Challenging the gatekeepers of Warhol's legacy
01/03/2006
Alan Yentob shines a revealing light on the secretive world of the Warhol Authentication Board
magine...Andy Warhol: denied is an important television expose of a situation first revealed in October 2003 by The Art Newspaper: the secret decision-making by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. This is the first time arts TV has taken up a viewer's case, which it does even-handedly.
The tale begins at an art world bash, where presenter Alan Yentob is collared by Joe Simon, an American living in London, and learns that he bought an early Warhol self-portrait in 1988 for $195,000. In 2001 he hoped to sell it for $2 million, but the sale was scuppered by the board, which was set up six years after he bought his picture. In the board's opinion, the work is not a genuine Warhol, although it has the Warhol signature stamped on the stretcher, and is certified on the back:"an original painting by Andy Warhol completed by him in 1964. Frederick Hughes." Mr Hughes was president of the Warhol Foundation, and responsible for authenticating the artist's work before the board was established.
Authentication is required by major sale rooms: the "Denied" stamp has seeped through to the front, effectively invalidating it. The board gives no reasons for its decisions and, as Mr Yentob tells us: "When you submit a work, the waiver you sign negates any previous authentications, and gives you no right to challenge its verdict in court." And, "to prevent legal action the board reserves the right to change its opinion about the authenticity of the works at any point in the future." The board's procedures go against all recognised art historical practice, according to Richard Dorment, art critic at the UK newspaper Daily Telegraph, leaving no room for debate about attributions.
To New York, to investigate the workings of this most secret of clubs. From a photograph, the board looks like a happy-go-lucky quartet, of whom only Professor Robert Rosenblum has any significant art historical credentials. No-one is available to speak, but the board's lawyer, Ronald Spencer, agrees to answer Mr Yentob's queries. How does the board justify its secrecy? "If you come to us for our opinion, we're not going to provide a roadmap. You can submit any evidence you want," he replies.
One high-profile victim of this procedure is the dealer Ivan Karp, "the man credited with discovering Warhol". His tale involves two Warhol self-portraits, silk-screened by students in a college under Warhol's instruction, one of which Warhol signed. "He confirmed that he thought this portrait was a Warhol production," Mr Karp says, and sold them on this understanding. The buyers submitted them to the board-who stamped them "denied". Mr Karp had to refund $30,000. "I resubmitted the paintings and they were again rejected." A letter from the board ran: "We do not pass on the authentication of signatures, we pass on the making process of the picture." The paintings were rejected "for having been made under incorrect circumstances". But"they didn't stamp the one with the signature," Mr Karp says.
Ronald Spencer responds: "There is no evidence that Warhol ever showed up at this art school." He dismisses the testimony of Professor Ray Fleming: "He could have signed it 10 years later...If you sign my baseball cap, what does that tell me about your signature?" Mr Spencer clarifies the board's guidelines: "We can all agree that if Andy Warhol conceives the idea, then supervises that assistant's execution, and then approves of that...then that's a Warhol." The problem for Mr Simon is that his picture was one of several made off-site, unsupervised, and that it compares unfavourably with Warhol 's versions. Nevertheless, they were "approved" by Warhol.
Mr Yentob meets a number of witnesses who corroborate Warhol's production practices: Paul Morissey, Sam Green and Richard Ekstrakt. Richard Dorment protests: "The people who were actually there in the 1960s and 1970s are...not being asked what happened. And when they tell, they're being told, no, it didn't happen that way. I think it's one reason why of all the authentication committees I've never heard the number of complaints that we've heard about the Andy Warhol Authentication Board." This riveting programme offers no reassurance with the news from New York "that the Authentication Board has appointed two new members. But the policy will remain exactly the same."
Imagine...Andy Warhol: denied, BBC1, 6/8, 24 January. Presenter/executive producer Alan Yentob. Produced and directed Chris Rodley
_Features_Arts in broadcasting and television
Monday, 1 October 2007
Authenticating Andy artnews
AUTHENTICATING ANDY
Seventeen years after Andy Warhol’s death, controversies surrounding the Warhol Art Authentication Board and the Catalogue raisonné of his work reflect confusion about his intent, his working methods, and his legacy
By Kelly Devine Thomas
Andy Warhol was the most successful and famous American artist of the 20th century. His signature images - the Jackies, Elvises, and Marilyns - are as familiar to us as the Mona Lisa. His pictures sell for millions, and he is represented in virtually every public and private collection of contemporary art in the world. Everybody knows what an “Andy Warhol” looks like.
Or do they? The coeditors of the second volume of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, published by Phaidon last month, would dispute that statement. Warhol himself, write Neil Printz and Georg Frei, didn’t make it easy. Not only did he “deflect those who would attempt to know his work or to discern his hand in it, he disputed the role of the artist as the author of a work of art.” He made hundreds of virtually identical paintings. He overturned traditional notions of rarity and uniqueness. He even suggested that he didn’t care if people couldn’t see “whether my picture was mine of somebody’s else’s.”
“There are so many Andy Warhols,” says Printz. “Everyone has their own Andy. We wanted to look at the Warhol we can see.”
The catalogue raisonné is an ongoing project of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a controversial entity since its beginnings in 1987, when Warhol died, leaving artwork and assets worth more than half a billion dollars and a will directing the most of his assets be used to establish a foundation dedicated to the “advancement of visual arts.” The foundation inherited an astounding trove that people fought over - how much was it worth, who would get what, who was in control - throughout much of the 1990s. In the past decade, the foundation has reaped more than $175 million from sales of works left in Warhol’s estate, enabling it to become a powerhouse in the contemporary-art world as a grant giver, a facilitator of scholarship, and an arbiter of authenticity as well as a source of Warhol’s work. It is the foundation’s role as an authenticator that has caused the most contention in recent years and is threatening to pull it into another court battle.
While the dispute concerns money, it also involves confusion about Warhol’s working methods, his intent, and his legacy. The handling of Warhol’s estate, the complex nature of his work, and the volume and value of what he left behind make it very difficult to clarify his oeuvre. “There have been some disgruntled people,” says foundation president Joel Wachs. “But it’s not the job of the authentication board to think about whether people will be upset. It’s the job of the authentication board to protect Warhol’s legacy and owners of his legitimate works.”
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which was established by the foundation in 1995, has examined more than 3,000 work submitted to it and has rejected about 10 to 15 percent of them as inauthentic. Decisions by the board - whose members are David Whitney, and independent curator, who was a friend of Warhol’s and worked with him Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts, New York university, and curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Sally Kind-Nero, the foundation’s curator for drawings and photography; and Printz - are unanimous and are protected by a waiver indemnifying the board, the foundation, and the estate, a practice that is not uncommon among authentication committees.
Because the board does not explain its decisions - it says explanations are subject to misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or misuse - there is growing frustration in the market over how it arrives at its conclusions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the board has rejected works previously authenticated by representatives of the foundation and has reversed its own opinions about works it had previously determined to be authentic. “I don’t understand the science of it,” says one New York dealer. “That’s what is unclear.”
The authentication board acts as an arm of the six-volume catalogue raisonné project. Printz, King-Nero, and Frei, who is the director of Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich, have travelled the world to document and compare as many of Warhol’s works as possible. Not all works must be submitted to the board to be included in the catalogue, sources say. A work must be submitted if one of the three-member team considers its authenticity uncertain and wants the whole board to see it.
New York dealer and collector Timothy Baum says he was told a year ago that four Flowers paintings - two of which he owned and two that he had sold - needed to be submitted to the board for inclusion in the catalogue. The paintings, which Baum says were given by the late Henry Geldzahler, Warhol’s friend and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of contemporary art, as a wedding gift to a family friend of the curator’s in the 1960s, were rejected. “The works were not signed, but Warhol didn’t sign all of his works,” says Baum. Since the board does not explain its decisions, Baum doesn’t know why the works were not accepted. “They don’t have to give any reason, and they don’t,” says Baum. “It’s shocking.”
Rainer Crone, author of a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s paintings published in 1970, estimated that Warhol made more than 900 Flowers paintings in the 1960s. The foundation’s catalogue records a little more than half that number. The authentication board contends that Warhol was “acutely aware of how many works he was making,” but Crone took the opposite view, stating, “Warhol was neither interested in the exact number of paintings produced nor in limiting the edition.”
“There is this perception that Warhol painted more than he did,” says Brett Gorvy, Christie’s codirector of contemporary art. “The catalogue raisonné has shown how few there actually are in some cases. It has had quite a big impact on the market. People had been looking at his works as a serial; now they are seeing them as more unique.”
Catalogues raisonnés are scholarly endeavours that list every known work in an artist’s oeuvre. They also have an enormous influence on the market. If a work is not published in a catalogue raisonné, it has little or no market value.
Joe Simon, a London-based film producer and collector, has been trying for years to obtain the current board’s acceptance of a Warhol self-portrait he bought in 1989, which was twice approved by previous foundation representatives. Simon and other dealers and collectors have told Vanity Fair and other publications that they intend to take legal action against the board and the foundation for decisions they say have cost them millions. They contend that the board is refusing to authenticate certain artworks in order to increase the value of the foundation’s own collection. As ARTnews went to press, no lawsuit had been filed.
Wachs scoffs at the notion that the board’s decisions are linked with the relative value of the foundation’s assets. He also dismisses criticism that is a conflict of interest for the foundation to be selling works by Warhol and, at the same time, judging the authenticity of works owned by others. “The authentication board operates completely independently,” Wachs says. “The foundation is totally uninvolved in its decisions.”
Dealers and auction specialists say that outright fakes of Warhol’s works are relatively easy to spot. It’s much more difficult, they say, to distinguish between works that were made under Warhol’s direction and those that weren’t, in part because Warhol employed assistants and used reproducible silk screens.
Warhol described the silk-screening process like this: “With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time.”
The board has set out to decide which works made with his silk screens were authorized by Warhol. “There are clear distinctions between what Warhol made and what he did not,” the board has stated. “The goal of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is to clarify these distinctions.”
Among the works the board has rejected is a 1967 two-panel self-portrait produced by a Michigan art class and signed by Warhol, which New York dealer Ivan Karp, one of Warhol’s earliest supporters, bought in the 1960s and later sold. The work had been authenticated by the foundation in 1989 as a “collaboration.” It was authorized by Warhol, with his signature,” say Karp, who is now out the $40,000 purchase price he refunded to the buyer when the work was rejected. “The authentication board does not dispute the signature. They say they do not take the signature into account. How can they say that! The signature is the confirming act!”
Asked by ARTnews if the board views Warhol’s signature as an authenticating act, the board responded, via fax: “The signature is taken into consideration as one factor among many during the authentication review.” The bottom line, surmises Karp, is that “if the board doesn’t like the conditions under which an object was made, it’s not going to authenticate it.”
In general a work doesn’t have to be reviewed by the board for Christie’s or Sotheby’s to handle it if its provenance is solid, although the board has had suspect works pulled form auction, sources say. “With some artists’ estates, you have to secure the authentication board’s approval because clients are looking for it,” says Gorvy. But in the case of Warhol, “this is not currently deemed by buyers to be essential for a work to be sold at auction.”
“The vast majority of what we sell never needs an authentication,” says Ronald Feldman, who commissioned works from Warhol, copublished with the foundation the catalogue raisonné of prints, and frequently buys works from the foundation. But another dealer insists, “You need their ‘Good Housekeeping stamp of approval.’ Without it a work is dead in the water.” Jean-Paul Russell, who worked for Warhol’s printer in the 1980s, says he would never submit one of his works to the board. “what would they tell me? That it’s real?” asks Russell. “I know more about his work than they do.” Russell says he is the owner of a green Hamburger painting that Warhol made on the same roll of canvas as a Camouflage painting. “Nobody would know that story,” says Russell. “The authentication board wouldn’t know why it was green.”
Some critics charge that the independence of the authentication board is compromised by the fact that two of its four members are also employees of the foundation: Printz is coeditor of the first and second volumes of the foundation’s catalogue raisonné of Warhol paintings, sculpture, and drawings. King-Nero, the foundation’s curator of drawings and photography, works with Printz on the catalogue.
Foundation employees often play dual roles or are involved in both the foundation’s business and its scholarly ventures. Vincent Fremont, who worked for Warhol from 1969 until the artist’s death, is the foundation’s exclusive sales agent for paintings, sculpture, and drawings and is also a consultant to the authentication board. Fremont was names in Warhol’s will as one of the foundation’s three founding trustees (with the late Frederick Hughes, Warhol’s longtime manager, and his older brother, John Warhola, who lives in Pittsburgh). He was the foundation’s primary authenticator and exclusive agent for all works sold between 1990 and 1995.
