SEVEN DAYS LATER, at 6.30 p.m., I rang the buzzer to Joe Simon’s Chelsea flat. The guy who opened the door looked about twenty-five but was in fact closer to forty. He had floppy blond hair, big white teeth, a broad face and ski-jump nose, and he was wearing pressed chinos, a button-down collar, blazer and loafers. The preppy clothes were of a piece with the unostentatious decor of his flat: good oriental rugs over beige coir matting, antique furniture, a comfortable sofa and easy chairs covered in fabrics by Nina Campbell. I was used to the British aesthetic of shabby chic, so I also noticed that everything in the flat was in immaculate condition.
On the walls of his drawing room hung two framed Warhol Cow silkscreen prints. In each, the same cow is shown against a soft blue background in close-up, filling the viewer’s field of vision. The effect is hallucinatory and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, comforting. Each print was framed individually and inscribed, Happy Birthday Joey, love Andy.
Hanging nearby was a more valuable Warhol, his silk-screened portrait of Mick Jagger. There are many prints in this series, and, with hindsight, I’d say that Simon’s was the best I’ve seen. Others tend to be luridly coloured, with smears of red paint over Jagger’s rubbery lips and splashes of turquoise laid like mascara over his eyelids.
Simon’s print was different. In it, Warhol left a black-and-white photograph of Jagger intact, then overlaid one side of his face with a semi-transparent geometric shape, with a wash of pale green over the other. Black, white, grey and green: the restrained palette creates a stillness in the portrait that makes it unique in the series. The frame, too, was unusual. It was covered in silver fabric and signed by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.
I also noticed a sensitive crayon portrait of Joe Simon by his neighbour in Malibu, David Hockney, as well as Hockney’s delightful studies of his two dachshunds, which I found particularly enchanting since we were then besotted with our own miniature dachshund. These prints too were dedicated, To Joe with love from David.
You learn a lot about someone by looking at the art they have on their walls. This glimpse of Simon’s world made it clear that his personal connection with the artist or the sitter was what drew him to a work of art. But there was something else about the collection that I had not expected: it was quiet, personal, not one acquired to show off or to impress.
Simon got straight down to business. There was no small talk, no flattery, and no pretence on Simon’s part that he had ever read my reviews, exhibition catalogues or books. I took that as a positive sign. He told me he was a film producer whose company had worked on projects with Tim Burton, Salma Hayek and Woody Allen, and he mentioned several well-reviewed movies he’d produced, but within minutes he was showing me the two Warhols he wanted to talk about.
The first was the Red Self-Portrait, a screen print on canvas from a series made in 1965. While I was looking, Simon kept up a running commentary, hardly drawing breath as a story spilled out that he must have told a hundred times before. On 9 August 1989, he bought the picture on the recommendation of Michael Hue-Williams, a London art dealer I knew and respected. The picture was ‘signed’ Andy Warhol twice, and confirmed as an authentic by Andy’s business manager, Fred Hughes, in a handwritten inscription on the stretcher. But there was a big hitch. What Simon had not realised when he bought the picture, he said, was that the two highly realistic Andy Warhol signatures were stamped facsimiles, not written in Warhol’s own hand. Simon said he bought the self-portrait ‘because I liked it, but mostly because Michael [Hue-Williams], Fred [Hughes] and Ammann [Thomas Ammann, the Swiss art dealer] all underscored to me the importance of the piece, and Andy’s signatures… I was dizzy with excitement.’
In 2002, thirteen years after acquiring the Red Self-Portrait, and after a bitter break-up with his partner, Simon decided to sell it. A buyer was easily found through a London gallery. Contracts were exchanged and the purchase price paid into the gallery’s escrow account. The gallery advised their client of the possibility that the painting would be included in a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s paintings, the ultimate confirmation of its authenticity. Such a catalogue is intended to include every picture the artist painted. Each catalogue entry contains basic information – the subject of the picture, the date it was painted, the material it is painted on and its size. If it is signed, dated or inscribed, either by the artist or by another hand, that information is given, as is its provenance – the history of ownership from the moment it left the artist’s studio to its present whereabouts, if known, in a private collection or a public museum. If the work has been restored, repaired or relined, that information is added.
