telegraph feb 2004 paul warhola

Next month, Paul Warhola, Andy Warhol's brother is selling off his
equivalent to
the family silver. He is hoping to swell his family's coffers by more
than $3.5 million
by selling some paintings that he was given by Warhol when he was a
teenager - a
series charmingly called The Nosepickers. He feels sad that having clung
on to the
twelve paintings for more than half a century he is now forced to let
them go. Yet
Warhola, a chicken farmer who drives a pick up truck and lives in a
bungalow near
Pittsburgh, where Warhol grew up, wants to leave some money for his
grandchildren.
He should have been rich, he feels. The`Warhol legacy is estimated to be
worth more
than $700 million and some of those administering it get paid more than
$1.2 million
every year from selling paintings in its collection - yet all Paul has
ever received
from his brother's estate is $200,000. Warhola, a jovial 80-year-old
Father Christmas
lookalike who is as proud of his brother as Jed Bush is of George W. ,
does
not give the impression of being naturally grumpy. Yet he cannot forget
the day
that Andy died in February 1987. "I remember me and my other brother
John went
round to Andy's house in New York the day after he had died" he recalls,
in
a voice reminiscent of Andy's plaintive drawl, "It was at 7.30 in the
morning
yet already the executors were inside rummaging around for what they
could lay their
hands on. I suspected they had been there even while Andy was still
dying in hospital.
They didn't want to see us at all." Suddenly any frailty in his voice
vanishes:
"I don't think much of them - they're a bunch of crooks!" he barks. "They
do things just to suit themselves. I don't approve of it - they have
hurt a lot
of people and Andy would never have approved of that." Warhola is not
the only
one who feels bitter about the management of what is probably the
richest artist's
estate in the world. The Warhol Foundation has been accused in the past
of mismanaging
the paintings and other assets left to it in Warhol's will. "We need to
protect
not only the charitable dollars but also the national treasure of Andy
Warhol's
artistic legacy," said Dennis Vacco, former New York State Attorney,
a few
years ago. But now the tide of criticism against the Warhol Foundation
is rising
so fast that as many 60 people, including some of Warhol's friends and
former colleagues
are threatening to take legal action against it. They are particularly
angered by
the behaviour of the Warhol Authentication Board that was set up by the
Warhol Foundation
in 1994 in order to assess which works are genuine Warhols and which are
fakes.



The job of the Warhol Authentication Board, is, it must be said, a
thankless one.
Warhol's prints are, along with Macdonald's golden arches and the
cursive script
of the Coca Cola logo among the most widely recognized symbols of
American culture
- and the most easily reproduced. Truckloads of fakes and forgeries
appear at the
headquarters of the Warhol Authentication Board in New York every year.
As a result,
if you want to sell a Warhol, it is unlikely anybody is going to touch
the work without it first having been given the Board's seal of approval. Yet a
growing number
of people are now complaining that the Board, made up of four people who
mostly have
an academic rather than a personal knowledge of Warhol, have persistently made the
wrong decisions,
and have repeatedly turned down perfectly genuine works - works they were personal gifts by
the artist,
works that he signed, works that appear beyond doubt to be by the
Troll-like maestro
himself.
Of course Warhol himself is to blame for much of the confusion. When he was once
asked why he didn't sign some of his work, he answered: "because I
didn't make
it." How therefore does one judge when a Warhol is a Warhol and when it
is
by one of the umpteen staff and helpers he employed to help him print
his works,
and which even included, at times, the man who swept his floors?
This unapologetically
lazy way of working has continued to cause mayhem in today's market and encouraged apparently inconsistent and capricious rulings on authenticity by the Authentication Board. Its decisions, some claim, are guided
principally
by self-interest. Compared to other artists estates, The Warhol
Foundation is in the highly unusual position of owning
the greatest cache of the artist's work which it continually trades in.
Last year alone it sold more than $30 million of Warhol's work - making
it
a Gulliver in a land of Lilliput Warhol dealers. During his lifetime
Warhol was
believed to have been responsible for creating as many as 100,000
works - possibly
the most that any artist has ever created. "Making money is art and
working
is art and good business is the best art of all," he said. Yet if the
Foundation
sanctioned all these works as 'authentic' there would be a danger that they would all
not be worth
very much - those in its own collection included. Although officially
there is
no connection between the Warhol Foundation and the Warhol Board,
Vincent Fremont,
sales agent of the art collection who earns a six percent cut of
everything sold,
was previously in charge of authentications and is still a consultant to
the board,
demonstrating - argue its critics - that the two outfits are still
closely allied. Members of the board and its staff continue to hold
prominent salaried positions within the Warhol Foundation . Sally
King-Nero is curator for drawings and photographs, Claudia DeFendi
curator for prints, Bibi Khan assistant curator, while Robert Rosenblum sits
on the art advisory board of the foundation. Rosenblum and David Whitney also
have their own multi-million dollar collection of Warhols.
Warhol Authentication Board spokesperson Claudia DeFendi recently issued a statement to the press ‘Warhol was a highly productive artist, and that like many other successful
artists such as Rubens and David, he employed assistants and carefully
supervised them; that Warhol controlled the way his work was made, how it
looked, and was well aware of how many of each subject and series were
made. There are clear distinctions between what Warhol made and what he
did not, and that the goal of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is to
clarify these distinctions.’
Just how the board are clarifying these decisions is a mystery but many of those who actually did work with the artist have their own views.