Claudia Defendi, chief curator of the foundation’s collection and coeditor of its catalogue raisonné of Warhol prints, is also the authentication board’s spokesperson. Timothy Hunt, the first curator hired by the estate, in 1987, to catalogue the collection and the foundation’s former chief curator, is now the foundation’s exclusive agent for sales of photography and prints.
Work on the catalogue raisonné began in 1977, when the late Zurich dealer Thomas Ammann started the project with the Warhol’s cooperation. Warhol didn’t keep detailed records of how many works he made. Instead, he dumped receipts, junk mail, and exhibition flyers into more than 600 boxes, sealed them, and called them “time capsules.” About one-quarter of the capsules, which are housed in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, have been catalogued, says John Smith, assistant director for collections and research.
The Warhol Foundation became involved with the project in 1993, when it hired Printz as coeditor. “I wanted to catalogue Warhol like they catalogued Picasso,” says Printz.
In order to do that, the authors examined the voluminous amount of material Warhol had left behind, from his thousands of works - they estimate that he made about 10,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings - to the roughly 1.500 boxes that hold a “vast and staggeringly complicated account of his activities as an artist.” The authors admit that “aspects of the archive, including many of the time capsules, have not been inventoried, nor has it been possible to exhaustively review the entire archive.”
What did Warhol make? When did he make it? How did he do it? When did he put the screen on? How did he know where to put the yellow in Marilyn’s hair? How did he change, and when did he change? These are some of the questions Printz says he and his colleagues set out to answer.
The first volume of the catalogue, published in 2002, covers the years from 1961 through 1963. Volume two deals with the period from 1964 through 1969, when Warhol created more than 1,500 works, many of which are virtually identical. The problem, then, the editors note, “becomes one of differentiation, no longer a question of Warhol versus not-Warhol, but one of Warhol versus another; or put another way, which Warhol is it? - which Campbell’s Tomato Soup Painting? Which Brillo Box Sculpture? And how many of each are there?”
The foundation will publish the next four volumes of the paintings, sculpture, and drawings catalogue raisonné, on which it has spent more the $2.3 million so far. There were discussions about transferring the project to the Warhol Museum, but the foundation’s directors decided to keep the volumes under the foundation’s control. Printz, who took a leave of absence last year to work on the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné, will edit the volumes. “It’s staying with us,” says Wachs. “We want to make sure that we continue the high quality of scholarship we had in the first two volumes. It’s not going to be cheap, but it has to be done.”
Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928, the youngest son of Czechoslovakian immigrants Julia and Ondrej Warhola. His older brother, John, remembers Warhol as a kid who had “all the makings of a priest” and who often abandoned ball games to draw on the front stoop of their home. “He was a blue-eyed, blond-haired quiet kid who never argued,” Warhola told ARTnews. “He was more of a listener. He let you do the talking.”
Warhol moved to New York when he was 21, dropped the a from his last name, and became a successful commercial illustrator. He became an art start in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in his first one-man show. He founded the Factory during the 1960s, a playground for the rich, the famous, and the drug-ridden that also functioned as his work space.
Warhol created his art across mediums, pushing the limitations of painting, printmaking, and film. He shrewdly identified iconic images of American identity, celebrity, and death: Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Munroe, Elvis, Jacqueline Kennedy (before and after John F. Kennedy’s assassination), the electric chair. He was also a successful publisher. He founded Interview magazine and wrote several books in which he set forth views on life, art, and pop culture.
Today Warhol’s work is a cornerstone of the contemporary-art market. His paintings routinely sell for millions of dollars. His auction record is the $17 million paid for Orange Marilyn (1961) in 1998. New York dealer Larry Gagosian recently sold Superman (1961) for around $25 million - the highest price known to have been paid for a work by Warhol. While most evening auctions will feature no more than three works by the same artist, up to five of Warhol’s works may be included, so strong is his market. “He is Picasso of the late 20th century,” says Gorvy.
Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987, following routine gall bladder surgery. Most of his personal belongings - primarily antique furnishings, jewellery, and other odd collections of cookie jars and other objects - were sold in 1988 at Sotheby’s raising $25.3 million and providing the foundation with its seed money.
Warhol’s estate also included a vast collection of his own work: more than 100,000 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs; more than 100 films; 4,000 hours of experimental video and segments produced for television; and hundreds of boxes of archival material. The value of the artworks became the subject of a prolonged court battle in the 1990s between the foundation, which was the principal beneficiary of the estate and took responsibility for its assets in 1990, and Edward Hayes, the attorney for the estate who was hired immediately after Warhol’s death by Hughes, the executor, who died in 2001.
The foundation argued for a lower valuation, because Hughes and Hayes were each due to receive compensation equal to 2 percent of the estate’s value, and because the IRS requires private foundations to give away 5 percent of their assets annually. When it appraised the estate, Christie’s, acting on the foundation’s instructions, applied a blockage discount - a practice that allows an appraiser to reduce the value of an artist’s estate for tax purposes - and arrived at the sum of $95 million for Warhol’s art, bringing the estate’s total value to around $220 million.
Hayes rejected that figure. He sued the foundation, arguing that the artworks alone were worth at least $700 million. A judge settles the matter in 1994, declaring the estate worth $510 million, with Warhol’s art valued at nearly $400 million. A separate investigation by the New York state attorney general’s office into the foundation’s business affairs ended in 1998, with a settlement in which the foundation agreed to strengthen its internal financial controls and to provide, at regular intervals, more extensive financial information to the attorney general’s office and the public.
The foundation has donated almost 6,000 works to the Warhol Museum, which it opened in 1994 in collaboration with the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and New York’s Dia Center for the Arts. Other works in Warhol’s estate went to more than 24 museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which purchased works from the foundation in 1992 at deeply discounted prices.
Some of the works inherited by the foundation were on rolls of canvas. “Many of his paintings were stored un-stretched,” says Fremont. “There wouldn’t have been enough room to store them all otherwise.”
Several rolls of Elvis canvases were in Warhol’s studio after his death. These Elvis paintings are distinct from, and are considered precursors to, the Elvis canvases that were shown by Irving Blum at the Ferus Gallery in 1963, according to the catalogue raisonné. “During Warhol’s lifetime, the studio series remained largely unknown,” the authors note. Crone did not include them in his catalogue. The studio types were never exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime because they were all damaged, according to Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s. Warhol wrote about the incident in POPism: “One night that summer there was a terrible thunderstorm and when I came in the next morning, the Elvises were sopping wet - I had to do them all over again.” Malanga says Warhol asked him to destroy the rolls.
He says he destroyed some of them but became distracted and forgot to destroy all of them. “When these paintings started popping up in 1993, I wondered where they were coming from,” Malanga recalls. “They differed from the Ferus ones in the cropping of the heads and the cowboy boots.” According to the catalogue raisonné, Elvis is about sex inches shorter in the studio types than in those shown at Ferus. Says Fremont, “If Warhol had wanted to destroy them, he would have. He had 20-plus years to do that.”
One of the studio rolls, Elvis 11 Time, was kept intact and donated by the foundation to the Warhol Museum. The catalogue raisonné notes that another studio roll, Elvis 6 Times, was divided by the foundation in 2001 into three distinct works, featuring, respectively, one Elvis impression, three impressions, and two impressions. “That was a determination that was made with a lot of thought,” says Fremont of the works, which were later sold. If the roll had been exhibited intact during Warhol’s lifetime, Fremont says, “it wouldn’t have been cut.” He adds that there was a precedent for the foundations action: Warhol himself had cut a studio-type double Elvis from a roll and sold it to a collection in Japan in February 1987, shortly before his death that same month.
An advantage of buying works from the foundation, aside from the fact that they were sold to dealers at a discount, is that works with a foundation provenance are marked with inventory numbers, beginning with PA for painting, PO for portrait, and SC for sculpture. The authentication board says it has never rejected a work originating from the estate. Many of them are never submitted. “The message is that if you buy from the foundation, it will be OK forever,” says a New York dealer who has had works rejected by the board. “But if it doesn’t come from the foundation, it can be fake tomorrow.”
Fremont and Hunt do not submit the works they sell on behalf of the foundation to the authentication board, nor do most people who buy works from the foundation. Fremont says that people who buy from him are welcome to submit the works to the board, but “it’s not necessary.”
Some sources argue that the authentication board and catalogue raisonné authors are not applying the same standards of authenticity to the works that are being sold by the foundation. In particular, they point to the studio-type Elvis paintings that Warhol never exhibited and allegedly directed Malanga to destroy. Others say the foundation has sold works completely after Warhol’s death. Says Fremont, “Anything Andy did not see directly before his death has stopped. Works that had been approved by him were completed.” The foundation has also acquired works over the years from Warhol’s associates that, sources say, the board might otherwise question. “Would the board authenticate some of these works if they didn’t come from or weren’t owned by the foundation?” asks one dealer. “I don’t think so.”
In May 1993, Hughes tried to sell ten Warhol works at Sotheby’s. Eight of them failed to sell. The works, many of which were dated from the early 1960s and were major examples of the artist’s oeuvre, had a scant exhibition history. None of them had been exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime; most had been shown for the first time at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich six months before the Sotheby’s sale.
Two months after the failed Sotheby’s sale, Hughes reached an agreement with the foundation, which was in the middle of its court battle with Hayes. Hughes agreed to accept Christie’s lower valuation of the estate; in return the foundation agreed to pay him his 2 percent executor’s fee, based on that valuation, and to hand over dozens of works worth tens of millions of dollars that Hughes Claimed were his. Among these were the works that Hughes had tried to sell at Sotheby’s, according to an affidavit by Hughes that has been obtained by ARTnews. Today they appear in the catalogue raisonné.
In his affidavit, Hughes also claimed five Elvis paintings, which he said had been given to him by Warhol in the 1960s. All of them were the studio type that Malanga says Warhol asked him to destroy.
Fremont says that Hughes initially stamped Warhol’s signature on estate works but stopped this practice within a matter of months, because, he says, “it wasn’t practical.” Hughes authenticated works until 1989, when he became ill with multiple sclerosis. Fremont, who took over the authentication duties in 1990, says, “There was a lot of learning, real-time learning, involved.” The foundation began assigning authentication numbers in 1990 to works that were reviewed, a practice the board continues today. Works accepted as authentic are stamped and assigned numbers beginning with the letter A; works not considered authentic are assigned the letter B and are stamped denied; and works whose authenticity the board can’t determine are assigned the letter C. The authentication board says it has also assigned numbers beginning with the letter D when it believes a work is collaborative. To date it has issued nine D numbers - none to works dating before 1969.
Photos play a large part in Warhol’s oeuvre - his images came from photos he found in periodicals or took himself, most famously in a photo booth or with a Polaroid, but he had only one show of his photos during his lifetime. According to the board, it authenticates only black-and-white photographs that match negatives in the foundation’s possession and may decline to approve such a work if it has doubts about ownership, provenance, or authorization. Today, four-panel stitched photographs have sold for upward of $50,000, and a single Polaroid can sell for $20,000.
As reported in a 1995 ARTnews article, the estate exhibited Warhol’s photo-booth images at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery in 1989, where each strip was priced at $12,500. Among them were photos of the late dealer Holly Solomon, who sued the estate, claiming that she, not Warhol, had taken the pictures. The article reported that she later agreed to split the photographs with the estate to settle the suit.
The estate and the foundation acquired a number of works by reaching similar settlement agreements with former associates of Warhol’s, such as Rupert Jasen Smith, Warhol’s printer from 1977 to 1987. Generally, works in the possession of an artist’s printer are returned to the estate when he or she dies. But some of Warhol’s printers and assistants say that Warhol often gave them works as payment, in lieu of cash. Ultra Violet, one of Warhol’s superstars during the 1960s, says that Warhol was very clever about money. Whenever anyone asked him for some, “he never had any.”
Horst Weber von Beeren worked with Smith from 1978 to 1985, producing thousands of Warhol screen prints on paper and canvas. Around 1996, von Beeren says, Archibald Gillies, president of the foundation at the time, offered to buy the 300 works he had in his possession for $100,000 - works, von Beeren says, that they were then worth close to $2.4 million. Some were unpublished prints, that is, they were unique, and others were excess prints relating to limited editions commissioned by dealers during Warhol’s lifetime. Gillies declined to comment for this article, saying that he didn’t think it was appropriate to comment on foundation matters after his retirement, in 2001. He referred all questions to the foundation’s attorney, Peter Gates, who also declined to comment.
When he didn’t accept the offer, von Beeren says, the foundation made another proposal: von Beeren would give the foundation all of the prints relating to limited editions, and he and the foundation would split the unpublished prints. But von Beeren says he was told he would still need to submit his share to the authentication board. “I was told we would submit them separately,” says von Beeren. He rejected the foundation’s terms and later submitted the works in batches, sometimes under other people’s names, to the authentication board. The works included a number of identical 1978 Liza Minnelli images on paper (prints) and on canvas (paintings).
