the board. None of them got rich making counterfeit Warhols, he adds, including himself. “I’m a real person, I publish magazines! I have my own money! Whatever success I’ve had has been by being creative and doing good work, not scamming anybody.”
The double-panel Karp self-portrait would also seem to meet Spencer’s definition of what constitutes a Warhol work. But again the lawyer disagrees. “Did you ever see the film?” he asks, in reference to a film apparently made of Warhol’s visit to the Michigan art class where the silkscreen was made. “Ask Karp about that. I think you’ll find that he can’t come up with this famous film. And that nobody will be able to.”
“I never heard of such a film before,” Karp replies in astonishment. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. In any event, why would one have to come up with a film to justify the work of art anyway? Remember, the work was signed - and they don’t deny the signature.” (“The board would not say whether the signature was authentic or not,” Spencer replies.)
Spencer is unflappable even when shown the letter he wrote relating to board’s reversal of judgment over a period of 13 months. “New information came to the board’s attention,” he says with a shrug. “The legal waiver specifically allows for that kind of change. Art-historical community even if it’s only 13 months.”
As for the story of the dealer who resubmitted a DENIED work under a more powerful dealer’s name, Spencer says, “The idea that the board would change its opinion because the owner was an important dealer is so foreign to the way the board operates.”
Spencer, like Fremont, debunks the idea that the board denies outsiders’ works to enhance the value of the estate’s own Warhols. “If one day there are suddenly 100 more Rembrandts on the market, do you think it affects the value of the other Rembrandts? Any art-world expert will tell you it doesn’t.”
Nor, says Defendi, is the board acting in an arbitrary fashion when it authenticates certain paintings of a series and denies other seemingly identical ones. “It seems arbitrary.” she says, “but you have to realize that the board examines every work of art individually.” And the dealers who feel the board is denying genuine Warhols because it questions their quality are simply wrong, she asserts. “The board is not concerned with quality,” she says, “only that a work is authentic.”
How much simpler, by comparison, the Alexander Calder foundation’s authentication board seems! Sandy Rower, director and, as it happens, Calder’s grandson, says his own lawyer advised drawing up a stern contract for applicants. “For many months we labored over language and wording. Then I realized: this is stupid. So we do not ask anyone to sign any contract of any kind. . . . I prefer to have an open process where no one is intimidated.”
Rower takes a broad view of what constitutes Calder’s art. “My grandfather made a lot of unusual things in unusual ways,” he says. “He’d make things for people after dinner. We don’t think of those works as any less authentic than mobiles.” When he does have to deny a work, Rower says, “we always explain why a work isn’t a Calder. A letter from me describes in relatively broad terms why a work isn’t genuine, including research into our archives and records. If necessary, I’ll even go into great detail.”
“Sandy is entitled to conduct his foundation as he wishes,” Spencer replies. “But the first time he gets a claim, he’s going to rethink how he operates.”
A signed baseball cap, as Spencer suggests, is not art. Or is it?
Warhol, after all, was an artist whose work always posed the question: What is art? Or conversely: What is not art? Toward the end of his life, Warhol even began putting seemingly random objects into boxes and calling them time capsules: those capsules are now on display as art at the Warhol museum. If he signed a baseball cap, who’s to say he wasn’t making a work of art with a typically wry, Warholian comment on art and celebrity?
“If you bring a napkin in that Andy signed for you, it’s a souvenir,” Vincent Fremont says. “There may be value in it, but the board will not authenticate souvenirs.” And yet, he admits, “if it’s a drawing - for instance, Halston and others had drawing that Andy drew on menus and stuff - that would be different.” That would be art? Fremont hesitates. “Yeah. In my opinion. But I don’t speak for the board.”
It’s in trying to draw this line, between art and non-art, that the Warhol authentication board seems to get hopelessly - absurdly - bollixed up.
Take the issue of printers’ proofs, made by the printer to determine color, etc., before an actual print run. Sometimes Warhol would give extra proofs of a silkscreened work to the printer as a payment, or partial payment, for producing a set of prints for sale or exhibition. Art or non-art? Fremont observes that all printers’ proofs must be signed and numbered and marked “P/P.” Then, he says, they’re legitimate art. One Warhol printer recently submitted about 10 to the board. “They were all printers’ proofs,” he declares, but none were signed. “I wish I’d had the balls at the time I got them, and asked Andy to sign them.” The board’s response was ambivalent. “Half of them the board said ‘yes’ to,” the printer recounts. “On one they had no opinion [a C]. And the others are B.”
The same printer also has “overage.” “If I need 300 good pieces, I will print 400,” he explains, “because you always have a problem. The majority of them are destroyed because they obviously have flaws. Some would go to Andy. The boy du jour at the Factory might get one.” Art or non-art? One would guess the latter. But, the printer charges, “the foundation is selling this overage! To dealers. You have to buy a block of $100,000.
Fremont says flatly that the foundation is selling no such overage - unnumbered prints from a limited edition. What it has sold are portfolios of unique trial proofs. “Andy would have 15 versions, say, made of one image, to see which colors he wanted to use. The 14 he didn’t choose aren’t any less good; so [dealer] Ronald Feldman made portfolios of those.”
Another former printer, Horst Weber von Beeren, ran off scores of these unique trial proofs in helping Warhol decide which final version of a portrait to go with on private commissions. “Andy should have destroyed the extra prints,” he says. “He couldn’t and wouldn’t. He was a hoarder.” Weber von Beeren has no quarrel with the foundation selling its own trove of thousands of such prints. He just wishes the authentication board would authenticate his own. In the fall of 2000, he submitted five of his eight Liza Minnelli proofs. “And they were authenticated! So I sold them to an Italian art dealer. Then we submitted the last three; they were not authenticated.” At the same time, the board reversed itself on the first five Minnellis.