Warhol
printer Jean-Paul Russell's answer to this is that Warhol always farmed
out his work for other people
to do because that was part of his quasi communist philosophy of how art
ought to
be produced. "I had never seen Andy Warhol even once come down to the
studio
to watch the work being printed," said Jean Paul Russell. "Sometimes he
would ring up to give his instructions over the telephone. Warhol gave
direction
but always left an opening for input from others.".
Gerard Malanga, Warhol's chief assistant in the 60s recalls the first time
when Warhol's work was made out of the studio and out of the artist’s
hands. Art dealer’s Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp went ahead and did a print-run of
the Liz Taylor portrait
without Andy's permission, using ‘Total Color’ as the
commercial printer. Malanga was not in the least worried since
these posters are not true silkscreens but Offset Color Lithos. “These
were made from a 4 x 5 color
transparency and not from the original acetates” Total Color never
spoke with Warhol or Malanga directly; only to dealer Leo Castelli. Warhol was shown the work after it was completed.
This does not take away
from Warhol's art but it certainly goes against the policy of the
Authentication Board.



Leading the campaign against the Authentication Board are two men who
own almost
identical Warhol pictures - which would have been worth millions had the
Board not
deemed them to be fakes. Richard Ekstract, the publisher of the upmarket
monthly magazine, Homes and Cottages and Joe Simon, producer of the
Oscar nominated
Richard III, both own red self-portrait screenprints of Warhol made in
1965. Ekstract's
version was a direct gift from the artist. Warhol and Ekstract collaborated on
making some
video art in the early 1960's,
and Warhol provided him with an acetate, a type of photo negative used
in screenprinting,
as a thank you for lending him $15,000 worth of video equipment. Warhol told Ekstract that he could have it made up as a
series of
prints - so long as he didn't have to pay for it and was shown the
results. Unorthodox
as this deal sounds there are a number of people who can remember Warhol
striking
it including his manager at the time, Paul Morrissey and the curator of
his first
Retrospective in 1965 Sam Green. ."Andy was just so lazy about his art,"
said Morrissey, "But as Warhol's manager I spoke with Ekstract on many
occasions
and I was the one who negotiated the arrangement with Ekstract."." Sam
Green, curator
of the Warhol Retrospective in 1965 and long considered a leading
authority of the
artists work, was shown one of the portraits by Warhol; “Andy was
pushing for
it because he said that it exemplified his new technique for having
works produced
without his personal touch, he wanted to get away from that. At the time
he was
ambivalent about his personal authorship. In any case, the painting is
familiar
to and known by me.” Many at the Tate Gallery in London believe the pictures to be
genuine.
It used a Warhol made from the Warhol/ Ekstract
acetates/photo-negatives to publicise its
mammoth retrospective exhibition of Warhol's work two years ago -
plastering it
on to the top of buses and onto tee shirts and mugs. IN 2002 the US
Government
even deemed it sufficiently iconic to print it onto the 37 cent postage
stamp. Yet
even these prestigious endorsements have failed to convince the Board.
"I feel
very angry," said Ekstract last week. "The collaboration I had with Andy
Warhol was undeniable. There are even photos to prove it apart from the
testimonies
of those who worked with him for decades."
Ekstract has employed one of New York's sharpest litigators, Steve
Pesner to begin
proceedings against the Board. It is a brave move - few have dared take
on the Goliath
of the art world and their phalanx of Pretorian legal guards. Whatever
the outcome
of the trial it will have far reaching ramifications; artists since the
Renaissance
have got other people to execute their ideas, too, and the court case
could usher
in the possibility that their work will have to be reassessed.
The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia is filled with works which were made using the great
artist’s casts after his death and authenticated by his estate, now works such as these may now be
re-evaluated.
"I think opening
up this Pandora's box can only be a good thing," says Ekstract. "These
people have too much power for too long and its house-cleaning time.
These abuses
grow as they get more power. I feel certain a positive thing will come
out of all
this. I feel very optimistic. I think we'll prevail." Others are less
certain.
The Warhol Foundation is used to paying lawyers millions out of their
charitable funds
to fend off their critics and it remains to be seen if Ekstract's
pockets are sufficiently
deep to match this brinkmanship. He may also find it hard to get
witnesses. The
sense of terror the Warhol Foundation inspires is palpable. People will
not speak