According to letter from the board that were provided to ARTnews, between June 1999 and early 2000, the board approved five of the paintings. Eight months later, it rejected three additional canvases. At the same time, the board approved seven prints and reversed its opinion about the five paintings it had previously approved. When one of the paintings it had reversed its opinion about was exhibited at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 2001, the authentication board’s attorney, Ronald Spencer, sent a letter to Shafrazi alerting him to the fact that the work had been deemed inauthentic. Shafrazi did not return phone calls seeking comment.
It is not uncommon for owners to submit works to the authentication board under another person’s name. Sam Bolton, who was Hughes’s assistant from 1984 until 1988 says he submitted Polaroids to the board under someone else’s name last summer. “I didn’t want any trouble,” says Bolton. “Why would I want to go up against a foundation that has turned down so many things?”
In early1988, Los Angeles dealer Michael Kohn advised a client to buy a Warhol self-portrait (ca. 1964) for $22,000. Kohn knew of two similar paintings that had been authenticated by the estate and sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s a few months earlier, in November 1987. But when Kohn tried to get his client’s work approved in 1988, the estate wouldn’t authenticate it. Instead, Hayes, the attorney for the estate at the time, offered to reimburse Kohn’s client in 1989.
Hayes says he believed that the estate should reimburse clients if works it had authenticated later proved to be problematic. The estate’s offer included a clause that granted Kohn’s client the opportunity to buy back the work within two years if it were authenticated. “I thought they should be able to extend the option for a much longer time,” says Kohn, who turned down the offer.
The estate’s policy toward authentication began to change in the summer of 1989, when seven signed Superman collages, which were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1989 Warhol retrospective, were reported to be fakes. Miller was the owner of six of the collages; Hughes reportedly owned the seventh. According to Hayes and to Paul Alexander’s 1994 book Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions, Hughes received the collage in exchange for authentication 15 collages that Miller had bought from an Italian dealer for $175,000. When Miller asked the estate to reimburse him for his loss, Hughes refused.
Hayes says he insisted that Hughes refund Miller’s money, but instead Hughes asked him to draw up an agreement that would prohibit owners from making authentication claims against the estate. When Hayes refused, the foundation turned to Gates, Gillies’s personal attorney at the time, who in 1990 drew up the waiver that owners now sign before submitting their works to the authentication board. “I realized they weren’t using any document,” says Gates, “so I drew up one that could be used going forward for all cases.”
The self-portrait Christie’s sold in November 1987 which was identical to the one Kohn’s client bought in 1988, fetched $28,000 from Paris dealer Daniel Templon. By the time London collector Joe Simon bought the work from New York’s Lang & O’Hara Gallery, in August 1989, for $195,000, it had twice been authenticated by Hughes: once prior to the Christie’s sale and again when it was handled by Ronald Feldman, in March 1988. In 2001, Simon says, a London dealer had a buyer willing to pay him $2 million for the self-portrait on condition that it be submitted first to the authentication board. Simon submitted it to the board and was informed that it wasn’t authentic.
Stunned by the board’s decision, Simon set out to learn more about the painting. He located magazine publisher Richard Ekstract, who in 1965 had arranged to lend Warhol a high-quality Norelco video camera if Warhol would agree to be interviewed for his trade magazine, Tape Recording. According to Ekstract and Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s manager at the time, who has written a letter to the board in support of Simon’s case, Warhol loaned Ekstract a set of acetate transparencies so that he could have some silk-screened self-portraits made for use in the magazine and for a party Ekstract gave for Warhol. (By loaning Ekstract the acetates, Warhol obligated Ekstract to pay for the expensive silk screens, Morrissey says.) Ekstract and Morrissey say Warhol then gave the self-portraits to Ekstract and to half a dozen others who had made the deal and the event possible.
Whitney Museum adjunct curator Callie Angell, who is compiling the foundation’s catalogue raisonné of Warhol films, says Warhol used the Norelco camera to shoot at least eleven half-hour tapes of people at the Factory.
When Simon submitted his self-portrait a second time, last year, along with a dozen affidavits from Warhol’s former printers and associates, it was rejected again, with no explanation. “It’s like getting in a car accident with someone who doesn’t have car insurance,” says Simon. “There’s nothing you can do.”
After the Vanity Fair piece and other articles appeared about Simon’s case, the board sent him a letter last May, explaining the reasons why it would not authenticate the work. According to the letter, which was provided to ARTnews, the reasons relate to eleven self-portraits on linen that the catalogue raisonné states Warhol created in early 1964. One of the works, on linen with a green background, was used as the image for the U.S. Postal Service stamp commemorating the artist in 2002. Another painting of this type fetched $1.4 million at Christie’s last November.
The same photo image was used to make both sets of works, but whereas the self-portraits on linen are hand painted and differ slightly from one another in terms of screen intensity and detail coloring, those on cotton have no hand painting and are identical to one another, making them more like prints. The letter also contends that Simon’s self-portrait, as well as nine others identical to it that the board has reviewed, was made without Warhol’s authorization by a commercial printer who received no instructions from Warhol, which contradicts the way the board says Warhol worked during the 1960s.
“The board says Warhol never did this and Warhol never did that,” says Ekstract. “But that’s a load of crap. He did do this. There’s no other way for them to come into my possession.”
“To establish the mechanisms we’ve created,” says Wachs, “is no small undertaking.” In the 17 years since Warhol’s death, the foundation, which does not accept donations, has self-generated all of its revenue from investment proceeds, the sale of its art collection, and the licensing of Warhol products.
It has more than $135 million in cash and investments, and its collection of Warhol art is worth more than $20 million, according to the foundation’s 2003 annual report. But Wachs says this figure is based on Christie’s discounted appraisal, conducted more than a decade ago. “It’s difficult to know the value of that we have,” he says. Fremont put it this way: “It’s getting down there. Warhol was prolific but not that prolific.” While the second volume of the catalogue raisonné lists the foundation as the owner of dozens of box sculptures and Jackie, Flowers and Electric Chair paintings, along with a number of society portraits, Fremont says many of the works have been sold. When asked how many prints and photographs are left, Hunt replies, “Less than there was two weeks ago, and less than there was two weeks before that.”
The foundation supports museums and arts organizations around the country and is also concerned with broader political and social issues facing artists - such as freedom of artistic expression and, in recent years, health insurance. Wachs says the aim of the foundation is to “create and nurture an environment from which future Andy Warhols will emerge.”
As for what Warhol would have thought about the handling of his legacy, Ronnie Cutrone, his assistant in the 1970s, observes, “He would say, ‘Oh my God. What a soap opera.’”
Seventeen years after Andy Warhol’s death, controversies surrounding the Warhol Art Authentication Board and the Catalogue raisonné of his work reflect confusion about his intent, his working methods, and his legacy
By Kelly Devine Thomas
Andy Warhol was the most successful and famous American artist of the 20th century. His signature images - the Jackies, Elvises, and Marilyns - are as familiar to us as the Mona Lisa. His pictures sell for millions, and he is represented in virtually every public and private collection of contemporary art in the world. Everybody knows what an “Andy Warhol” looks like.
Or do they? The coeditors of the second volume of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, published by Phaidon last month, would dispute that statement. Warhol himself, write Neil Printz and Georg Frei, didn’t make it easy. Not only did he “deflect those who would attempt to know his work or to discern his hand in it, he disputed the role of the artist as the author of a work of art.” He made hundreds of virtually identical paintings. He overturned traditional notions of rarity and uniqueness. He even suggested that he didn’t care if people couldn’t see “whether my picture was mine of somebody’s else’s.”
“There are so many Andy Warhols,” says Printz. “Everyone has their own Andy. We wanted to look at the Warhol we can see.”
The catalogue raisonné is an ongoing project of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a controversial entity since its beginnings in 1987, when Warhol died, leaving artwork and assets worth more than half a billion dollars and a will directing the most of his assets be used to establish a foundation dedicated to the “advancement of visual arts.” The foundation inherited an astounding trove that people fought over - how much was it worth, who would get what, who was in control - throughout much of the 1990s. In the past decade, the foundation has reaped more than $175 million from sales of works left in Warhol’s estate, enabling it to become a powerhouse in the contemporary-art world as a grant giver, a facilitator of scholarship, and an arbiter of authenticity as well as a source of Warhol’s work. It is the foundation’s role as an authenticator that has caused the most contention in recent years and is threatening to pull it into another court battle.
While the dispute concerns money, it also involves confusion about Warhol’s working methods, his intent, and his legacy. The handling of Warhol’s estate, the complex nature of his work, and the volume and value of what he left behind make it very difficult to clarify his oeuvre. “There have been some disgruntled people,” says foundation president Joel Wachs. “But it’s not the job of the authentication board to think about whether people will be upset. It’s the job of the authentication board to protect Warhol’s legacy and owners of his legitimate works.”
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which was established by the foundation in 1995, has examined more than 3,000 work submitted to it and has rejected about 10 to 15 percent of them as inauthentic. Decisions by the board - whose members are David Whitney, and independent curator, who was a friend of Warhol’s and worked with him Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts, New York university, and curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Sally Kind-Nero, the foundation’s curator for drawings and photography; and Printz - are unanimous and are protected by a waiver indemnifying the board, the foundation, and the estate, a practice that is not uncommon among authentication committees.
Because the board does not explain its decisions - it says explanations are subject to misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or misuse - there is growing frustration in the market over how it arrives at its conclusions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the board has rejected works previously authenticated by representatives of the foundation and has reversed its own opinions about works it had previously determined to be authentic. “I don’t understand the science of it,” says one New York dealer. “That’s what is unclear.”
The authentication board acts as an arm of the six-volume catalogue raisonné project. Printz, King-Nero, and Frei, who is the director of Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich, have travelled the world to document and compare as many of Warhol’s works as possible. Not all works must be submitted to the board to be included in the catalogue, sources say. A work must be submitted if one of the three-member team considers its authenticity uncertain and wants the whole board to see it.
New York dealer and collector Timothy Baum says he was told a year ago that four Flowers paintings - two of which he owned and two that he had sold - needed to be submitted to the board for inclusion in the catalogue. The paintings, which Baum says were given by the late Henry Geldzahler, Warhol’s friend and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of contemporary art, as a wedding gift to a family friend of the curator’s in the 1960s, were rejected. “The works were not signed, but Warhol didn’t sign all of his works,” says Baum. Since the board does not explain its decisions, Baum doesn’t know why the works were not accepted. “They don’t have to give any reason, and they don’t,” says Baum. “It’s shocking.”
Rainer Crone, author of a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s paintings published in 1970, estimated that Warhol made more than 900 Flowers paintings in the 1960s. The foundation’s catalogue records a little more than half that number. The authentication board contends that Warhol was “acutely aware of how many works he was making,” but Crone took the opposite view, stating, “Warhol was neither interested in the exact number of paintings produced nor in limiting the edition.”
“There is this perception that Warhol painted more than he did,” says Brett Gorvy, Christie’s codirector of contemporary art. “The catalogue raisonné has shown how few there actually are in some cases. It has had quite a big impact on the market. People had been looking at his works as a serial; now they are seeing them as more unique.”
Catalogues raisonnés are scholarly endeavours that list every known work in an artist’s oeuvre. They also have an enormous influence on the market. If a work is not published in a catalogue raisonné, it has little or no market value.
Joe Simon, a London-based film producer and collector, has been trying for years to obtain the current board’s acceptance of a Warhol self-portrait he bought in 1989, which was twice approved by previous foundation representatives. Simon and other dealers and collectors have told Vanity Fair and other publications that they intend to take legal action against the board and the foundation for decisions they say have cost them millions. They contend that the board is refusing to authenticate certain artworks in order to increase the value of the foundation’s own collection. As ARTnews went to press, no lawsuit had been filed.
Wachs scoffs at the notion that the board’s decisions are linked with the relative value of the foundation’s assets. He also dismisses criticism that is a conflict of interest for the foundation to be selling works by Warhol and, at the same time, judging the authenticity of works owned by others. “The authentication board operates completely independently,” Wachs says. “The foundation is totally uninvolved in its decisions.”
Dealers and auction specialists say that outright fakes of Warhol’s works are relatively easy to spot. It’s much more difficult, they say, to distinguish between works that were made under Warhol’s direction and those that weren’t, in part because Warhol employed assistants and used reproducible silk screens.
Warhol described the silk-screening process like this: “With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time.”
The board has set out to decide which works made with his silk screens were authorized by Warhol. “There are clear distinctions between what Warhol made and what he did not,” the board has stated. “The goal of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is to clarify these distinctions.”