Then there’s the case of the “Rauschenberg blouse.”
Occasionally in the 1960s, Warhol designed one-of-a-kind clothes with images from his paintings. The “Brillo dress” was made out of paper. In February 2002, it sold at Christie’s for $56,400, after getting an A from the authentication board. From the same dealer who put the “Brillo dress” up for auction, Los Angeles collector Andrew Dodge bought the “Rauschenberg blouse,” a one-of-a-kind garment silkscreened with Warhol’s images of artist Robert Rauschenberg and his family. The blouse had been on exhibit at the Warhol museum for about three months as part of a show called “The Warhol Look: Glamour Style fashion.” It was identified in that show by the museum’s curators as made by Warhol. Still, when Dodge decided to put the blouse up for auction, Christie’s took the precaution of submitting it to the authentication board.
The board denied it.
Stunned, Dodge started researching the blouse, as Joe Simon had done with his self-portrait. He discovered that Warhol had made the Rauschenberg blouse in 1962 for Sarah Dalton, a British ingenue who helped Warhol edit the move Sleep. Dalton wrote Dodge a letter recounting that she was 16 years old on the one night she wore the blouse, to a John Cage concert, and that she remembered meeting Rauschenberg there. She wore the blouse only one, she said, because it was intended to be a work of art.
“I challenged the board,” Dodge recalls, “and they said, ‘The object you submitted is “associated” with the artist, but it is not “made by him.”’ I said, ‘What do you mean “not made by him”?’ He didn’t [silk]screen his own work!” (“If the board used that word [‘associated’],” says Spencer, “it’s not the [same] meaning that Dodge put on it.”) Now, as Dodge observes, the blouse is “a dead duck,” with no value either to another collector or to a museum.
In recent years, hundreds of Polaroid pictures have been finding their way from the Warhol foundation to Bischofberger and other dealers. These are Polaroids Warhol took of the rich and famous whose portraits he did on commission, to great profit, beginning in the early1970s. The Polaroids were used the same way they are in fashion shoots, as rough, preliminary takes. Warhol would use the images on them to produce his silkscreens, but the Polaroids themselves were just a means to an end. ( many of those who worked for Warhol state that these are only drafts )
“We used to throw those Polaroid’s in the garbage,” Bolton recalls. Yet now dealers are hawking them for thousands of dollars each. The subject of one Polaroid, Bolton relates, is a well-known artist. “They are now selling Polaroid’s that I took of Andy with the artist, and a European dealer is selling them - to the artist! It’s insane!”
Timothy Hunt, the Warhol foundation’s exclusive agent for Warhol photos and prints, sees no problem with that. “If Andy hands his camera off to someone else and instructs them to take a photograph, then we still consider that a Warhol photograph,” he says. “It’s Warhol as director.” Hunt says the fact that Warhol kept so many of them suggests he valued them. “I suspect if Andy had caught Sam throwing Polaroid’s into the garbage can, he would have gone berserk.” That Christie’s in the early 1990s appraised the Polaroid’s at 50 cents to a dollar each is immaterial. “The marker clearly doesn’t agree with their appraisal,” Hunt says. “They are selling” - for prices ranging up to $20,000 per Polaroid.
The Polaroid’s are sold directly by the estate and foundation, which stamps them. So they aren’t actually considered by the authentication board - unless a buyer wants to resell them. Can a buyer assume the board would authenticate them? Hunt pauses. “If the Polaroid is by Andy Warhol, then yes, you could expect the board to authenticate it.”
Last winter, Joe Simon and Richard Ekstract submitted their self-portraits for a final time to the Warhol authentication board. The board was due to meet again on June 9. Ever dogged, Simon had even more documentation to show, collected now in a three-ring binder with multicolored, numbered tabs: affidavits, sales receipts, dealer letters, and the like.
With their works still on the pile at West 20th Street waiting to be reviewed, both Ekstract and Simon received curt letters from the board. Once again, their works had been denied.
As a sort of thank-you to the Warhol museum for its support during his odyssey, Simon recently agreed to let designer Philip Treacy - a good friend - create a handbag imprinted with the Warhol self-portrait the board had just denied. Simon wanted a royalty from sales to go to the museum. The Warhol foundation, however, informed Treacy that it owns the copyright to the iconic image. So it, not the museum, will get the handbag royalties.
“Someone has to be wrong here,” Ekstract says one radiant June morning in the semicircle living room of his art-filled Sagaponack home. “It’s either me or them. You can’t be in the middle someplace.”
As far as he and his lawyer can see, Ekstract adds, the board’s rejection amounts to a charge of forgery, which is defamation of character. And so he and Simon are seriously contemplating legal action. “These people don’t know who to pick a fight with,” he says. “We will sue.”
“At the very least,” says Simon; “we want to stop this madness from happening to all the other owners of Warhol art. Someone has to say to this board: Enough.”
Signed by the artist, certified by his estate - it’s got to be an original Andy Warhol, right? Not unless the Warhol authentication board says so. But dealers and collectors are crying foul over the four-member board’s perplexing verdicts, which have turned high-priced art into wall decoration
BY MICHAEL SHNAYERSON
They tend to look nervous as they come, bearing their packages, to the red-brick warehouse on far-west 20th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Up on the seventh floor of the Andy Warhol estate building, they add prints and paintings to the pile that gathers there three times a year. Soon enough, they get a telltale letter from the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Some return to pick up their works with obvious relief, but many, many others storm back in grief or rage. “It’s a depressing job,” admitted a young elevator man on duty to a stunned collector on the way down not long ago. “People have so much hope, and they come out just crushed.”