To confirm that the Red Self-Portrait was to be included in the Warhol catalogue raisonné, the lawyer for Simon’s client called the Zurich-based art dealer George Frei, co-author of that catalogue. Frei worked for Thomas Ammann Fine Art, the leading European dealer in Warhol’s art.
Although he had seen and photographed the painting in Simon’s London house in 1996 without commenting on its authenticity, Frei unexpectedly advised the lawyer not to buy the picture until it had been certified as genuine by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. That advice carried with it the implication that the painting might not be ‘right’, so Simon released the client from the sale. At the time, he explained, he was simply too busy with different projects to worry about the sale of a painting falling through.
The following month, Hue-Williams took the picture to New York to show the A-list art dealer Larry Gagosian. Before Hue-Williams left, Simon was told that Gagosian’s London office had verbally offered him $800,000 for a quick sale. Simon declined. He saw no reason to sell the picture cheap, when, in a few weeks’ time, another dealer might offer the full price.
Instead, he took advice from a new friend, Vincent Fremont, who told him to submit both works to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. To his consternation, both works came back from the Board stamped DENIED. He could not understand why, and the Board wouldn’t tell him. Simon was asking me to look at it in the hope that I could explain what was wrong, why they had not been authenticated.
As he was telling his story, he started to stutter. His eyes glistened with tears. To spare him embarrassment, I stood up to take a closer look at the picture, which was propped against the wall. The Red Self-Portrait is one of Warhol’s best-known images. Based on a photo taken in an automatic photo booth in Times Square, it shows the artist’s head and shoulders, full-face and slightly from below, very much like the figures in two other important works of the mid-1960s: the mug shots in Thirteen Most Wanted Men, which was shown at the New York World’s Fair in 1965, and the anonymous actor whose head and upper torso we see in Warhol’s underground film, Blow Job.
Like the men in those works, Andy assumes the insolent take-it-or-leave-it expression of the criminal or the hustler. As with other portraits of the sixties, out-of-register reds and blacks make the picture’s surface look slightly fuzzy, like a colour TV on the blink. Warhol presents himself to the world as a new kind of person – one trapped, as though behind a screen, in some fathomless, unreal televisual space – without physical mass or emotional depth, somewhat like Marilyn or Liz in their portraits. As he once said, ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’
One thing about the work disturbed me from the first moment I saw it: the picture surface was unusual – curiously glossy, without texture or brushwork, and with no hint of the canvas weave underneath the image. It could almost have been a photographic reproduction.
Next, Simon produced the second work he wanted me to see. This was a meticulous arrangement of crisp one-dollar bills pasted onto a small canvas. Though untitled, Simon called it the ‘Dollar Bill’ piece. Unlike the Red Self-Portrait, it was signed, inscribed and dated 1986 – all in Warhol’s own handwriting. But the Authentication Board had rejected this work as well. I had never seen anything like it by Warhol, nor had I heard of the assistant who sold it to Simon. But Simon showed me an entry in the published Warhol diaries, in which Warhol says he gave the collage to his assistant as a birthday present during a dinner at the Odeon restaurant.
The diary entry, dated 21 April 1986, reads: ‘And then I had to be creative to think of birthday presents… I stuck money in that grandmother-type birthday card, and I did a canvas that had dollars pasted onto it and then I remembered they even made those sheets of money, but this you could just rip money off when you need it, like for tips.’1
I could see why Simon believed the piece to be genuine. The repeated image of George Washington on the one-dollar bills; the mere fact that it was made from Warhol’s favourite thing, money: all that seemed thoroughly Warholian. It was also meticulously crafted. The bills were glued onto the canvas with deliberation. There were no curled edges, and all the bills were straight. Later, I learned that the serial numbers were arranged in chronological order, from one to forty-one – a detail that suggested the person who made it had taken enormous care in constructing the work. I could not see anything obviously wrong with the collage. It was the Red Self-Portrait that did not feel right.
But, as I told Simon on the telephone, I did not know enough about Warhol to say anything helpful, let alone definitive. I could not think of a way to help him find the answers he was looking for. All I could do was to sympathise with his frustration and tell him that he had to assume the Authentication Board was staffed by scholars who would not have denied the authenticity of either work without good reason.
By now, it was almost eight o’clock. I wished Simon good luck and apologised for my inability to help. Driving home, I did not expect to hear from him again.