Among the works the board has rejected is a 1967 two-panel self-portrait produced by a Michigan art class and signed by Warhol, which New York dealer Ivan Karp, one of Warhol’s earliest supporters, bought in the 1960s and later sold. The work had been authenticated by the foundation in 1989 as a “collaboration.” It was authorized by Warhol, with his signature,” say Karp, who is now out the $40,000 purchase price he refunded to the buyer when the work was rejected. “The authentication board does not dispute the signature. They say they do not take the signature into account. How can they say that! The signature is the confirming act!”
Asked by ARTnews if the board views Warhol’s signature as an authenticating act, the board responded, via fax: “The signature is taken into consideration as one factor among many during the authentication review.” The bottom line, surmises Karp, is that “if the board doesn’t like the conditions under which an object was made, it’s not going to authenticate it.”
In general a work doesn’t have to be reviewed by the board for Christie’s or Sotheby’s to handle it if its provenance is solid, although the board has had suspect works pulled form auction, sources say. “With some artists’ estates, you have to secure the authentication board’s approval because clients are looking for it,” says Gorvy. But in the case of Warhol, “this is not currently deemed by buyers to be essential for a work to be sold at auction.”
“The vast majority of what we sell never needs an authentication,” says Ronald Feldman, who commissioned works from Warhol, copublished with the foundation the catalogue raisonné of prints, and frequently buys works from the foundation. But another dealer insists, “You need their ‘Good Housekeeping stamp of approval.’ Without it a work is dead in the water.” Jean-Paul Russell, who worked for Warhol’s printer in the 1980s, says he would never submit one of his works to the board. “what would they tell me? That it’s real?” asks Russell. “I know more about his work than they do.” Russell says he is the owner of a green Hamburger painting that Warhol made on the same roll of canvas as a Camouflage painting. “Nobody would know that story,” says Russell. “The authentication board wouldn’t know why it was green.”
Some critics charge that the independence of the authentication board is compromised by the fact that two of its four members are also employees of the foundation: Printz is coeditor of the first and second volumes of the foundation’s catalogue raisonné of Warhol paintings, sculpture, and drawings. King-Nero, the foundation’s curator of drawings and photography, works with Printz on the catalogue.
Foundation employees often play dual roles or are involved in both the foundation’s business and its scholarly ventures. Vincent Fremont, who worked for Warhol from 1969 until the artist’s death, is the foundation’s exclusive sales agent for paintings, sculpture, and drawings and is also a consultant to the authentication board. Fremont was names in Warhol’s will as one of the foundation’s three founding trustees (with the late Frederick Hughes, Warhol’s longtime manager, and his older brother, John Warhola, who lives in Pittsburgh). He was the foundation’s primary authenticator and exclusive agent for all works sold between 1990 and 1995.
Claudia Defendi, chief curator of the foundation’s collection and coeditor of its catalogue raisonné of Warhol prints, is also the authentication board’s spokesperson. Timothy Hunt, the first curator hired by the estate, in 1987, to catalogue the collection and the foundation’s former chief curator, is now the foundation’s exclusive agent for sales of photography and prints.
Work on the catalogue raisonné began in 1977, when the late Zurich dealer Thomas Ammann started the project with the Warhol’s cooperation. Warhol didn’t keep detailed records of how many works he made. Instead, he dumped receipts, junk mail, and exhibition flyers into more than 600 boxes, sealed them, and called them “time capsules.” About one-quarter of the capsules, which are housed in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, have been catalogued, says John Smith, assistant director for collections and research.
The Warhol Foundation became involved with the project in 1993, when it hired Printz as coeditor. “I wanted to catalogue Warhol like they catalogued Picasso,” says Printz.
In order to do that, the authors examined the voluminous amount of material Warhol had left behind, from his thousands of works - they estimate that he made about 10,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings - to the roughly 1.500 boxes that hold a “vast and staggeringly complicated account of his activities as an artist.” The authors admit that “aspects of the archive, including many of the time capsules, have not been inventoried, nor has it been possible to exhaustively review the entire archive.”
What did Warhol make? When did he make it? How did he do it? When did he put the screen on? How did he know where to put the yellow in Marilyn’s hair? How did he change, and when did he change? These are some of the questions Printz says he and his colleagues set out to answer.
The first volume of the catalogue, published in 2002, covers the years from 1961 through 1963. Volume two deals with the period from 1964 through 1969, when Warhol created more than 1,500 works, many of which are virtually identical. The problem, then, the editors note, “becomes one of differentiation, no longer a question of Warhol versus not-Warhol, but one of Warhol versus another; or put another way, which Warhol is it? - which Campbell’s Tomato Soup Painting? Which Brillo Box Sculpture? And how many of each are there?”
The foundation will publish the next four volumes of the paintings, sculpture, and drawings catalogue raisonné, on which it has spent more the $2.3 million so far. There were discussions about transferring the project to the Warhol Museum, but the foundation’s directors decided to keep the volumes under the foundation’s control. Printz, who took a leave of absence last year to work on the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné, will edit the volumes. “It’s staying with us,” says Wachs. “We want to make sure that we continue the high quality of scholarship we had in the first two volumes. It’s not going to be cheap, but it has to be done.”
Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928, the youngest son of Czechoslovakian immigrants Julia and Ondrej Warhola. His older brother, John, remembers Warhol as a kid who had “all the makings of a priest” and who often abandoned ball games to draw on the front stoop of their home. “He was a blue-eyed, blond-haired quiet kid who never argued,” Warhola told ARTnews. “He was more of a listener. He let you do the talking.”
Warhol moved to New York when he was 21, dropped the a from his last name, and became a successful commercial illustrator. He became an art start in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in his first one-man show. He founded the Factory during the 1960s, a playground for the rich, the famous, and the drug-ridden that also functioned as his work space.
Warhol created his art across mediums, pushing the limitations of painting, printmaking, and film. He shrewdly identified iconic images of American identity, celebrity, and death: Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Munroe, Elvis, Jacqueline Kennedy (before and after John F. Kennedy’s assassination), the electric chair. He was also a successful publisher. He founded Interview magazine and wrote several books in which he set forth views on life, art, and pop culture.
Today Warhol’s work is a cornerstone of the contemporary-art market. His paintings routinely sell for millions of dollars. His auction record is the $17 million paid for Orange Marilyn (1961) in 1998. New York dealer Larry Gagosian recently sold Superman (1961) for around $25 million - the highest price known to have been paid for a work by Warhol. While most evening auctions will feature no more than three works by the same artist, up to five of Warhol’s works may be included, so strong is his market. “He is Picasso of the late 20th century,” says Gorvy.
Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987, following routine gall bladder surgery. Most of his personal belongings - primarily antique furnishings, jewellery, and other odd collections of cookie jars and other objects - were sold in 1988 at Sotheby’s raising $25.3 million and providing the foundation with its seed money.
Warhol’s estate also included a vast collection of his own work: more than 100,000 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs; more than 100 films; 4,000 hours of experimental video and segments produced for television; and hundreds of boxes of archival material. The value of the artworks became the subject of a prolonged court battle in the 1990s between the foundation, which was the principal beneficiary of the estate and took responsibility for its assets in 1990, and Edward Hayes, the attorney for the estate who was hired immediately after Warhol’s death by Hughes, the executor, who died in 2001.
The foundation argued for a lower valuation, because Hughes and Hayes were each due to receive compensation equal to 2 percent of the estate’s value, and because the IRS requires private foundations to give away 5 percent of their assets annually. When it appraised the estate, Christie’s, acting on the foundation’s instructions, applied a blockage discount - a practice that allows an appraiser to reduce the value of an artist’s estate for tax purposes - and arrived at the sum of $95 million for Warhol’s art, bringing the estate’s total value to around $220 million.
Hayes rejected that figure. He sued the foundation, arguing that the artworks alone were worth at least $700 million. A judge settles the matter in 1994, declaring the estate worth $510 million, with Warhol’s art valued at nearly $400 million. A separate investigation by the New York state attorney general’s office into the foundation’s business affairs ended in 1998, with a settlement in which the foundation agreed to strengthen its internal financial controls and to provide, at regular intervals, more extensive financial information to the attorney general’s office and the public.
The foundation has donated almost 6,000 works to the Warhol Museum, which it opened in 1994 in collaboration with the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and New York’s Dia Center for the Arts. Other works in Warhol’s estate went to more than 24 museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which purchased works from the foundation in 1992 at deeply discounted prices.
Some of the works inherited by the foundation were on rolls of canvas. “Many of his paintings were stored un-stretched,” says Fremont. “There wouldn’t have been enough room to store them all otherwise.”
Several rolls of Elvis canvases were in Warhol’s studio after his death. These Elvis paintings are distinct from, and are considered precursors to, the Elvis canvases that were shown by Irving Blum at the Ferus Gallery in 1963, according to the catalogue raisonné. “During Warhol’s lifetime, the studio series remained largely unknown,” the authors note. Crone did not include them in his catalogue. The studio types were never exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime because they were all damaged, according to Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s. Warhol wrote about the incident in POPism: “One night that summer there was a terrible thunderstorm and when I came in the next morning, the Elvises were sopping wet - I had to do them all over again.” Malanga says Warhol asked him to destroy the rolls.
He says he destroyed some of them but became distracted and forgot to destroy all of them. “When these paintings started popping up in 1993, I wondered where they were coming from,” Malanga recalls. “They differed from the Ferus ones in the cropping of the heads and the cowboy boots.” According to the catalogue raisonné, Elvis is about sex inches shorter in the studio types than in those shown at Ferus. Says Fremont, “If Warhol had wanted to destroy them, he would have. He had 20-plus years to do that.”
One of the studio rolls, Elvis 11 Time, was kept intact and donated by the foundation to the Warhol Museum. The catalogue raisonné notes that another studio roll, Elvis 6 Times, was divided by the foundation in 2001 into three distinct works, featuring, respectively, one Elvis impression, three impressions, and two impressions. “That was a determination that was made with a lot of thought,” says Fremont of the works, which were later sold. If the roll had been exhibited intact during Warhol’s lifetime, Fremont says, “it wouldn’t have been cut.” He adds that there was a precedent for the foundations action: Warhol himself had cut a studio-type double Elvis from a roll and sold it to a collection in Japan in February 1987, shortly before his death that same month.
An advantage of buying works from the foundation, aside from the fact that they were sold to dealers at a discount, is that works with a foundation provenance are marked with inventory numbers, beginning with PA for painting, PO for portrait, and SC for sculpture. The authentication board says it has never rejected a work originating from the estate. Many of them are never submitted. “The message is that if you buy from the foundation, it will be OK forever,” says a New York dealer who has had works rejected by the board. “But if it doesn’t come from the foundation, it can be fake tomorrow.”
Fremont and Hunt do not submit the works they sell on behalf of the foundation to the authentication board, nor do most people who buy works from the foundation. Fremont says that people who buy from him are welcome to submit the works to the board, but “it’s not necessary.”
Some sources argue that the authentication board and catalogue raisonné authors are not applying the same standards of authenticity to the works that are being sold by the foundation. In particular, they point to the studio-type Elvis paintings that Warhol never exhibited and allegedly directed Malanga to destroy. Others say the foundation has sold works completely after Warhol’s death. Says Fremont, “Anything Andy did not see directly before his death has stopped. Works that had been approved by him were completed.” The foundation has also acquired works over the years from Warhol’s associates that, sources say, the board might otherwise question. “Would the board authenticate some of these works if they didn’t come from or weren’t owned by the foundation?” asks one dealer. “I don’t think so.”
In May 1993, Hughes tried to sell ten Warhol works at Sotheby’s. Eight of them failed to sell. The works, many of which were dated from the early 1960s and were major examples of the artist’s oeuvre, had a scant exhibition history. None of them had been exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime; most had been shown for the first time at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich six months before the Sotheby’s sale.
Two months after the failed Sotheby’s sale, Hughes reached an agreement with the foundation, which was in the middle of its court battle with Hayes. Hughes agreed to accept Christie’s lower valuation of the estate; in return the foundation agreed to pay him his 2 percent executor’s fee, based on that valuation, and to hand over dozens of works worth tens of millions of dollars that Hughes Claimed were his. Among these were the works that Hughes had tried to sell at Sotheby’s, according to an affidavit by Hughes that has been obtained by ARTnews. Today they appear in the catalogue raisonné.
In his affidavit, Hughes also claimed five Elvis paintings, which he said had been given to him by Warhol in the 1960s. All of them were the studio type that Malanga says Warhol asked him to destroy.
Fremont says that Hughes initially stamped Warhol’s signature on estate works but stopped this practice within a matter of months, because, he says, “it wasn’t practical.” Hughes authenticated works until 1989, when he became ill with multiple sclerosis. Fremont, who took over the authentication duties in 1990, says, “There was a lot of learning, real-time learning, involved.” The foundation began assigning authentication numbers in 1990 to works that were reviewed, a practice the board continues today. Works accepted as authentic are stamped and assigned numbers beginning with the letter A; works not considered authentic are assigned the letter B and are stamped denied; and works whose authenticity the board can’t determine are assigned the letter C. The authentication board says it has also assigned numbers beginning with the letter D when it believes a work is collaborative. To date it has issued nine D numbers - none to works dating before 1969.