In the netherworld of great artists’ estates, some panel of experts is usually on tap to determine the authenticity of once humble paintings that now sell for millions of dollars. They may debate, they may equivocate. None, though, has seemed so capricious as the Andy Warhol board. None has stirred such indignation, such loathing, and such fear.
Much of the fault lies with the artist himself. Sixteen years after his untimely death at 58 from complications following gallbladder surgery, Warhol is the hottest name, by far, in modern art. His silkscreened prints, with their globally recognized images, have doubled in value in the last three to five years. Prices for his important paintings have risen as much as tenfold in that period.
But as demand has increased, so has the number of forgeries. “Warhol is the most famous artist in America,” says Manhattan art dealer John Woodward, “and the most faked.” Forgers have a field day because Warhol was also among the world’s most prolific artists - hundreds of paintings, thousands of prints - thanks to his pioneering production of “mechanized” art, for which he employed helpers both inside and outside his “Factory” sites. Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals. Often, as a result, the Warhol board is simply blamed as the messenger of bad news to hoodwinked buyers.
For some time, though, disturbing stories have wafted out from that red-brick building into the art world. Gallery owners and dealers have submitted works signed by Warhol or authenticated by the executors of the artist’s estate, only to have the board declare them, in its words, “not the work of Andy Warhol.” Works that Warhol discussed or produced in the company of Factory assistants have been denied despite multiple affidavits from those assistants. The board has even reversed its own judgments, creating huge confusion.
Unlike some such boards - sculptor Alexander Calder’s, for example - the Warhol board never officially explains why it’s denied authenticity to a work. That would help the forgers. So an owner is left to come up with his own theory for why the painting he bought in good faith for perhaps several hundred thousand dollars or more is now worthless.
Nor do the owners have any recourse: to have their works reviewed, they have to sign a contract by which they forgo any right to a legal appeal. The contract says the board will issue “merely an opinion,” but the board’s opinion is, like a king’s, the only one that counts, and so over this huge domain of the global art market the board’s power is absolute.
To a wide range of disgruntled gallery owners, dealers, and collectors contacted by Vanity Fair, those opinions are suspect. Few such boards, they observe, are linked to a foundation that has had troves of the late artist’s work to sell - a potential conflict of interest. Critics say the board plays favorites: the same painting may be authenticated when submitted by one dealer, they suggest, but denied if submitted by a less established one.
Underlying many of the stories is an issue more philosophical than financial. When the board declares work “not the work of Andy Warhol,” does it just mean actual fakes? Or does it, as many of the stories suggest, often mean works that were by Warhol, but not in the board’s opinion intended by the artist to be shown or sold in art?
And if so, how do the board’s members have the gall to judge that?
Joe Simon, a U.S.-born filmmaker and British art-world habitué, has spent most of the last two years pondering that very question. His harrowing odyssey with the Warhol authentication board began soon after July 2001, when he found a buyer, through a London gallery, for a Warhol painting he’d bought in 1989. Simon had paid $195,000 for the work, a red silkscreened self-portrait done in 1965. His buyer had agreed to pay $2 million. The only condition was that Simon submit the work to the Warhol authentication board.
(The buyer was told by Georg Frei, a consultant for the Warhol Authentication Board that it was best if the painting was submitted to the authentication board. Mr. Simon was told by the board that it would add interest to the painting if it was submitted and included in the new catalogue raisonne which the board are involved in)
Simon did so without hesitation, signing the legal waiver that explained, among other matters, the board’s rating system: “A” for “work of Andy Warhol,” “B” for “not the work of Andy Warhol,” and “C” for “not able at this time to form an opinion.” Shortly after, Simon was faxed a letter with the verdict: a B. He was floored.
As far as Simon could see, the painting had an impeccable provenance. Before his purchase of it from the Lang & O’Hara gallery in New York, the 24-by-20-inch work (synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas) had been handled by Christie’s auction house and by Ronald Feldman, a well-known Manhattan dealer long associated with the artist. It had also been examined by Fred Hughes, Warhol’s executor and the late chairman of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, who wrote and signed an authentication on the back of the painting. “And before I bought it, having known Fred forever, I rang him at home and discussed it with him,” Simon recalls. “the irony is that he owned one of the portraits himself.”
Simon had moved in Warhol circles since coming to New York as a teenager and landing a job as an assistant for Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (as well as Jacqueline Kennedy at Doubleday). Handsome and charming, he slid easily into the factory crowd and knew Warhol personally. Over the years, as he became a movie producer (Richard III), various artists, including David Hockney, painted portraits of him. When the board denied his Warhol self-portrait in early 2002, Simon was trying to produce a sequel to the 1994 drag-queen camp classic The Adventured of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Appalled at what he felt to be a gross injustice, he put his work aside and embarked on a full-time campaign to prove his painting was real. It was a campaign that would immerse him in the creative chaos of Warhol’s early Factory years, even as it deepened his suspicions of the authentication board.
By the late summer of 1965, as Simon already knew, Warhol at 37 had made the leap from commercial designer to Pop-art pioneer, and all but burned out as he did. His first canvases - comic-book characters, Campbell’s-soup cans - had been painstakingly hand-painted, but he soon moved on to silkscreening, which hardly any other artist had tried. Not only was it faster and more profitable, but the assembly-line process of silkscreening seemed perfect for the iconic images he was producing.
By now Warhol’s passion had also shifted from painting to moviemaking. It was easier - and more fun. The Factory had become a Pop version of a Hollywood studio, with Warhol-named “starts” - Baby Jane Holzer, Viva, Ultra Violet - making mind-numbingly long films of people sleeping or kissing. Warhol was also using a new handheld tape recorder to “write” a novel called A: A Novel. On the fringe of this scene, as Simon learned, was a young magazine publisher names Richard Ekstract, who’d just struck a deal with the artist. In exchange for having Warhol sit the cover interview for his trade magazine Tape Recording, Ekstract called an executive he knew over at Norelco and persuaded him to lend Warhol one of the world’s first video recorders and cameras - a $15,000 novelty.
