spot the Warhol november 2003

Spot the Warhol

From Evening Standard - 04/11/2003 (1003 words)
ANDREW RENTON

ANDY Warhol must be chuckling in his grave over a report in Vanity Fair that as many as one in six Warhol works is a fake. According to the report, works that Warhol "discussed or produced in the company of Factory assistants have been denied, despite multiple affidavits from those assistants". New York is bracing itself for a Warhol washout at next week's sales after a two-year price boom that has seen as much as 4 million change hands for a wallsized Warhol canvas.

Confused? You should be. Warhol deliberately blurred the line as to who made what in the Factory. His estate, a secretive group of purported associates and professional advisers, established an authentication committee in 1995 to judge the status of any works which were submitted to it. The committee issues its verdicts through the estate's lawyer, Ron Spencer, and its assistant secretary, Claudia Defendi. Its assessment criteria are mysterious and apparently inconsistent. Many works that seem authentic have been returned with the dreaded "not the work of Andy Warhol" certification.

Take pity on Joe Simon, for example.

He bought a Warhol self-portrait of apparently impeccable provenance, authenticated by the late Fred Hughes, who was the original executor of Warhol's estate and a trusted associate of the artist's. When Simon came to sell the painting two years ago, a $2 million deal was agreed, subject to authentication. The committee returned his canvas unverified and without explanation. The same committee has been filtering "new" Warhol originals onto a hungry market. Collectors who paid dearly for their works are now screaming conflict of interest.

The problem arises from the way Warhol worked. His New York studio, known with little irony as the Factory, churned out canvases using the simplest silkscreening techniques, often without Warhol being in the building, or even in the country. In theory, Warhol supposedly approved all works that left the studio, but many are suspected to have been squirrelled out of the studio in the marijuana haze of the late Sixties, to be sold on the side.

These works are physically identical to the certified originals, made in the same way, by the same people, using the same screens and paints.

And then there were the paintings that Warhol himself set aside for a rainy day. Charles Saatchi once told me that he bought many paintings directly from Warhol himself, rather than from commercial galleries, visiting him at his Manhattan town house, where classic Warhol canvases lay rolled up under the bed. In this way, Saatchi assembled one of the finest Warhol private collections.

WHEN it comes to designating a work, the law recognises the artist's intent ion. Wa rhol 's game, however, was to give little of his intention away. He strategically deferred to others around him, seeming almost incapable of making a decision for himself.

That was the philosophy that made him famous. The trouble is that art lovers, and art buyers in particular, cling to the idea of a uniquely authored work; that is the only way we can understand what we are looking at.

An American artist, Mike Bidlo, a specialist in copying modern masters, wanted to make fake Warhols, so he borrowed Warhol's original silkscreens to rustle up some new Marilyns. These works, subversive as they are, have been redesignated as the work of another artist. They cost about one hundredth of the price of the so-called original Warhol.

When Brian Sewell in these pages challenged the authorship of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, which the National Gallery is fervently trying to save for the nation with 11 million of Heritage Lottery Fund money and 10 million from private donors, he sent a seismic tremor through the old way of measuring who did what. Sewell argued that the work was, at best, an imitation of the Raphael style from someone in his studio, or perhaps elsewhere, and he made his case by following exactly the same intellectual, critical and forensic route that Nicholas Penny covered when he "discovered" the Madonna in 1991. It raises the question: can we ever be sure who did what at Factory Raphael?

The National will recall with a chill the issue of "deattribution" that hit its last great Rembrandt exhibition in 1989. Several popular Rembrandts were suddenly cast into scholarly doubt. As a result, while you had to queue for a glimpse of the Nightwatch, a side room filled with newly deattributed works was all but deserted. Viewing art is an act of faith. And sometimes it is severely, irreparably, shaken.

The current turmoil ref lects Warhol's laconic attitude to the value we attach to the artist's hand. Stories abound of Warhol being shown work that he would comfortably sign, as if it were his own creation. But Warhol would only back an idea until it lost him money. By the time he was being commissioned for society portraits in the 1980s, he was caught between producing money-spinning kitsch and debasing his own iconic stock. To my knowledge, he was the only great artist of the 20th century whose prices fell upon his death. Collectors got wind of overproduction and feared a flooded market.

RATHER than chasing after an elusive rubberstamping, I think the quest for authenticity is mostly beside the point.

If we learned one thing from Warhol, it is that the value of an artwork lies beyond paint and canvas. What he was purveying was an image rather than the physical materials of a work. It amounted to a commentary on what we would now call "lifestyle". Warhol observed it and sold it back to us. He craved immortality, but he loved trash and produced tons of it. We may never be able to tell echt Andy from Warhols more worrisome, and a new breed of self-designated experts will soon come along to overturn the last assertion.

As Warhol might have said: everyone will have a fake for 15 minutes.