Photos play a large part in Warhol’s oeuvre - his images came from photos he found in periodicals or took himself, most famously in a photo booth or with a Polaroid, but he had only one show of his photos during his lifetime. According to the board, it authenticates only black-and-white photographs that match negatives in the foundation’s possession and may decline to approve such a work if it has doubts about ownership, provenance, or authorization. Today, four-panel stitched photographs have sold for upward of $50,000, and a single Polaroid can sell for $20,000.
As reported in a 1995 ARTnews article, the estate exhibited Warhol’s photo-booth images at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery in 1989, where each strip was priced at $12,500. Among them were photos of the late dealer Holly Solomon, who sued the estate, claiming that she, not Warhol, had taken the pictures. The article reported that she later agreed to split the photographs with the estate to settle the suit.
The estate and the foundation acquired a number of works by reaching similar settlement agreements with former associates of Warhol’s, such as Rupert Jasen Smith, Warhol’s printer from 1977 to 1987. Generally, works in the possession of an artist’s printer are returned to the estate when he or she dies. But some of Warhol’s printers and assistants say that Warhol often gave them works as payment, in lieu of cash. Ultra Violet, one of Warhol’s superstars during the 1960s, says that Warhol was very clever about money. Whenever anyone asked him for some, “he never had any.”
Horst Weber von Beeren worked with Smith from 1978 to 1985, producing thousands of Warhol screen prints on paper and canvas. Around 1996, von Beeren says, Archibald Gillies, president of the foundation at the time, offered to buy the 300 works he had in his possession for $100,000 - works, von Beeren says, that they were then worth close to $2.4 million. Some were unpublished prints, that is, they were unique, and others were excess prints relating to limited editions commissioned by dealers during Warhol’s lifetime. Gillies declined to comment for this article, saying that he didn’t think it was appropriate to comment on foundation matters after his retirement, in 2001. He referred all questions to the foundation’s attorney, Peter Gates, who also declined to comment.
When he didn’t accept the offer, von Beeren says, the foundation made another proposal: von Beeren would give the foundation all of the prints relating to limited editions, and he and the foundation would split the unpublished prints. But von Beeren says he was told he would still need to submit his share to the authentication board. “I was told we would submit them separately,” says von Beeren. He rejected the foundation’s terms and later submitted the works in batches, sometimes under other people’s names, to the authentication board. The works included a number of identical 1978 Liza Minnelli images on paper (prints) and on canvas (paintings).
According to letter from the board that were provided to ARTnews, between June 1999 and early 2000, the board approved five of the paintings. Eight months later, it rejected three additional canvases. At the same time, the board approved seven prints and reversed its opinion about the five paintings it had previously approved. When one of the paintings it had reversed its opinion about was exhibited at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 2001, the authentication board’s attorney, Ronald Spencer, sent a letter to Shafrazi alerting him to the fact that the work had been deemed inauthentic. Shafrazi did not return phone calls seeking comment.
It is not uncommon for owners to submit works to the authentication board under another person’s name. Sam Bolton, who was Hughes’s assistant from 1984 until 1988 says he submitted Polaroids to the board under someone else’s name last summer. “I didn’t want any trouble,” says Bolton. “Why would I want to go up against a foundation that has turned down so many things?”
In early1988, Los Angeles dealer Michael Kohn advised a client to buy a Warhol self-portrait (ca. 1964) for $22,000. Kohn knew of two similar paintings that had been authenticated by the estate and sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s a few months earlier, in November 1987. But when Kohn tried to get his client’s work approved in 1988, the estate wouldn’t authenticate it. Instead, Hayes, the attorney for the estate at the time, offered to reimburse Kohn’s client in 1989.
Hayes says he believed that the estate should reimburse clients if works it had authenticated later proved to be problematic. The estate’s offer included a clause that granted Kohn’s client the opportunity to buy back the work within two years if it were authenticated. “I thought they should be able to extend the option for a much longer time,” says Kohn, who turned down the offer.
The estate’s policy toward authentication began to change in the summer of 1989, when seven signed Superman collages, which were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1989 Warhol retrospective, were reported to be fakes. Miller was the owner of six of the collages; Hughes reportedly owned the seventh. According to Hayes and to Paul Alexander’s 1994 book Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions, Hughes received the collage in exchange for authentication 15 collages that Miller had bought from an Italian dealer for $175,000. When Miller asked the estate to reimburse him for his loss, Hughes refused.
Hayes says he insisted that Hughes refund Miller’s money, but instead Hughes asked him to draw up an agreement that would prohibit owners from making authentication claims against the estate. When Hayes refused, the foundation turned to Gates, Gillies’s personal attorney at the time, who in 1990 drew up the waiver that owners now sign before submitting their works to the authentication board. “I realized they weren’t using any document,” says Gates, “so I drew up one that could be used going forward for all cases.”
The self-portrait Christie’s sold in November 1987 which was identical to the one Kohn’s client bought in 1988, fetched $28,000 from Paris dealer Daniel Templon. By the time London collector Joe Simon bought the work from New York’s Lang & O’Hara Gallery, in August 1989, for $195,000, it had twice been authenticated by Hughes: once prior to the Christie’s sale and again when it was handled by Ronald Feldman, in March 1988. In 2001, Simon says, a London dealer had a buyer willing to pay him $2 million for the self-portrait on condition that it be submitted first to the authentication board. Simon submitted it to the board and was informed that it wasn’t authentic.
Stunned by the board’s decision, Simon set out to learn more about the painting. He located magazine publisher Richard Ekstract, who in 1965 had arranged to lend Warhol a high-quality Norelco video camera if Warhol would agree to be interviewed for his trade magazine, Tape Recording. According to Ekstract and Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s manager at the time, who has written a letter to the board in support of Simon’s case, Warhol loaned Ekstract a set of acetate transparencies so that he could have some silk-screened self-portraits made for use in the magazine and for a party Ekstract gave for Warhol. (By loaning Ekstract the acetates, Warhol obligated Ekstract to pay for the expensive silk screens, Morrissey says.) Ekstract and Morrissey say Warhol then gave the self-portraits to Ekstract and to half a dozen others who had made the deal and the event possible.
Whitney Museum adjunct curator Callie Angell, who is compiling the foundation’s catalogue raisonné of Warhol films, says Warhol used the Norelco camera to shoot at least eleven half-hour tapes of people at the Factory.
When Simon submitted his self-portrait a second time, last year, along with a dozen affidavits from Warhol’s former printers and associates, it was rejected again, with no explanation. “It’s like getting in a car accident with someone who doesn’t have car insurance,” says Simon. “There’s nothing you can do.”
After the Vanity Fair piece and other articles appeared about Simon’s case, the board sent him a letter last May, explaining the reasons why it would not authenticate the work. According to the letter, which was provided to ARTnews, the reasons relate to eleven self-portraits on linen that the catalogue raisonné states Warhol created in early 1964. One of the works, on linen with a green background, was used as the image for the U.S. Postal Service stamp commemorating the artist in 2002. Another painting of this type fetched $1.4 million at Christie’s last November.
The same photo image was used to make both sets of works, but whereas the self-portraits on linen are hand painted and differ slightly from one another in terms of screen intensity and detail coloring, those on cotton have no hand painting and are identical to one another, making them more like prints. The letter also contends that Simon’s self-portrait, as well as nine others identical to it that the board has reviewed, was made without Warhol’s authorization by a commercial printer who received no instructions from Warhol, which contradicts the way the board says Warhol worked during the 1960s.
“The board says Warhol never did this and Warhol never did that,” says Ekstract. “But that’s a load of crap. He did do this. There’s no other way for them to come into my possession.”
“To establish the mechanisms we’ve created,” says Wachs, “is no small undertaking.” In the 17 years since Warhol’s death, the foundation, which does not accept donations, has self-generated all of its revenue from investment proceeds, the sale of its art collection, and the licensing of Warhol products.
It has more than $135 million in cash and investments, and its collection of Warhol art is worth more than $20 million, according to the foundation’s 2003 annual report. But Wachs says this figure is based on Christie’s discounted appraisal, conducted more than a decade ago. “It’s difficult to know the value of that we have,” he says. Fremont put it this way: “It’s getting down there. Warhol was prolific but not that prolific.” While the second volume of the catalogue raisonné lists the foundation as the owner of dozens of box sculptures and Jackie, Flowers and Electric Chair paintings, along with a number of society portraits, Fremont says many of the works have been sold. When asked how many prints and photographs are left, Hunt replies, “Less than there was two weeks ago, and less than there was two weeks before that.”
The foundation supports museums and arts organizations around the country and is also concerned with broader political and social issues facing artists - such as freedom of artistic expression and, in recent years, health insurance. Wachs says the aim of the foundation is to “create and nurture an environment from which future Andy Warhols will emerge.”
As for what Warhol would have thought about the handling of his legacy, Ronnie Cutrone, his assistant in the 1970s, observes, “He would say, ‘Oh my God. What a soap opera.’”
This is not by me
'This is not by me'
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board's denied authentication of works that many have
otherwise taken to be by Andy Warhol has been in the news since the winter of 2003 when
the collector Joe Simon first went public on the board's denial of a silkscreen painting that he
had bought for $195,000 as an investment in 1988, within a year of Warhol's death. Since
then there have been numerous reports of disgruntled collectors and dealers who have fallen
foul of the Authentication Board. Joe Simon's painting, like many, appeared to have a well-
established provenance. Warhol had made an acetate of a photographic self-portrait, which
he gave to a friend, Richard Ekstract, to make the silkscreens as decorations for a party
celebrating the premiere of Warhol's first underground video. Ekstract sent the acetate to a
printer. After the party Warhol gave the pictures to Ekstract in gratitude for his having
facilitated both the video production and the party. Ekstract gave some of the limited edition
to partygoers. The Andy Warhol Foundation (established by Warhol through his will)
authenticated Simon's picture, as did Fred Hughes who was the sole executor of Warhol's will
and his former business manager. Recently, Simon proposed to sell his picture for around
£1.4m, and a potential buyer submitted it to the Andy Warhol Authentication Board, Inc.
Information about the operations of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc is hard to
find. It is a limited liability company registered in New York State. Its website is minimal,
merely saying 'a procedure has been established for the authentication of works of art
purportedly by Andy Warhol', that it 'does not offer any appraisal services', gives Claudia
Defendi as the contact name, a Manhattan address and telephone number. Its website
address is through the Andy Warhol Foundation For Visual Arts, Inc:
www.warholfoundation.org/authen.htm. The Warhol Foundation is a separate limited liability
company also registered in New York State, and its website offers the link directly to the Art
Authentication Board - without further explanation of their legal or business relationship.
The Warhol Foundation, not the Art Authentication Board, was established through Warhol's
will and was therefore the legal body specifically trusted and empowered by him to safeguard
and promote his artistic legacy. Indeed, the Warhol Foundation has commissioned and
already published two volumes of Warhol's Catalogue Raisonne (paintings and sculpture from
1961 to 1969), with more volumes in train. Given these uniquely authoritative publications
sponsored by the Warhol Foundation, it is difficult to fathom why it does not itself
authenticate authorship of 'works purportedly by Andy Warhol'. Applicants to the Art
Authentication Board say that it does not certify nor discuss why it denies authentication (to
around one in six submissions). It is widely believed that the board's essential criterion for
authenticating a work is whether it is satisfied that there is good evidence of Warhol having
supervised and overseen its creation. Given the common knowledge and ample documentary
evidence of Warhol's unique and deliberately perverse ways of working – especially during
The Factory years - it might have again been expected that the Warhol Foundation was the
best body to understand such ways of working, to interpret and decide any authentication
issues.
Art historian and friend of Warhol John Richardson owns works given to him directly by
Warhol, but has said that even he would not 'dare submit these things to the board for fear
of being told they're not by Andy', and questions whether it is possible to authenticate
Warhol's output: 'he used to do these silkscreens, and assistants would come in at night and
run off a few copies for themselves. But did they make them any less authentic than the ones
they ran off for Andy during the day?'. For many years Warhol engaged teams of assistants
to execute his ideas. Paul Morrissey, Warhol's former manager of The Factory: There's no
such thing as an authentic Warhol'. Ronnie Cutrone, a Warhol assistant: 'Actually, Andy rarely
got involved. He had an ability to let go and say, "You do it". It was easy to rip off his
Page 2
paintings and sign them'. Sam Green, who curated some Warhol shows: 'I would do his
signature. Andy only cared about authorship when it came to selling.'