Warhol was thrilled: how much easier to make movies with it than with a 16-mm. camera! When the short tryout period ended, Ekstract says, Warhol asked to keep the camera and recorder, with plenty of videotape, for six more months. In return, he would give silkscreened self-portraits to Ekstract himself and half a dozen others who’d made possible the extended loan and a related party to celebrate Warhol as an underground filmmaker. Such were the origins, Ekstract explained to Joe Simon, of Simon’s own painting.
Because Warhol was so busy, Ekstract added, and because the self-portraits were for barter, not cash, Warhol delegated more of the creative work than usual. Typically, Warhol sent the image he’d chosen to a downtown studio to have a silkscreen made. When the silkscreen came back to the Factory, Warhol and an assistant produced the painting from it. This time, however, Warhol told Ekstract to have a silkscreen printer do that final step with Andy’s guidance. The point, Ekstract said with a laugh, was to save money. “He was too cheap to do it himself!”
Up at the Factory, Ekstract recalled, Warhol approved the paintings. Ekstract, who paid for the silkscreening, kept one for himself. One of the others went to an advertising man. That one, Simon determined after more sleuthing, was the one he’d bought in 1989.
Ekstract, 72, has come a long way since the early days of Tape Recording. He’s published some 20 trade and consumer magazines, including the new Hamptons Cottages & Gardens. He’s an art collector, keeps an apartment on Gracie Square in New York, and has a radically contemporary home on seven and a half acres in Sagaponack, Long Island, that looks like a lunar-landing module. As Simon recounted his frustrations with the board, Ekstract began to seethe. The authentication board had denied his own self-portrait some years before, but he’d shrugged off the slight: Warhol had given him the painting, and he wanted to keep it. Since then, however, more than one of his old cronies had tried to sell their paintings and, like Simon, had had them denied by the board. Ekstract encouraged Simon to keep on with his research. If he prevailed, all seven owners would benefit. If the board turned him down again, Ekstract might be willing to foot a lawsuit.
Simon kept digging. He spoke to Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s Factory film director in the 1960s, who remembered the Ekstract deal and wrote a letter of support. Billy Name, the Factory’s photographer at that time, corroborated Morrissey’s version. Perhaps the most authoritative of the early Factory affidavits came from Warhol’s Factory assistant Gerard Malanga , who helped the artist produce nearly all his early silkscreened paintings.
“The Ekstract situation was an anomaly,” Malanga admits. “We never farmed out another job at that point.” But, he says, “it’s still valid.” After all, he notes, Warhol was always experimenting with different methods. Just because this method was different at the time, he says, “how can the board say Joe’s painting is not real?”
Along with Factory workers, Simon sought out three of Warhol’s early dealers and champions: Sam Green, Irving Blum, and Ivan Karp. All of these art-world figures agreed that Simon’s self-portrait was real. Karp was especially supportive: he, too, had had a Warhol painting denied by the board.
“I was his first art dealer, in 1961, and I was dedicated to his good cause!” the twinkly-eyed Karp, 77, declares of Warhol from the office of his venerable West Broadway gallery, called OK Harris. So Karp was stunned when a buyer to whom he’d sold a two-panel self-portrait by Warhol informed him that the then newly formed authentication board had declared it “not the work of Andy Warhol.”
Karp had bought the painting in the 1960s, knowing full well that its creation had been atypical. A Michigan art professor had contacted Warhol to say that his class wished to produce a Warhol silkscreen, and could the artist advise them? Warhol blithely obliged. When the students were done, Warhol went to visit the class, pronounced himself delighted by the two square panels, one on top of the other, each of which bore his silkscreened image - one in silver, one in blue - and signed the upper one of them. When the professor offered to sell Karp the work, the dealer snapped it up, convinced it was merely another of the artist’s experiments in method, no less legitimate than any of his other works.
To Karp, the proof was in the penmanship. “The signature was the confirming act on the part of the artist!” he declares. “That meant this is what he meant it to be!” As Karp knew, the lack of a signature on a Warhol work meant nothing: the artist produced works in such volume that he often waited until they were sold before signing them. But when Warhol did sign a work, and the signature could be confirmed, how could the board ignore it? “To be uninterested in the signature is extraordinary,” Karp fumes. “That’s the whole thing for authenticators of classical paintings, after all. In my 46 years in the business, I’ve never come across anything like this.”
Karp had no choice but to take the painting back and refund the buyer his $40,000. After stewing for a while, he decided to submit the painting himself. “I figured when I submitted it under my name, from my loyalty to Warhol’s career . . . That they would honor that,” Karp says. It came back with the DENIED stamp on the back of the canvas. Furious, Karp discarded that one and hung the unspoiled panel in his office.
“There it is,” Karp says, gesturing to the wall behind him. As salable work, Karp figures, the small panel would be worth about $90,000. Now it’s just a decorative wall hanging. “And you know what?” Karp says, fuming again at the memory. “I found a paper in my files, from Vincent Fremont, confirming the picture.”
Behind a big wooden desk in his loft-like Manhattan office at One Union Square, framed by rows of art books behind him, Vincent Fremont at 53 has the rumpled, shambling look of a college art professor, and a casual, self-deprecating charm to match. Yet he holds a post of high power in the art world, one that makes a lot of art dealers nervous. As exclusive agent for the Warhol foundation, which was formed in 1987, Fremont decides which galleries and museums will get Warhol shows, and which dealers will get works to sell. From all paintings, drawings, and sculpture that the foundation sells, he gets a commission: originally 10 percent, now 6 percent. Since its inception, the foundation has sold about $150 million worth of Warhol’s art. Fremont, who showed up as a worshipful teenager at the Factory in 1969 to sweep the floors, is now a multimillionaire.