openly about what they think of it for fear of retribution but mutter
darkly about
tapped telephones and threatening calls. Simon was just 17 when he
first met Warhol
and bought his first picture from him - a print of Mick Jagger - but it
was not
until he was 25 that he bought his first serious painting. It never
crossed Simon's
mind that the painting, which he had bought for $195,000 from one of New
York's
most established and respected art dealers, was anything but a genuine
Warhol. The
painting had been stamp signed at Warhol's studio and the year before it had
been
authenticated by the chairman of the Warhol Foundation, executor of the
Warhol estate
and Warhol's manager for more than 20 years, Fred Hughes. Hughes had
even owned
a similar image himself. However, when Simon presented it to the board
two years
ago, with a view to selling it for $2 million, he was told it was "not
by Andy
Warhol." "I was absolutely amazed," he says. "It had an impeccable
provenance." "I was persuaded by Vincent Fremont to submit the picture,
it turns out he stamp signed it in the first place. As he had already
denied Ekstract’s his decision was clearly pre-meditated." Like Ekstract, Simon has
got written affidavits testifying to its
genuineness from many of those working in Warhol's studio during the
1960's but
still, the board says "nein." Simon has taken time off from a highly
successful
film career to fight this decision and has been approached by Gosford
Park director
Robert Altman about making a film about his three year struggle. "The board is completely
unregulated
and routinely makes decisions to serve its own interests rather than historical accuracy," he says. Paul Morrisey adds: "I just want to
say that the Board doesn't want
to accept the reality of what was happening and how Warhol worked."
Even, Ivan Karp, the man who first
launched Warhol's career and took a punt on him when he was an unknown
hick doing
shoe adverts, has been told that his Warhols are fakes. Karp, who was
Warhol's dealer
for more than 20 years owned a painting that was turned down that he
remembers Warhol
signing in front of an auditorium of people in a school in Michigan.
Warhol had
been paid by the school to give a lecture on how to make screenprints
and, after the students used
his own silkscreens, he signed the resulting two panel pictures. "For the
Board
to be uninterested in the signature is extraordinary," complains Karp.
"In
my 46 years in the business, I've never come across anything like this."
In 1989, when Karp's picture was presented to Mr. Fremont with all of
its details and history, the picture was certainly deemed authentic . Mr.
Fremont viewed the work and all of the information submitted to him and
was personally familiar with the visit that Warhol had made to the
college. In 1989 Mr. Fremont was attempting to establish stability in
the Warhol market and Mr. Karp was an important dealer at the time. 15
years on Mr. Fremont is a dealer himself, a dealer and consultant to the
board, who owes his position
to the foundation. According to Richard Polsky, author of ‘I bought
Andy Warhol’
works
sold by Fremont go only to buyers who will not resell them into the secondary market, and so dilute
the value and prestige of Warhol' s work.
The
Board washes its hands of any need to give a reason for its decisions.
Its policy
document states, airily: "In forming an opinion as to the authenticity
of the
work purporting to be by Andy Warhol is often difficult and will in most
cases depend
upon subjective criteria which are not capable of proof or certainty."
The
reason for this non disclosure, according to the Warhol Foundation and
Authentication
Board lawyer Ron Spencer is "We do not want to provide a roadmap - or
instruction
manual - for forgers." But by not doing so they are strangling public
debate
on how Warhol created his works. As Simon says, "Now that the goal posts
have been moved works that Warhol signed off on and considered his own to sell are no longer seen as by the artist. Its
that simple...It’s very easy to make a decision which you
are not accountable for, by failing to give the reason
for
their doubts, it is difficult for curators, scholars and owners such as
myself to
respond.” Artists such as Van Gogh, who have had
as many
forgeries as Warhol have a more democratic process “Its only fair;, says Mr. Sjraar Van Heugten, who
authenticates pictures
for the Van Gogh Museum “We believe the owner has the right to
understand how
we came to our decisions”
.
The Van Gogh museum had its own problems a few years back when a Van Gogh “expert”
published his own version of a catalogue of Van Gogh’s work and falsely
claimed that 45 works were fakes, costing the owners millions of dollars
to prove their authenticity.
A leading Rembrandt dealer was on the Rembrandt Research project, which
threw the art market in turmoil after it had claimed that
over 600 of the world’s Rembrandt’s were fakes, until this was proven otherwise.