Warhol actively encouraged such challenges to hitherto traditional approaches to authorship:
'Why don't you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my
paintings'; and apropos his 'Flower paintings' 'I decided I won't sign the fake ones that're
turning up all over Europe - the ones that people told us they bought from Gerard. Maybe I
should do new ones and make good on the fakes in Europe. I don't know. I'll see.' On the
back of some of the fakes made of his print portfolios (Marilyn Monroe, 1967 and Flowers,
1970) Warhol endorsed 'This is not by me. Andy Warhol.'
Authorship is important not only for the purposes of art history and criticism, it also has great
economic significance. As Warhol's works continue to circulate throughout the secondary
global art market place, vast sums of money have been and continue to be invested in their
purchase and sale, and the achievement of huge profits (or losses) will largely depend on
buyers' (and/or their agents') satisfaction as to authenticity. The Art Authentication Board
appears already to have established itself with art market professionals as the preferred
authentication authority, not the Warhol Foundation or other independent Warhol experts.
The board requires all applicants submitting works for authentication to sign an undertaking
not to challenge the board's decision in court. The validity of this purported waiver of legal
rights has yet to be legally challenged. The strongest legal contestant would be the
foundation, since it probably owns Warhol's statutory moral rights – both to claim or to
prevent false attribution of his authorship. Under US law these rights last for the same length
as copyright (in Warhol's case probably for decades to come), but only in respect of works in
the artist's ownership at death (and which were presumably inherited from Warhol by the
foundation). In the case of works not owned by Warhol at his death, these rights will have
expired on Warhol's death. This effectively produces a Catch 22 situation: only works
inherited from Warhol by the foundation - and not works that were sold or given away by him
- can be the subject of legal challenge, but only by the foundation; and since the foundation
appears to be acquiescing in (if not tacitly supporting) the authentication decisions of the
separate board, collectors of works during Warhol's lifetime appear to have no legal remedy
under current US law.
UK law is different in two key respects. First, UK artists have the statutory moral right only to
stop their names being falsely attributed to works they did not create; they do not (as in the
US) have the right to claim true attribution of their authorship of works they did create.
Second, the UK right to prevent false attribution lasts for the lifetime of the artist plus 20
years after death; and applies to all the artist's works - whether or not they were in the
artist's ownership at death. In France, statutory moral rights last indefinitely, and this reflects
a radically different philosophy from the US: French law views the integrity of art as a vital
cultural treasure that should be looked after for future generations; US law respects the
integrity of artists, but only during their lifetime, rarely after their death; UK law currently lies
somewhere in between.
© Henry Lydiate 2006
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board's denied authentication of works that many have
otherwise taken to be by Andy Warhol has been in the news since the winter of 2003 when
the collector Joe Simon first went public on the board's denial of a silkscreen painting that he
had bought for $195,000 as an investment in 1988, within a year of Warhol's death. Since
then there have been numerous reports of disgruntled collectors and dealers who have fallen
foul of the Authentication Board. Joe Simon's painting, like many, appeared to have a well-
established provenance. Warhol had made an acetate of a photographic self-portrait, which
he gave to a friend, Richard Ekstract, to make the silkscreens as decorations for a party
celebrating the premiere of Warhol's first underground video. Ekstract sent the acetate to a
printer. After the party Warhol gave the pictures to Ekstract in gratitude for his having
facilitated both the video production and the party. Ekstract gave some of the limited edition
to partygoers. The Andy Warhol Foundation (established by Warhol through his will)
authenticated Simon's picture, as did Fred Hughes who was the sole executor of Warhol's will
and his former business manager. Recently, Simon proposed to sell his picture for around
£1.4m, and a potential buyer submitted it to the Andy Warhol Authentication Board, Inc.
Information about the operations of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc is hard to
find. It is a limited liability company registered in New York State. Its website is minimal,
merely saying 'a procedure has been established for the authentication of works of art
purportedly by Andy Warhol', that it 'does not offer any appraisal services', gives Claudia
Defendi as the contact name, a Manhattan address and telephone number. Its website
address is through the Andy Warhol Foundation For Visual Arts, Inc:
www.warholfoundation.org/authen.htm. The Warhol Foundation is a separate limited liability
company also registered in New York State, and its website offers the link directly to the Art
Authentication Board - without further explanation of their legal or business relationship.
The Warhol Foundation, not the Art Authentication Board, was established through Warhol's
will and was therefore the legal body specifically trusted and empowered by him to safeguard
and promote his artistic legacy. Indeed, the Warhol Foundation has commissioned and
already published two volumes of Warhol's Catalogue Raisonne (paintings and sculpture from
1961 to 1969), with more volumes in train. Given these uniquely authoritative publications
sponsored by the Warhol Foundation, it is difficult to fathom why it does not itself
authenticate authorship of 'works purportedly by Andy Warhol'. Applicants to the Art
Authentication Board say that it does not certify nor discuss why it denies authentication (to
around one in six submissions). It is widely believed that the board's essential criterion for
authenticating a work is whether it is satisfied that there is good evidence of Warhol having
supervised and overseen its creation. Given the common knowledge and ample documentary
evidence of Warhol's unique and deliberately perverse ways of working – especially during
The Factory years - it might have again been expected that the Warhol Foundation was the
best body to understand such ways of working, to interpret and decide any authentication
issues.
Art historian and friend of Warhol John Richardson owns works given to him directly by
Warhol, but has said that even he would not 'dare submit these things to the board for fear
of being told they're not by Andy', and questions whether it is possible to authenticate
Warhol's output: 'he used to do these silkscreens, and assistants would come in at night and
run off a few copies for themselves. But did they make them any less authentic than the ones
they ran off for Andy during the day?'. For many years Warhol engaged teams of assistants
to execute his ideas. Paul Morrissey, Warhol's former manager of The Factory: There's no
such thing as an authentic Warhol'. Ronnie Cutrone, a Warhol assistant: 'Actually, Andy rarely
got involved. He had an ability to let go and say, "You do it". It was easy to rip off his
Page 2
paintings and sign them'. Sam Green, who curated some Warhol shows: 'I would do his
signature. Andy only cared about authorship when it came to selling.'
Warhol actively encouraged such challenges to hitherto traditional approaches to authorship:
'Why don't you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my
paintings'; and apropos his 'Flower paintings' 'I decided I won't sign the fake ones that're
turning up all over Europe - the ones that people told us they bought from Gerard. Maybe I
should do new ones and make good on the fakes in Europe. I don't know. I'll see.' On the
back of some of the fakes made of his print portfolios (Marilyn Monroe, 1967 and Flowers,
1970) Warhol endorsed 'This is not by me. Andy Warhol.'
Authorship is important not only for the purposes of art history and criticism, it also has great
economic significance. As Warhol's works continue to circulate throughout the secondary
global art market place, vast sums of money have been and continue to be invested in their
purchase and sale, and the achievement of huge profits (or losses) will largely depend on
buyers' (and/or their agents') satisfaction as to authenticity. The Art Authentication Board
appears already to have established itself with art market professionals as the preferred
authentication authority, not the Warhol Foundation or other independent Warhol experts.
The board requires all applicants submitting works for authentication to sign an undertaking
not to challenge the board's decision in court. The validity of this purported waiver of legal
rights has yet to be legally challenged. The strongest legal contestant would be the
foundation, since it probably owns Warhol's statutory moral rights – both to claim or to
prevent false attribution of his authorship. Under US law these rights last for the same length
as copyright (in Warhol's case probably for decades to come), but only in respect of works in
the artist's ownership at death (and which were presumably inherited from Warhol by the
foundation). In the case of works not owned by Warhol at his death, these rights will have
expired on Warhol's death. This effectively produces a Catch 22 situation: only works
inherited from Warhol by the foundation - and not works that were sold or given away by him
- can be the subject of legal challenge, but only by the foundation; and since the foundation
appears to be acquiescing in (if not tacitly supporting) the authentication decisions of the
separate board, collectors of works during Warhol's lifetime appear to have no legal remedy
under current US law.
UK law is different in two key respects. First, UK artists have the statutory moral right only to
stop their names being falsely attributed to works they did not create; they do not (as in the
US) have the right to claim true attribution of their authorship of works they did create.
Second, the UK right to prevent false attribution lasts for the lifetime of the artist plus 20
years after death; and applies to all the artist's works - whether or not they were in the
artist's ownership at death. In France, statutory moral rights last indefinitely, and this reflects
a radically different philosophy from the US: French law views the integrity of art as a vital
cultural treasure that should be looked after for future generations; US law respects the
integrity of artists, but only during their lifetime, rarely after their death; UK law currently lies
somewhere in between.
© Henry Lydiate 2006
Making Art Work
Making Art Work
Conceptualise this. You fancy yourself as a Young British Artist. You're
sitting in a pub and you've just had this great idea (hic!) for a
site-specific installation. You're gonna cover Nelson's Column with a
giant condom! Yeah, what a statement. So you scribble it on the back of
a fag packet and nest morning you think, er, how am I going to make that?
Then you remember. You're an artist! You don't have to "make" things.
You just call up the Mike Smith Studio and get them to make it for you.
They'll work everything out, do the technical drawings, research the
materials, source that special resin or whatever you need, and make that
huge condom. They might even be able to suggest a title. Nelson's
Condom, say, or Give Sheath a Chance. Hey, it might even win the Turner!
To judge by Making Art Work: Mike SmithStudio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley,
£39.95), such a daft scenario is less far fetched than you might
imagine. This book is a celebration of the work of the "star fabricator"
Mike Smith, without whom most of the YBAs would not have been able to
produce the conceptual detritus that clutters up the Saatchi and Tate
collections and provokes so many satisfying column inches of art-rage.
Smith trained as an artist and is, arguably, still working as one. Over
the last decade and a half he has been beavering- away in the Old Kent
Road to produce works of art "by" Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman,
Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread and others. Now he has decided its time
for a bit of recognition. But the book goes further than that. By
revealing in some cases how much of the input comes from Smith, it begs
the whole question of who the author of these "seminal" works of art
really is. It blows a long hard whistle on the pretensions of some of
these great clients of his.
So who is Mike Smith?' He say’s he's in artist who decided he was
"interested in a wider range of ideas than I could generate myself”. He
sees himself as a problem-solver. Many of the artists who use him agree.
They get him to fabricate their works because if they went to an
ordinary metalwork shop or carpenter or engineer they'd get funny looks
or he asked to pay in advance.
Smith is attuned to their artistic way of thinking. He knows what they
want sometimes better than they do themselves. "People come here with an
idea of something they want to do," he says, "and they don't know how to
do it." (Of course not, they're artists.) "They have an image of it,"
and Smith & Co have to "make the physical expectation of that image
real".
A classic example of a Smith production was Rachel Whiteread's
site-specific installation for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar
Square. "Monument" simply inverted a transparent copy of the plinth on
top of the original. What a marvelous expression of the concept of
utter vacuity! It's a plinth, and it's empty. Wow!
What most people don't realise is that this factuous visual gag took
Smith
three years to make and employed 23 people in the process. Smith had an
"enormous sense of satisfaction", he says, "in managing to pull
something off like that."
Smith was also responsible for Hirst's formaldehyde tanks and other big
glass structures for artists like Gavin Turk and Alex Hartley. The
latter rather ungraciously categorises a typical Mike Smith production
as "minimalism with a twist" and "bombastic work with super slick
finishes".
Often it involves taking some ordinary object and simply making a very
large version of it. Examples include Mona Hatoum's oversize vegetable
grater, Michael Landy's giant wood chipper, and Darren Almond's huge
flip-clocks and calendars. But Claes Oldenburg was making massive
sculptures of household objects way back in the 60s. So if an artist has
a not very original idea and gets someone else to do all the actual work
of creating it, who deserves the credit?
William Furlong, whose interviews of Smith and his client form the bulk
of the text, wonders whether, if artists are no longer making and doing
things for themselves, they are more like Renaissance painters who
employed a "studio" of assistants? This ignores the difference between
mixing a few paints or colouring in the background, and completing the
entire work. A better model might be the ghost or editor who actually
writes the celebrity's book, or the record' producer who turns the
budding (or fading) pop star's effort’s into a proper song.
Furlong asks about the nature of the "collaboration" and whether Smith
should be able to claim some portion of authorship of finished works.
Naturally, the artists deny this hotly, though Whiteread is astute
enough to suggest Smith should keep a copyright in his processes.
(Presumably, if anyone then tries to rip something off Smith can
litigate instead of the cash-strapped artist.) Patsy Craig, the studio's
archivist, complains that the fine art world tends to be "just mildly
egocentric where issues of accreditation are concerned".