Fremont readily admits that in the tumultuous period after Warhol’s death he authenticated Karp’s double-panel self-portrait. In the absence of any authentication board at that time, he and Fred Hughes took on the thankless job, as he puts it, of judging works that came in for review. “You wouldn’t believe the stories that some people brought, huge packages of stories that were totally fabricated,” Fremont recalls. “It’s much more complicated than you’d think.” In the case of the Karp self portrait, he remembers the circumstances: the Michigan art class, Warhol’s visit. How then could the board later reverse his judgment? “The present board is its own body,” Fremont says evenly. Did the board decide that work done off-site was invalid, despite Warhol’s approval of it? That impression, he says without elaboration, is “understandable but not correct.”
Hughes did most of the authenticating until his eyesight began to fail from multiple sclerosis. As Hughes’s condition worsened, Fremont became the estate’s chief authenticator. (After a protracted and painful decline, Hughes dies in 2001.) Dealers began muttering that this created, at the least, an apparent conflict of interest - one that might lead Fremont to reject works presented by outsiders in order to promote sales of the foundation’s own stock, for which he would get his sales commission. Fremont denies that. “It was never about commerce,” he says of the authenticating. “It was about the integrity of the artist’s work.”
Eight years after Warhol’s death, the authentication board was formed. It would be an expert panel wholly separate from, but underwritten by, the Warhol foundation, which would continue to sell Warhol’s art. One member was David Whitney, a Warhol acquaintance who had once hung a show of Warhol drawings at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. (No relation to the museum’s founding family, he was, and is architect Philip Johnson’s companion.) Another, Neil Printz, was a well-regarded academic, while Georg Frei worked at the Thomas Ammann Fine Art gallery in Switzerland. Interior designer Jed Johnson, a close friend of Warhol’s for many years, was a fourth member, though he would serve for little more than a year - a victim of the crash of TWA Flight 800. There was briefly one other member of the board: Vincent Fremont.
Early on, Fremont says, he realized he was once again in a tricky position: both on the authentication board and selling art as the foundation’s exclusive agent. “That’s when it dawned on me that I should step off,” he says. “I didn’t want the perception of conflict to arise, so . . . I removed myself.”
With Johnson’s tragic death, Fremont’s resignation, and Frei’s decision to work instead on the catalogue raisonné, the board assumed its current roster: Whitney, Printz, New York University professor Robert Rosenblum, and former foundation curator Sally King-Nero. These were the judges who began to gather three times a year, reviewing up to 100 submissions each time. These were the ones whose judgments began to roil the art world.
When paintings and prints from Warhol’s well-known series were denied - the Flower series, for example - one could assume the board thought them fakes. But dealers began to believe that if they submitted several from the same series at once - seemingly from the same source - a certain percentage appeared to get turned down as a matter of course.
“I bought 14 Warhol’s from a major wholesaler,” recounts one dealer. “These were 70s silkscreens. I bought and paid for them without written agreement because the works were not only purchased from the Andy Warhol estate but stamped with the Andy Warhol stamp - a circle - and with serial numbers from the estate. I submitted five to the authentication board. Four of the five got an A. But the fifth got a B. Now what do I do about the other nine?”
Some dealers felt the board was cutting down on outside stock on general principles: the less stock out there, the higher the value of what the foundation still owned. Others worried that the board was making decisions based on quality. “Lets say you have two Marilyns, and one is in better condition,” hypothesized one dealer. “So they’ll say, ‘We’ll authenticate this one, but not that one.’ But that’s not their position to take.”
Dealers became accustomed to having the board deny paintings from well-known series that Fremont, or Hughes, or both, had authenticated on behalf of the estate in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The Karp double-panel self-portrait was a perfect example. In cases like this, dealers wondered if the board had new information, or was quietly correcting misjudgments made by Fremont and Hughes. But how to explain when the board reversed its own rulings, going from A to B - within months?
One dealer submitted two silkscreened paintings to the board and had both approved. “Three months later I sold the first painting for about $300,000. After a few months I consigned the second to Christie’s.” To the dealer’s mystification, Christie’s kept the painting awhile, then returned it without explanation. “Then I consigned it to Sotheby’s. After 15 days, they said they didn’t want to deal with it. It turned out that the authentication board had faxed both Christie’s and Sotheby’s to say that the painting was fake . . . less than a year after they gave it an A rating.”
One dealer passed on to Vanity Fair a letter written by the board’s lawyer, Ronald Spencer, to a New York Gallery owner. In the letter, Spencer called attention to a work being exhibited in a show of Warhol paintings and drawings. Spencer acknowledged that the board had given that work an A, but then informed the gallery owner, “A little more that thirteen months thereafter . . . the authentication board wrote the [painting’s] owner ot advise that the authentication board’s opinion had changed by reason of circumstances coming to its attention.” Now the work was “not by Andy Warhol,” Spencer advised, and it’s a should be immediately changed to a B.
One well-known New York dealer recounts getting an unsolicited letter recently from the authentication board about a Warhol painting the dealer had bought in the 1980s and kept in her personal collection. The letter advised that the painting had been overlooked in the first volume of the catalogue raisonné. “However, if I wanted to resubmit, I was welcome to do that,” the dealer recounts. “The next thing I knew, the painting was stamped DENIED on top of Fred Hughes authentication!
