Once Bitten, Twice Denied
December 2007
In the 20 years since his death, Andy Warhol has enjoyed far more than 15 minutes of fame. The man who wove steel wool into golden fleece is the subject of scores of books and films. Media scholars mine his visions. Museums mount retrospectives. Warhol’s market, static for several years, has recently spiked; his 1963 silkscreen "Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car)" fetched $71.7 million last May at Christie’s New York—more than four times the high set six months earlier.With the surge in popularity and prices most people invested in the Warhol legacy are happy. Joe Simon-Whelan, however, isn’t one of them. The London-based film director is suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board for $20 million after a 1964 Warhol self-portrait he submitted for authentication was twice inked with the Authentication Board’s dreaded "Denied" stamp. Simon-Whelan purchased the 24-by-20-inch silkscreen in 1989. The work bore three stamped Warhol signatures, in addition to a signed, handwritten inscription from then–Warhol Foundation president and estate executor Fred Hughes certifying its authenticity. The denial, Simon-Whelan charges, has made his painting virtually unsaleable. "We think the motivations of this board are not in good faith," says Seth Redniss, co-counsel for the plaintiff with Lee A. Weiss. Along with fraud and antitrust infractions, the lawsuit charges the defendants with conspiracy to limit the number of Warhol artworks on the market in order to artificially inflate the value of the Foundation’s own Warhol holdings. "We think they give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down according to their own financial interests."
Andy Warhol is a problematic artist for connoisseurs. He often worked in multiples, which he frequently neglected to sign or number. More significantly, he deliberately flaunted traditional concepts of authorship by delegating the tasks of drawing, photography, printing and even painting to his New York "Factory" colleagues, to friends and to outside collaborators. (See sidebar on page 60.) "Artists throughout history have always had assistants," says Douglas Crimp, professor of contemporary art at the University of Rochester. "Warhol’s innovation was to say, ‘Let’s industrialize the process. And let’s not cover it up.’ He is famous for saying, ‘I don’t make my work. My assistants do.’"
The problem of authenticating Warhol is compounded by the quantity of alleged works in circulation, and by the astronomical prices some of these works command. It is also compounded by repetition. Myriad versions of pop icons like Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot exist in various colors, mediums and sizes.
The Warhol Foundation, created according to the artist’s will just a few months after his death, received a reported 100,000 Warhols, the value of which has been estimated at between $300 million and $500 million. The non-profit Foundation, which last year issued $11 million in cultural and educational grants, generates much of its revenues from sales of Warhol’s work. Until 1995, when the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board was incorporated, the Foundation also played a pivotal role in separating Warhol wheat from chaff. Particularly active in this effort were Hughes and fellow Foundation trustee Vincent Fremont, who had been Warhol’s executive business manager and is still the Foundation’s exclusive sales agent. Fremont Enterprises is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with the Warhol estate.
The Authentication Board was formed to keep the Foundation and its officers out of the Warhol authentication business and avoid any conflict of interest. "We keep each other at arm’s length," says Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs. "The Authentication Board is completely independent. I’ve never even attended one of their meetings."
The painting in question, referred to as "Double Denied" in the lawsuit, was one of half a dozen silkscreen self-portraits executed for the 1964 world premiere of Warhol’s first videos. They were screened at an abandoned subway stop beneath Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Richard Ekstract, a New York publisher and former Warhol media consultant who helped organize the happening, says Warhol gave him the silkscreen acetate or mold and instructed him to have five or six impressions of the self-portrait printed for the event. On completion of the printing, Ekstract returned the acetate to Warhol. He kept one of the paintings after the event and gave the others to colleagues. Ekstract believes the printer he commissioned for the job also ran off a few impressions for himself.
In 1987, the owner of "Double Denied" put the work up for auction at Christie’s in order to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. The auction house brought the work to the Foundation, where Fremont authenticated it with three stamped Warhol signatures. After a series of sales, "Double Denied" was purchased by Simon-Whelan in August 1989 for $195,000. The silkscreen had sold at Christie’s two years earlier for $28,600.
One year later, Ekstract submitted his own impression of "Double Denied" to the Foundation for authentication. It was rejected, as were all other subsequent submissions of paintings from the Ekstract series. "These paintings represent the first screenings of video art anywhere," he says. "A seminal moment in art history. Instead of denying their authenticity, the Foundation and Board should be applauding these works as an important step in Warhol scholarship."In its May 2001 letter to Simon-Whelan—a rare courtesy granted the film director and only after repeated requests—the Board claimed it had no verifiable evidence that Warhol either sanctioned or authorized "Double Denied" or any of the other impressions of the silkscreen Ekstract had printed for the screenings. It also stated that while Warhol did work in multiples, the individual works were distinguished by background, by handpainting by Warhol and by varying the angle or placement of the impression. "The existence of ten identical works is without precedent in the corpus of Warhol’s paintings," wrote Sally King-Nero on behalf of the Board.
Simon-Whelan claims he had no knowledge that all the other Ekstract paintings had been deemed inauthentic by the time he submitted "Double Denied" to the Board in 2001 after receiving a $2 million offer for the work. Furthermore, he claims he only submitted "Double Denied" for examination on the repeated urgings of Fremont, described in the 64-page complaint as one of the Warhol Foundation’s "enforcers." The complaint uses this term to refer to Foundation personnel and friends who it claims pressure Warhol owners to submit their works in order to tighten the Foundation’s stranglehold on the market.
In February 2002, after a two-month deliberation, the Board rejected Simon-Whelan’s painting. He reapplied one year later—this time buttressing his bid with letters from known Warhol collaborators and transcripts from the Andy Warhol Museum. The result, once again, was negative.
Ronald Spencer, who represents the Foundation, the Authentication Board and Vincent Fremont in the lawsuit, says that such reversals of opinion are far from rare in connoisseurship. "Different experts at different times come to different conclusions about the authenticity of works of art," he argues, adding that the Simon-Whelan lawsuit is completely without merit and will only serve to divert Foundation funds away from arts and education grants and into legal fees. "These changes of opinion often come about on the discovery of new information. Rembrandt’s oeuvre, for example, has expanded and contracted many times over the past century."
While Simon-Whelan enjoys the sympathy of many of his fellow collectors, not all of them buy into his conspiracy theory. "There’s always a certain risk in buying works by any of the contemporary artists," observes Portland, Oregon, real estate developer and philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer, who counts nearly 80 Warhol prints in his collection. "You rely on the reputation and integrity of who you’re buying from and on your own due diligence to make your own best judgment. But in the end, it comes down to human judgment, and human judgment can be wrong. Whether the reversal in question here is intentional is another matter, and my sense is that it’s not. Still, if I were this buyer, I think I’d be angry as well."
Andy Warhol ably exploited the flaws and follies of mass-market culture to generate fame, wealth, and, perhaps most importantly, great art. And his most miraculous power, that of alchemy, seems to have survived him. The artist who in life turned soup cans into high art and priceless images into ordinary pulp now, in death, seems to have ventured into yet another mass media phenomenon, the reality TV show, and transformed those who contend his legacy into the players.
"I don’t believe in the afterlife," says painter Ronnie Cutrone, who spent nearly two decades in various roles in Warhol’s factory. "And I don’t care about any of this. But if Andy were up there and looking down at what’s going on now, I guarantee you he’d be laughing. And he’d keep on laughing just so long as his prices stay high."
Ken Shulman has published investigative essays on art topics including Caravaggio, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft and the Sistine Chapel Restoration.