Case in point being the ‘ANDY WARHOL ART AUTHENTICATION BOARD, INCORPORATED.’ Instead of embracing Warhol’s hands off approach to his art,
this now infamous group are attempting to deny the fact that much of his
work was made by assistants in studios which he had never visited. This
robs Warhol of his rightful place in history as the artist who
popularised the contemporary conceptual art scene and the recognition of
being the major influence of the YBA’s. The board are relegating him to
being a distant descendent of Rubens and David.
Smith himself is more equivocal about his claim to some of the
limelight. "I want the studio to have recognition," he says, "but not at
the expense of-not being in business." In other words, he knows which
way his bread is buttered: by keeping his clients flattered. He freely
admits: "I have made things which aren't that interesting." But he
daren't say that to the artists, lest they take their funded commissions
elsewhere or, like Dada Hirst himself, set up their own little Warholy
factories.
PS: That fourth plinth is now empty again, with plans for a new
installation every other year. The current shortlist includes a car
covered in pigeon-shit (by Sarah Lucas) and a pair of phallic wooden
torpedoes (by Stefan Gec). It'll be funded by the Ken Livingstone
Foundation or "KLF" as it's known in the trade. Anyone with a wacky idea
should perhaps send it to Mike Smith's studio. As his client Darren
Almond says: "You can really have fun with Mike and suggest the most
ridiculous of ideas and he will take them seriously and come back to you
in two days with probably a solution."
Making Art Work. Mike Smith Studio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley, £39.95)
Conceptualise this. You fancy yourself as a Young British Artist. You're
sitting in a pub and you've just had this great idea (hic!) for a
site-specific installation. You're gonna cover Nelson's Column with a
giant condom! Yeah, what a statement. So you scribble it on the back of
a fag packet and nest morning you think, er, how am I going to make that?
Then you remember. You're an artist! You don't have to "make" things.
You just call up the Mike Smith Studio and get them to make it for you.
They'll work everything out, do the technical drawings, research the
materials, source that special resin or whatever you need, and make that
huge condom. They might even be able to suggest a title. Nelson's
Condom, say, or Give Sheath a Chance. Hey, it might even win the Turner!
To judge by Making Art Work: Mike SmithStudio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley,
£39.95), such a daft scenario is less far fetched than you might
imagine. This book is a celebration of the work of the "star fabricator"
Mike Smith, without whom most of the YBAs would not have been able to
produce the conceptual detritus that clutters up the Saatchi and Tate
collections and provokes so many satisfying column inches of art-rage.
Smith trained as an artist and is, arguably, still working as one. Over
the last decade and a half he has been beavering- away in the Old Kent
Road to produce works of art "by" Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman,
Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread and others. Now he has decided its time
for a bit of recognition. But the book goes further than that. By
revealing in some cases how much of the input comes from Smith, it begs
the whole question of who the author of these "seminal" works of art
really is. It blows a long hard whistle on the pretensions of some of
these great clients of his.
So who is Mike Smith?' He say’s he's in artist who decided he was
"interested in a wider range of ideas than I could generate myself”. He
sees himself as a problem-solver. Many of the artists who use him agree.
They get him to fabricate their works because if they went to an
ordinary metalwork shop or carpenter or engineer they'd get funny looks
or he asked to pay in advance.
Smith is attuned to their artistic way of thinking. He knows what they
want sometimes better than they do themselves. "People come here with an
idea of something they want to do," he says, "and they don't know how to
do it." (Of course not, they're artists.) "They have an image of it,"
and Smith & Co have to "make the physical expectation of that image
real".
A classic example of a Smith production was Rachel Whiteread's
site-specific installation for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar
Square. "Monument" simply inverted a transparent copy of the plinth on
top of the original. What a marvelous expression of the concept of
utter vacuity! It's a plinth, and it's empty. Wow!
What most people don't realise is that this factuous visual gag took
Smith
three years to make and employed 23 people in the process. Smith had an
"enormous sense of satisfaction", he says, "in managing to pull
something off like that."
Smith was also responsible for Hirst's formaldehyde tanks and other big
glass structures for artists like Gavin Turk and Alex Hartley. The
latter rather ungraciously categorises a typical Mike Smith production
as "minimalism with a twist" and "bombastic work with super slick
finishes".
Often it involves taking some ordinary object and simply making a very
large version of it. Examples include Mona Hatoum's oversize vegetable
grater, Michael Landy's giant wood chipper, and Darren Almond's huge
flip-clocks and calendars. But Claes Oldenburg was making massive
sculptures of household objects way back in the 60s. So if an artist has
a not very original idea and gets someone else to do all the actual work
of creating it, who deserves the credit?
William Furlong, whose interviews of Smith and his client form the bulk
of the text, wonders whether, if artists are no longer making and doing
things for themselves, they are more like Renaissance painters who
employed a "studio" of assistants? This ignores the difference between
mixing a few paints or colouring in the background, and completing the
entire work. A better model might be the ghost or editor who actually
writes the celebrity's book, or the record' producer who turns the
budding (or fading) pop star's effort’s into a proper song.
Furlong asks about the nature of the "collaboration" and whether Smith
should be able to claim some portion of authorship of finished works.
Naturally, the artists deny this hotly, though Whiteread is astute
enough to suggest Smith should keep a copyright in his processes.
(Presumably, if anyone then tries to rip something off Smith can
litigate instead of the cash-strapped artist.) Patsy Craig, the studio's
archivist, complains that the fine art world tends to be "just mildly
egocentric where issues of accreditation are concerned".
Case in point being the ‘ANDY WARHOL ART AUTHENTICATION BOARD, INCORPORATED.’ Instead of embracing Warhol’s hands off approach to his art,
this now infamous group are attempting to deny the fact that much of his
work was made by assistants in studios which he had never visited. This
robs Warhol of his rightful place in history as the artist who
popularised the contemporary conceptual art scene and the recognition of
being the major influence of the YBA’s. The board are relegating him to
being a distant descendent of Rubens and David.
Smith himself is more equivocal about his claim to some of the
limelight. "I want the studio to have recognition," he says, "but not at
the expense of-not being in business." In other words, he knows which
way his bread is buttered: by keeping his clients flattered. He freely
admits: "I have made things which aren't that interesting." But he
daren't say that to the artists, lest they take their funded commissions
elsewhere or, like Dada Hirst himself, set up their own little Warholy
factories.
PS: That fourth plinth is now empty again, with plans for a new
installation every other year. The current shortlist includes a car
covered in pigeon-shit (by Sarah Lucas) and a pair of phallic wooden
torpedoes (by Stefan Gec). It'll be funded by the Ken Livingstone
Foundation or "KLF" as it's known in the trade. Anyone with a wacky idea
should perhaps send it to Mike Smith's studio. As his client Darren
Almond says: "You can really have fun with Mike and suggest the most
ridiculous of ideas and he will take them seriously and come back to you
in two days with probably a solution."
Making Art Work. Mike Smith Studio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley, £39.95)
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.
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.
new york post nov 2006
PARTON PORTRAIT: IS IT ANDY'S?
November 19, 2006 -- A KITSCHY Andy Warhol portrait of Dolly Parton expected to fetch up to $1.5 million last week at Sotheby's didn't sell - and a talented Warhol copycat claims maybe the reason is that the work isn't really by Warhol.
Veteran artist Horst Weber says he produced more than 24,000 Warhol works over eight years - including images of Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Madonna - for Warhol's studio, which then sold them as genuine works of the famed pop artist.
"Warhol or an assistant would take a photograph or use a stock photo from a service, and we would normally handle the rest," explained Weber. "We had so much work, we used to farm it out to neighboring shops, and none of their employees had any contact with Warhol whatsoever."
Weber has particular memories of the oversized Parton portrait produced in 1984. "Although we made many paintings of Dolly Parton, I remember this particular one as I decided to make it with sugary colors," he said. "And the fact that this painting of Dolly Parton is unsigned means there is a very good chance that Warhol had never actually laid eyes on it."
Weber also points to a Sept. 18, 1985, entry in Warhol's diary, in which he laments how Parton's manager, Sandy Gallin, backed out of buying it. "[His] secretary got on and said, 'Ohhh, Sandy's soooo embarrassed' - that it just doesn't look like my art . . . And after 15 minutes, she popped the question: Could he get his $10,000 deposit back?"
While other Warhol pieces sold for millions in separate auctions at both Sotheby's and Christie's last week, the Parton portrait was one of the few that didn't.
A Sotheby's rep insists the Parton piece is a true Warhol: "The work is stamped on the overlap by the Andy Warhol Authentification Board and in fact was once owned by the Warhol Foundation."
November 19, 2006 -- A KITSCHY Andy Warhol portrait of Dolly Parton expected to fetch up to $1.5 million last week at Sotheby's didn't sell - and a talented Warhol copycat claims maybe the reason is that the work isn't really by Warhol.
Veteran artist Horst Weber says he produced more than 24,000 Warhol works over eight years - including images of Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Madonna - for Warhol's studio, which then sold them as genuine works of the famed pop artist.
"Warhol or an assistant would take a photograph or use a stock photo from a service, and we would normally handle the rest," explained Weber. "We had so much work, we used to farm it out to neighboring shops, and none of their employees had any contact with Warhol whatsoever."
Weber has particular memories of the oversized Parton portrait produced in 1984. "Although we made many paintings of Dolly Parton, I remember this particular one as I decided to make it with sugary colors," he said. "And the fact that this painting of Dolly Parton is unsigned means there is a very good chance that Warhol had never actually laid eyes on it."
Weber also points to a Sept. 18, 1985, entry in Warhol's diary, in which he laments how Parton's manager, Sandy Gallin, backed out of buying it. "[His] secretary got on and said, 'Ohhh, Sandy's soooo embarrassed' - that it just doesn't look like my art . . . And after 15 minutes, she popped the question: Could he get his $10,000 deposit back?"
While other Warhol pieces sold for millions in separate auctions at both Sotheby's and Christie's last week, the Parton portrait was one of the few that didn't.
A Sotheby's rep insists the Parton piece is a true Warhol: "The work is stamped on the overlap by the Andy Warhol Authentification Board and in fact was once owned by the Warhol Foundation."
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
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
"the art trade is the last major unregulated market"
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11802
“The art trade is the last major unregulated market”
Is it time for reform? Murky dealings come to light as more collectors enter the scene—and bring their cases to court
By Marc Spiegler
For the last few years, the media have trumpeted contemporary art as the hottest new investment. At fairs, auction houses and galleries, an influx of new buyers—many of them from the world of finance—have streamed in. Lifted by this tidal wave of new money, the number of thriving artists, galleries and consultants has rocketed upwards. Yet amid all this transformative change, one element has held stable: the art market’s murky modus operandi.
“In my experience, people coming from the finance world into the art market tend to be shocked by the level of opacity and murkiness”, says collector Greg Allen, a former financier who co-chairs MoMA’s Junior Associates board. “Of course, there’s a lot of hubris—these people made fortunes cracking the market’s code, so they tend to think the opacity is someone else’s problems. But the mechanisms are not in place to eliminate ethical lapses or price-gouging and the new breed of collectors are definitely more likely to pursue legal options. And once things go to court a lot of the opacity gets shaken out.”
Last November, Manhattan collector Andrew Klink sued legendary Toronto photography dealer Jane Corkin over an Andre Kertesz print. According to his suit, she cited it as coming from the Paris period most prized by photography collectors and he bought it for $275,000; but the Kertesz foundation later issued an authenticity letter that placed the particular print with more likelihood in the later New York period of the artist’s oeuvre. The case has been settled, and neither party can now comment publicly.
“The art trade is the last major unregulated market”, points out Manhattan attorney Peter R. Stern, whose work frequently involves art-market cases. “And while it always involved large sums of money, there was never the level of trading and investing that we have now. I’m increasingly approached by collectors who have encountered problems.” Stern represented collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann in his winning case against the Project gallery (The Art Newspaper, April 2005, p.53), which captivated the art world by revealing precisely what prices and discounts Project chief Christian Haye had offered various collectors and galleries on paintings by Julie Mehretu—information normally concealed by an art world omerta.
While the Project case was exceptionally complex, Stern undertook five more straightforward breach-of-contract cases in the last six months, all involving problems arising after collectors consigned work to a gallery for secondary-market sale. Stern declines to cite the dealers involved, since the suits are either pending or were settled out of court, but in one case, the consignor only discovered a work had been sold after her sister saw it hanging on a museum wall; the gallery had never notified, much less paid, her. In another, the consignor spotted the work at a cocktail party, asked the host its sale price and heard a significantly higher sum than that upon which the gallery had paid commission on. A third case was triggered when a gallery assistant prepared invoices with two different prices and then switched them by mistake while mailing them off, revealing the true selling price to the consignor.
While lawsuits are less of an issue in England, politicians may soon start seriously investigating art-market affairs. This March, Parliament’s select Media, Culture and Sport Committee held hearings on the art trade. Most of the hearing focused on the ramifications of the droit de suite regulations which come into effect in January 2006. But abstract painter Rebecca Salter—whose work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, the British Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—weighed in with descriptions of dealer practices that stunned the less art world-savvy MPs present; the predominant absence of written contracts was noted with particular amazement.