“The value isn’t the point,” says the outraged dealer. “The point is that I made a purchase based on the green light that Fred gave me. Fred was the only person at that point who could authenticate it. Sixteen years later, to be told that it’s a fake - It’s just not acceptable. I want them to be deposed, but more than that, I can’t say. I’ll leave it to my lawyer.”
In the gossipy world of art dealers, no one heard of such rude surprises happening to the long-established inner circle of major Warhol dealers - Larry Gagosian (with galleries in New York, Los Angeles and London), Zurich’s Bruno Bischofberger, et al. (In Gagosian’s case, that’s because, as a gallery spokesperson says, Gagosian didn’t feel the need to submit painting with a clear provenance for review. Bischofberger could not be reached for comment.) And so charger of favoritism arose, charger which one dealer outside the circle decided to put to the test. He bought a Flower painting in Italy, he says, and paid $120,000 for it - “today it would be worth $500,000” - on the condition that the board approve it. He bought it back to New York and submitted it; it was returned with a B rating. So the dealer showed the painting to a more powerful dealer in New York, one who has frequent dealings with the estate. The second dealer agreed it was real, and offered to become a half-owner of it for $60,000. The painting was then submitted under the second dealer’s name.
It came back an A.
Irving Blum, the dealer whose erstwhile Ferus gallery staged a seminal Warhol show in 1963, believes that who submits a painting definitely affects what the board will say. “My sense is that if it’s a charmed member of the inner circle they’re inclined to accept it. And if it comes from another source they’re inclined not to. It’s arbitrary, I believe.”
One well-known collector with longtime ties to Warhol says, “I think the thing is deeply sinister. It’s not that they’re uninformed. It has to do with manipulating an art market: by denying any and every Warhol they can, they only increase the value of what they’ve got.”
Fremont for one, rolls his eyes at this theory, “The authentication board does not have any art to sell,” he says. “It is a separate animal from the foundation. And the foundation’s running out of work. So that’s not a factor.”
By intent or not, says one aggrieved dealer, the board’s penchant for changing its mind about works submitted by outsiders has another, subtler effect on the market. “A major museum will probably choose not to buy from an outside dealer because the authentication board may change its rating on an artwork from A to B,” the dealer observes. “Whereas if it buys from the estate, that’s a guarantee.” The same guarantee, he suspects, comes with paintings sold by the inner circle of dealers.
As he kept up his lonely campaign, Joe Simon heard stories like these. They only made him more determined. The board’s assistant secretary, Claudia Defendi, had offered him one of the well-lawyered lines she says to all owners when they’ve been denied: “You’re welcome to resubmit your work with more documentation.” Later, she would draw a blank when asked to come up with the name of just one owner - one owner in the board’s eight-year history - who had, in fact, submitted more documentation and had his B rating changed to an A. (Actually, V.F. came up with one: Billy Name, the Factory photographer.) But Simon took her words to heart.
Fremont had been encouraged, too. “He invited me to lunch,” Simon recalls. “He advised me to try to trace the history of the piece. I never realized that he knew everything about the painting.” In fact, Fremont had participated in the estate’s authentication of the Ekstract self-portrait, as well as Simon’s, back in the late 1980s. “It didn’t even come to my mind,” Fremont says now with exasperation. “Anyway, I authenticated it with a qualifier. At that point in time, since we didn’t have a lot of information when Ekstract brought it to the estate . . . a letter was attached to the effect that there might be a need to revisit the situation.” ( Mr. Simon discussed at his portrait at length via email, telephone and in person with Fremont before he submitted his painting. The denied stamp and waiver only protected Fremont from his previous authentication)
Simon collected dozens of affidavits from anyone remotely relevant. He got transcripts of Warhol himself discussing the making of the painting. The transcript was provided by Matt Wrbican, an archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both Wrbican and Tom Sokolowski, the museum’s director, were sympathetic to his plight, even though the museum has received grants from the foundation that also funds the board.
All this, along with the painting itself, was tendered to the board for its next review meeting. One day in late February 2003, Simon’s mobile phone rang. It was Paul Morrissey, one of the many affidavit writers. Morrissey had just spoken to Fremont, who remains a consultant to the board, though not a voting member.
The painting had been denied again.
Once more, the board refused to explain its decision. And when approached by Vanity Fair, none of the board members chose to speak for himself. After some hesitation, however, Claudia Defendi consented to an interview at the red-brick building on West 20th Street; Ronald Spencer, the board’s lawyer, would also be in attendance.
Wherever the tens of millions of dollars earned by the estate on the sale of Warhol art over the last 16 years has gone, it certainly hasn’t produced any luxuries visible on the ground floor of 525 West 20th Street. When Spencer and Defendi usher a guest into a tiny office with three tiny chairs around a tiny white table, the effect is rather like pulling open the Wizard of Oz’s curtain.
Usually, one would prefer that a lawyer not be present at an interview, Defendi, however, seems almost incapable of saying anything other than her standard lines, “The board is more than happy to re-review a work if the owner is unhappy and feels the judgment in unfair,” she says. Asked on what basis the board authenticates work, she says, “The board authenticates work if it’s authentic.”
Spencer, a dapper veteran of art-world law, is at least more voluble. “All works that are ‘not by Warhol’ are not all fakes,” he clarifies. “That is to say, a fake is a work created with an intent to deceive. Historically, you have all kinds of work that were not created by the artist but were not created to deceive. They might have been copies; they might have been misattributions.” Just as likely, the board might see works Warhol did create - but not as art. “It has to do with the intent of the artist,” Spencer explains. “If the artist intends to create art, that’s one thing. If the artist intended to sign a baseball cap to give someone his signature, that’s not art.”