Having editors of an artist’s catalogue raisonne authenticating work sounds like a good
idea in theory but not so in practice, especially when they happen to deal in the artists work as well.
According to Bob Colacello, editor or Warhol’s Interview Magazine and
ghost writer on many of Warhol’s books for over 15 years many quality
dealers, such as Thomas Ammann, were constantly begging Fred Hughes to
get Warhol to curtail his quantity. In Colacello’s book Holy Terror; they were often pointing out that paintings were not prints, although
they knew full well that Andy was trying to prove the difference
moot-that was what pop art was all about , wasn’t it? there is a limit
to what the market will bear. Enough is enough.” Critics are saying that
now Thomas Ammann Fine Art is in the unique position to do this after
Warhol’s death by co-editing the catalogue raisonne and with their unique
relationship with members of the board.

More galling still for those trying to get works authenticated by the
Board is that
it will often contradict itself - denying the authenticity of a painting
that it
stated as genuine just months before. Horst Weber von Beeren, an artist
who printed
more than 20,000 works for Warhol over a period of eight years is
baffled as to
why five prints he was given by Warhol of Liza Minelli were accepted as
genuine
by the Board in 1999 only to receive a letter a few weeks later saying
that the
board had changed its mind "by reason of circumstance." No other
explanation
was given and all Weber von Beeren knows is that instead of making
about £60,000
on each of his prints, his treasure trove is now worth nothing. Another
who is equally
dismayed by the fickleness of the Board is Liz`Derringer - a glamorous
New York
music publicist. Derringer was known by Warhol as Mrs Rockstar, having
worked for
him as a journalist interviewing rock stars on his infamous Interview
Magazine
for more than ten years. "I first met Andy when I was 16," she says. "We
used to go up to the factory and Andy took us out to clubs and I was
with a friend
of mine who bullied him into giving us pictures by throwing a tantrum."
Derringer
does not know how he made them, only that Warhol gave her two
screen-prints - one
was of flowers, the other of an electric chair. Although the flower
picture has
been accepted as legitimate by the Board, she has been told the electric
chair picture
is a fake. "I showed them all manner of photos of me and Andy including
ones
he had signed and showed all the articles I had written for him over the
years.
But still they wouldn't change their minds. "I don't know what to do
next.
I could sure use the money - I need to buy a house! I'm a successful PR
person but
you can't make that kind of money unless you are Sophie Rhys-Jones and
married to
a prince." Like many others Weber von Beeren suspects the Board of
playing
a numbers game saying that it doesn't want to approve too many pictures
in one go
for fear of puncturing the value of the works it owns. "We little guys
are
competition for them. It's not in their interest to authenticate what we
own because
it might devalue the works owned by the Warhol Foundation," he says.
Weber
von Beeren also thinks that the decision by the Board to term works that
Warhol
didn't personally supervise as "not a Warhol" is madness, because it was
only a tiny minority that he did, anyway. "The present board members