Since testifying, Salter says, she has become a magnet for disgruntled artists—in the worst case, a work had been sold in 1963 and the artist was never paid; once the gallery admitted it, they summarily sent a check for £200, making no adjustment for inflation or interest. For contemporary artists with strong markets, the sums can rapidly spiral much higher—two relatively new arrivals to a major New York gallery, for example, had a million-plus dollars each in back payments owed to them from their previous dealer.
“I don’t want to lay all the blame at the door of dealers”, cautions Salter. “Artists with galleries can also behave quite badly, inviting people around to the studio and selling work at half price.” Nor are collectors choirboys when it comes to ethics, commonly reneging on deals, withholding payments for years, and misrepresenting their intentions. A classic example: German collector Hans Grothe, who amassed a huge photography collection at discount prices by promising to build a monumental museum, then auctioned his prime pieces at the height of the German-photo boom—including Andreas Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse, which was sold at Christie’s for £432,750 in 2001, setting the world auction record for contemporary photography.
Labour party MP Chris Bryant, who invited Salter to testify, sounds cautiously optimistic that one of the committee’s recommendations, a voluntary code of conduct defining ethical art world practices, could become a reality. “For the most part, the art market’s workings don’t come into view”, Bryant says. “But we will have to put droit de suite into place by the end of the year, which will bring those workings into public discussion. At that time there will be a lot of political pressure to also put in place a code of conduct, which of course the national institutions would abide by.” In theory that might mean that any dealer refusing to subscribe by the code of conduct could have trouble selling to publicly funded institutions such as the Tate.
Speaking of museums, the selection of artists for mid-career retrospectives functions as one of more heavily traded-upon pieces of market information. Short of sudden leap in auction prices, there is almost nothing that will turbo-charge an artist’s market faster than a retrospective at major institutions such as the Tate, MoMA, or Whitney. Yet such shows are rarely announced immediately after they have been decided upon. And during the period between when the show is green-lighted and its official announcement, the people best positioned to act upon it are major collectors.
“There’s so much insider trading around these retrospectives”, says London-based dealer Kenny Schachter. “Galleries call their top two or three collectors as soon as they find out and let them in on the deal. In commodities trading, where I used to work, that’s called ‘front-running’ and it’s illegal. I remember when I first stumbled into the art world, I was shocked that it could be run in such an archaic manner.” By the time the retrospective is officially announced, little primary-market work is available, so the second-tier collectors end up either buying the artist at auction or paying the newly raised prices justified by the retrospective. “The issue of how people use and spread this kind of information has not really been looked at in depth, but it actually deserves some attention”, says Susan May, formerly a Tate curator and now Head of the Arts Council Collection. “We always have to know where the line gets too close for comfort, because the last thing we want is to be scrutinised for insider trading. But the art world is such an intensely sociable environment, and it’s not as though we ever make people sign confidentiality agreements.”
Is that really “insider trading”? “The art market is unregulated, so there’s no rule defining what ‘insider trading’ means”, argues major Manhattan collector Adam Lindemann. “Also, it’s good to know about these shows ahead of time and people definitely buy based on that ‘privileged information’. But it’s no guarantee—unless it’s a hit, the artist’s market can often go flat afterwards.” Still, it hardly seems a level playing field when those collectors closest to a museum can profit from advance knowledge of where it will place its imprimatur. Yet museums rarely proscribe such activities. Quite the reverse, in fact. “Generally curators are encouraging people on the board to buy pieces by artists that a museum is planning to show or acquire, hoping that the work will be donated later on”, says one museum-world insider. “It’s seen as mutually beneficial. Information about a big solo show never stays secret. But it stays secret just long enough.”
Among dealers, there’s widespread disagreement about what should happen next. “There’s a lot more money in this business than there used to be, and yet we’re less regulated than used car dealers”, says one major American dealer who is taking part in ArtBasel in June. “And if we don’t start cleaning up the business, we might end being forced to do it from outside. Frankly, I’m surprised [New York State Attorney General] Eliot Spitzer stopped after those tax evasion cases—maybe he didn’t realise how much money is involved here.” But another top American dealer, likewise coming to Basel, says, “If you make the business transparent it would collapse overnight. I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what’s available or quote them prices 10 times what other people paid. Entire careers are built upon fabrications, like about which shows sold out and at what prices”.
Yet it’s precisely such uncertainties that can threaten the growth of the art market, points out Ian Charles Stewart, a London venture capitalist and art collector who also sits on boards at both the ICA and the Arts University London. “For anything to truly be called ‘investment grade’, you need to be able to track its prices over times, both at auction and in private sales”, he says. “A registry of all sales, auditable by the buyers and sellers, to show the price history of a piece would help a lot. The passage of art-market information now is so inconsistent that it’s like tech stocks from 1994 to 1999—the market is flush with cash, but it’s the insiders making the most money and the newbies often tend to learn hard lessons.”
“The art trade is the last major unregulated market”
Is it time for reform? Murky dealings come to light as more collectors enter the scene—and bring their cases to court
By Marc Spiegler
For the last few years, the media have trumpeted contemporary art as the hottest new investment. At fairs, auction houses and galleries, an influx of new buyers—many of them from the world of finance—have streamed in. Lifted by this tidal wave of new money, the number of thriving artists, galleries and consultants has rocketed upwards. Yet amid all this transformative change, one element has held stable: the art market’s murky modus operandi.
“In my experience, people coming from the finance world into the art market tend to be shocked by the level of opacity and murkiness”, says collector Greg Allen, a former financier who co-chairs MoMA’s Junior Associates board. “Of course, there’s a lot of hubris—these people made fortunes cracking the market’s code, so they tend to think the opacity is someone else’s problems. But the mechanisms are not in place to eliminate ethical lapses or price-gouging and the new breed of collectors are definitely more likely to pursue legal options. And once things go to court a lot of the opacity gets shaken out.”
Last November, Manhattan collector Andrew Klink sued legendary Toronto photography dealer Jane Corkin over an Andre Kertesz print. According to his suit, she cited it as coming from the Paris period most prized by photography collectors and he bought it for $275,000; but the Kertesz foundation later issued an authenticity letter that placed the particular print with more likelihood in the later New York period of the artist’s oeuvre. The case has been settled, and neither party can now comment publicly.
“The art trade is the last major unregulated market”, points out Manhattan attorney Peter R. Stern, whose work frequently involves art-market cases. “And while it always involved large sums of money, there was never the level of trading and investing that we have now. I’m increasingly approached by collectors who have encountered problems.” Stern represented collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann in his winning case against the Project gallery (The Art Newspaper, April 2005, p.53), which captivated the art world by revealing precisely what prices and discounts Project chief Christian Haye had offered various collectors and galleries on paintings by Julie Mehretu—information normally concealed by an art world omerta.
While the Project case was exceptionally complex, Stern undertook five more straightforward breach-of-contract cases in the last six months, all involving problems arising after collectors consigned work to a gallery for secondary-market sale. Stern declines to cite the dealers involved, since the suits are either pending or were settled out of court, but in one case, the consignor only discovered a work had been sold after her sister saw it hanging on a museum wall; the gallery had never notified, much less paid, her. In another, the consignor spotted the work at a cocktail party, asked the host its sale price and heard a significantly higher sum than that upon which the gallery had paid commission on. A third case was triggered when a gallery assistant prepared invoices with two different prices and then switched them by mistake while mailing them off, revealing the true selling price to the consignor.
While lawsuits are less of an issue in England, politicians may soon start seriously investigating art-market affairs. This March, Parliament’s select Media, Culture and Sport Committee held hearings on the art trade. Most of the hearing focused on the ramifications of the droit de suite regulations which come into effect in January 2006. But abstract painter Rebecca Salter—whose work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, the British Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—weighed in with descriptions of dealer practices that stunned the less art world-savvy MPs present; the predominant absence of written contracts was noted with particular amazement.
Since testifying, Salter says, she has become a magnet for disgruntled artists—in the worst case, a work had been sold in 1963 and the artist was never paid; once the gallery admitted it, they summarily sent a check for £200, making no adjustment for inflation or interest. For contemporary artists with strong markets, the sums can rapidly spiral much higher—two relatively new arrivals to a major New York gallery, for example, had a million-plus dollars each in back payments owed to them from their previous dealer.
“I don’t want to lay all the blame at the door of dealers”, cautions Salter. “Artists with galleries can also behave quite badly, inviting people around to the studio and selling work at half price.” Nor are collectors choirboys when it comes to ethics, commonly reneging on deals, withholding payments for years, and misrepresenting their intentions. A classic example: German collector Hans Grothe, who amassed a huge photography collection at discount prices by promising to build a monumental museum, then auctioned his prime pieces at the height of the German-photo boom—including Andreas Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse, which was sold at Christie’s for £432,750 in 2001, setting the world auction record for contemporary photography.
Labour party MP Chris Bryant, who invited Salter to testify, sounds cautiously optimistic that one of the committee’s recommendations, a voluntary code of conduct defining ethical art world practices, could become a reality. “For the most part, the art market’s workings don’t come into view”, Bryant says. “But we will have to put droit de suite into place by the end of the year, which will bring those workings into public discussion. At that time there will be a lot of political pressure to also put in place a code of conduct, which of course the national institutions would abide by.” In theory that might mean that any dealer refusing to subscribe by the code of conduct could have trouble selling to publicly funded institutions such as the Tate.
Speaking of museums, the selection of artists for mid-career retrospectives functions as one of more heavily traded-upon pieces of market information. Short of sudden leap in auction prices, there is almost nothing that will turbo-charge an artist’s market faster than a retrospective at major institutions such as the Tate, MoMA, or Whitney. Yet such shows are rarely announced immediately after they have been decided upon. And during the period between when the show is green-lighted and its official announcement, the people best positioned to act upon it are major collectors.
“There’s so much insider trading around these retrospectives”, says London-based dealer Kenny Schachter. “Galleries call their top two or three collectors as soon as they find out and let them in on the deal. In commodities trading, where I used to work, that’s called ‘front-running’ and it’s illegal. I remember when I first stumbled into the art world, I was shocked that it could be run in such an archaic manner.” By the time the retrospective is officially announced, little primary-market work is available, so the second-tier collectors end up either buying the artist at auction or paying the newly raised prices justified by the retrospective. “The issue of how people use and spread this kind of information has not really been looked at in depth, but it actually deserves some attention”, says Susan May, formerly a Tate curator and now Head of the Arts Council Collection. “We always have to know where the line gets too close for comfort, because the last thing we want is to be scrutinised for insider trading. But the art world is such an intensely sociable environment, and it’s not as though we ever make people sign confidentiality agreements.”
Is that really “insider trading”? “The art market is unregulated, so there’s no rule defining what ‘insider trading’ means”, argues major Manhattan collector Adam Lindemann. “Also, it’s good to know about these shows ahead of time and people definitely buy based on that ‘privileged information’. But it’s no guarantee—unless it’s a hit, the artist’s market can often go flat afterwards.” Still, it hardly seems a level playing field when those collectors closest to a museum can profit from advance knowledge of where it will place its imprimatur. Yet museums rarely proscribe such activities. Quite the reverse, in fact. “Generally curators are encouraging people on the board to buy pieces by artists that a museum is planning to show or acquire, hoping that the work will be donated later on”, says one museum-world insider. “It’s seen as mutually beneficial. Information about a big solo show never stays secret. But it stays secret just long enough.”
Among dealers, there’s widespread disagreement about what should happen next. “There’s a lot more money in this business than there used to be, and yet we’re less regulated than used car dealers”, says one major American dealer who is taking part in ArtBasel in June. “And if we don’t start cleaning up the business, we might end being forced to do it from outside. Frankly, I’m surprised [New York State Attorney General] Eliot Spitzer stopped after those tax evasion cases—maybe he didn’t realise how much money is involved here.” But another top American dealer, likewise coming to Basel, says, “If you make the business transparent it would collapse overnight. I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what’s available or quote them prices 10 times what other people paid. Entire careers are built upon fabrications, like about which shows sold out and at what prices”.
Yet it’s precisely such uncertainties that can threaten the growth of the art market, points out Ian Charles Stewart, a London venture capitalist and art collector who also sits on boards at both the ICA and the Arts University London. “For anything to truly be called ‘investment grade’, you need to be able to track its prices over times, both at auction and in private sales”, he says. “A registry of all sales, auditable by the buyers and sellers, to show the price history of a piece would help a lot. The passage of art-market information now is so inconsistent that it’s like tech stocks from 1994 to 1999—the market is flush with cash, but it’s the insiders making the most money and the newbies often tend to learn hard lessons.”
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