Intention is the key, Spencer confirms, no matter how the art is made. “If Warhol conceived the idea, and he then directed someone else to prepare a silkscreen, and he then supervised the process of production and in effect signed off on it, whether or not he signed his name to it, as long as he said, ‘That’s good, that’s what I wanted,’ Warhol created that work,” Spencer says. “no matter whether there were three, four, or five assistants working under his direction.”
The Ekstract and Simon self-portraits would seem to fall squarely within that definition. But Spencer says no. “Ekstract’s story, if I understand you correctly, is that in return for giving him the acetates, Ekstract was going to have produced a certain number of silkscreened paintings - six or seven,” Spencer says. “Why not 156 or 157? Did you ask him that? I suggest you do. Who said six or seven? Did Warhol say that to Ekstract? Is that Ekstract’s story?”
Ekstract has heard this from the board before. “I said, ’These are the people you can trace; these are the people who were connected with this event, who I felt should have them because of their contribution,’” he recalls telling the board. None of them got rich making counterfeit Warhols, he adds, including himself. “I’m a real person, I publish magazines! I have my own money! Whatever success I’ve had has been by being creative and doing good work, not scamming anybody.”
The double-panel Karp self-portrait would also seem to meet Spencer’s definition of what constitutes a Warhol work. But again the lawyer disagrees. “Did you ever see the film?” he asks, in reference to a film apparently made of Warhol’s visit to the Michigan art class where the silkscreen was made. “Ask Karp about that. I think you’ll find that he can’t come up with this famous film. And that nobody will be able to.”
“I never heard of such a film before,” Karp replies in astonishment. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. In any event, why would one have to come up with a film to justify the work of art anyway? Remember, the work was signed - and they don’t deny the signature.” (“The board would not say whether the signature was authentic or not,” Spencer replies.)
Spencer is unflappable even when shown the letter he wrote relating to board’s reversal of judgment over a period of 13 months. “New information came to the board’s attention,” he says with a shrug. “The legal waiver specifically allows for that kind of change. Art-historical community even if it’s only 13 months.”
As for the story of the dealer who resubmitted a DENIED work under a more powerful dealer’s name, Spencer says, “The idea that the board would change its opinion because the owner was an important dealer is so foreign to the way the board operates.”
Spencer, like Fremont, debunks the idea that the board denies outsiders’ works to enhance the value of the estate’s own Warhols. “If one day there are suddenly 100 more Rembrandts on the market, do you think it affects the value of the other Rembrandts? Any art-world expert will tell you it doesn’t.”
Nor, says Defendi, is the board acting in an arbitrary fashion when it authenticates certain paintings of a series and denies other seemingly identical ones. “It seems arbitrary.” she says, “but you have to realize that the board examines every work of art individually.” And the dealers who feel the board is denying genuine Warhols because it questions their quality are simply wrong, she asserts. “The board is not concerned with quality,” she says, “only that a work is authentic.”
How much simpler, by comparison, the Alexander Calder foundation’s authentication board seems! Sandy Rower, director and, as it happens, Calder’s grandson, says his own lawyer advised drawing up a stern contract for applicants. “For many months we labored over language and wording. Then I realized: this is stupid. So we do not ask anyone to sign any contract of any kind. . . . I prefer to have an open process where no one is intimidated.”
Rower takes a broad view of what constitutes Calder’s art. “My grandfather made a lot of unusual things in unusual ways,” he says. “He’d make things for people after dinner. We don’t think of those works as any less authentic than mobiles.” When he does have to deny a work, Rower says, “we always explain why a work isn’t a Calder. A letter from me describes in relatively broad terms why a work isn’t genuine, including research into our archives and records. If necessary, I’ll even go into great detail.”
“Sandy is entitled to conduct his foundation as he wishes,” Spencer replies. “But the first time he gets a claim, he’s going to rethink how he operates.”
A signed baseball cap, as Spencer suggests, is not art. Or is it?
Warhol, after all, was an artist whose work always posed the question: What is art? Or conversely: What is not art? Toward the end of his life, Warhol even began putting seemingly random objects into boxes and calling them time capsules: those capsules are now on display as art at the Warhol museum. If he signed a baseball cap, who’s to say he wasn’t making a work of art with a typically wry, Warholian comment on art and celebrity?
“If you bring a napkin in that Andy signed for you, it’s a souvenir,” Vincent Fremont says. “There may be value in it, but the board will not authenticate souvenirs.” And yet, he admits, “if it’s a drawing - for instance, Halston and others had drawing that Andy drew on menus and stuff - that would be different.” That would be art? Fremont hesitates. “Yeah. In my opinion. But I don’t speak for the board.”
It’s in trying to draw this line, between art and non-art, that the Warhol authentication board seems to get hopelessly - absurdly - bollixed up.
Take the issue of printers’ proofs, made by the printer to determine color, etc., before an actual print run. Sometimes Warhol would give extra proofs of a silkscreened work to the printer as a payment, or partial payment, for producing a set of prints for sale or exhibition. Art or non-art? Fremont observes that all printers’ proofs must be signed and numbered and marked “P/P.” Then, he says, they’re legitimate art. One Warhol printer recently submitted about 10 to the board. “They were all printers’ proofs,” he declares, but none were signed. “I wish I’d had the balls at the time I got them, and asked Andy to sign them.” The board’s response was ambivalent. “Half of them the board said ‘yes’ to,” the printer recounts. “On one they had no opinion [a C]. And the others are B.”
The same printer also has “overage.” “If I need 300 good pieces, I will print 400,” he explains, “because you always have a problem. The majority of them are destroyed because they obviously have flaws. Some would go to Andy. The boy du jour at the Factory might get one.” Art or non-art? One would guess the latter. But, the printer charges, “the foundation is selling this overage! To dealers. You have to buy a block of $100,000.