are, as
Andy would have said "Eggheads." They don't have a clue about Warhol
because
they were so far removed from the action. The fact is that working for
Andy was
like working in a sweatshop. For instance, I remember him saying "Liza
Minelli
- she's saleable let's print a lot of them," but he didn't stand there
checking
every one. We had to do that." Joe Simon agrees: "They are treating him
as if he was an Old Master painter. They seem to be trying to say that
works are
not by Warhol because he may not have actually painted them himself -
but allowed
others to do it. But that is as insane as saying that Damien Hirst did
not make
the shark or the glass or the formaldehyde, or that Tracey Emin's bed is
a fake
because she did not knit the blankets. Warhol was a master delegator -
an ideas
man much of whose later art was made by assistants in studios he never
visited."

One critic, Professor Anthony Hanania who is currently working on a book
about the Warhol Authentication scandal feels that the artist's genius was to break

with the fine art tradition, to become the one true heir of Marcel
Duchamp. Duchamp was a theorist, a 20th century Leonardo da
Vinci, who drew the flying machine, where Warhol was more like the
Wright Brothers, who made it fly. Nobody wanted to hang Duchamp on their

walls but they certainly did with Warhol." Paul Morrissey agrees.
“Warhol's ideal artist
was Duchamp, whom he was obsessed with. Andy thought Duchamp's was the
real art. We shot so much film of Duchamp, anytime he was in town Andy
went crazy, we followed him around with a film camera. Warhol called it
"pointed art" because Duchamp would just point at everyday things such
as a urinal and it suddenly became art. Warhol did this with Campbells
soup and Brillo boxes. He made sure the wallpaper company making the cow
pictures used the cheapest paper and had Billy Kluver make silver helium
balloons which would deflate and disappear. He thought he was being hip
and cool , detached from his art. Warhol would have many paintings
made, they weren't numbered or anything. This is Rubens?”
Warhol lawyer Ron Spencer said that its job is to determine the "intent"
of the artist. But with Warhol, whose intention was principally to make
money by
having as many people making as many things using his name at any one
time, his
authorship is extremely hard to track. How little he held his own
artistic endeavours
is clear. "Why do people think artists are special?" he once said. "Its
just another job."

The distinguished art historian John Richardson, who was
one of the eulogists at Warhol's funeral told the board recently, "I
feel that
your experts are behaving in an unnecessarily high-handed way - a way
that is of
more benefit to the Warhol Foundation than it is to collectors or
historians, like
myself, who would hope that the Warhol oeuvre would be treated the way
he would
have liked." Even those working for the Foundation itself appear to have
their
doubts. Tom Sokolowski, Director of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh said
recently:
"I think the Board has made some decisions about what his working
process that
could require further discussion." One thing however, is certain: Andy
Warhol
would have loved the row and the even greater fame it will bring him.
"Death
means a lot of money honey," he once said. "Death makes you a star."
ENDS