Fremont says flatly that the foundation is selling no such overage - unnumbered prints from a limited edition. What it has sold are portfolios of unique trial proofs. “Andy would have 15 versions, say, made of one image, to see which colors he wanted to use. The 14 he didn’t choose aren’t any less good; so [dealer] Ronald Feldman made portfolios of those.”
Another former printer, Horst Weber von Beeren, ran off scores of these unique trial proofs in helping Warhol decide which final version of a portrait to go with on private commissions. “Andy should have destroyed the extra prints,” he says. “He couldn’t and wouldn’t. He was a hoarder.” Weber von Beeren has no quarrel with the foundation selling its own trove of thousands of such prints. He just wishes the authentication board would authenticate his own. In the fall of 2000, he submitted five of his eight Liza Minnelli proofs. “And they were authenticated! So I sold them to an Italian art dealer. Then we submitted the last three; they were not authenticated.” At the same time, the board reversed itself on the first five Minnellis.
Then there’s the case of the “Rauschenberg blouse.”
Occasionally in the 1960s, Warhol designed one-of-a-kind clothes with images from his paintings. The “Brillo dress” was made out of paper. In February 2002, it sold at Christie’s for $56,400, after getting an A from the authentication board. From the same dealer who put the “Brillo dress” up for auction, Los Angeles collector Andrew Dodge bought the “Rauschenberg blouse,” a one-of-a-kind garment silkscreened with Warhol’s images of artist Robert Rauschenberg and his family. The blouse had been on exhibit at the Warhol museum for about three months as part of a show called “The Warhol Look: Glamour Style fashion.” It was identified in that show by the museum’s curators as made by Warhol. Still, when Dodge decided to put the blouse up for auction, Christie’s took the precaution of submitting it to the authentication board.
The board denied it.
Stunned, Dodge started researching the blouse, as Joe Simon had done with his self-portrait. He discovered that Warhol had made the Rauschenberg blouse in 1962 for Sarah Dalton, a British ingenue who helped Warhol edit the move Sleep. Dalton wrote Dodge a letter recounting that she was 16 years old on the one night she wore the blouse, to a John Cage concert, and that she remembered meeting Rauschenberg there. She wore the blouse only one, she said, because it was intended to be a work of art.
“I challenged the board,” Dodge recalls, “and they said, ‘The object you submitted is “associated” with the artist, but it is not “made by him.”’ I said, ‘What do you mean “not made by him”?’ He didn’t [silk]screen his own work!” (“If the board used that word [‘associated’],” says Spencer, “it’s not the [same] meaning that Dodge put on it.”) Now, as Dodge observes, the blouse is “a dead duck,” with no value either to another collector or to a museum.
In recent years, hundreds of Polaroid pictures have been finding their way from the Warhol foundation to Bischofberger and other dealers. These are Polaroids Warhol took of the rich and famous whose portraits he did on commission, to great profit, beginning in the early1970s. The Polaroids were used the same way they are in fashion shoots, as rough, preliminary takes. Warhol would use the images on them to produce his silkscreens, but the Polaroids themselves were just a means to an end. ( many of those who worked for Warhol state that these are only drafts )
“We used to throw those Polaroid’s in the garbage,” Bolton recalls. Yet now dealers are hawking them for thousands of dollars each. The subject of one Polaroid, Bolton relates, is a well-known artist. “They are now selling Polaroid’s that I took of Andy with the artist, and a European dealer is selling them - to the artist! It’s insane!”
Timothy Hunt, the Warhol foundation’s exclusive agent for Warhol photos and prints, sees no problem with that. “If Andy hands his camera off to someone else and instructs them to take a photograph, then we still consider that a Warhol photograph,” he says. “It’s Warhol as director.” Hunt says the fact that Warhol kept so many of them suggests he valued them. “I suspect if Andy had caught Sam throwing Polaroid’s into the garbage can, he would have gone berserk.” That Christie’s in the early 1990s appraised the Polaroid’s at 50 cents to a dollar each is immaterial. “The marker clearly doesn’t agree with their appraisal,” Hunt says. “They are selling” - for prices ranging up to $20,000 per Polaroid.
The Polaroid’s are sold directly by the estate and foundation, which stamps them. So they aren’t actually considered by the authentication board - unless a buyer wants to resell them. Can a buyer assume the board would authenticate them? Hunt pauses. “If the Polaroid is by Andy Warhol, then yes, you could expect the board to authenticate it.”
Last winter, Joe Simon and Richard Ekstract submitted their self-portraits for a final time to the Warhol authentication board. The board was due to meet again on June 9. Ever dogged, Simon had even more documentation to show, collected now in a three-ring binder with multicolored, numbered tabs: affidavits, sales receipts, dealer letters, and the like.
With their works still on the pile at West 20th Street waiting to be reviewed, both Ekstract and Simon received curt letters from the board. Once again, their works had been denied.
As a sort of thank-you to the Warhol museum for its support during his odyssey, Simon recently agreed to let designer Philip Treacy - a good friend - create a handbag imprinted with the Warhol self-portrait the board had just denied. Simon wanted a royalty from sales to go to the museum. The Warhol foundation, however, informed Treacy that it owns the copyright to the iconic image. So it, not the museum, will get the handbag royalties.
“Someone has to be wrong here,” Ekstract says one radiant June morning in the semicircle living room of his art-filled Sagaponack home. “It’s either me or them. You can’t be in the middle someplace.”
As far as he and his lawyer can see, Ekstract adds, the board’s rejection amounts to a charge of forgery, which is defamation of character. And so he and Simon are seriously contemplating legal action. “These people don’t know who to pick a fight with,” he says. “We will sue.”
“At the very least,” says Simon; “we want to stop this madness from happening to all the other owners of Warhol art. Someone has to say to this board: Enough.”
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