ANDY WARHOL DIED on 22 February 1987 from complications following routine gall-bladder surgery. The New York Times reported that he left assets in the region of half a billion dollars, although, for tax purposes, the Foundation he established in his name valued them at $80 million. The inventory of works of art by him included 4,118 paintings, 5,103 drawings, 19,086 prints and 66,512 photographs, plus sculptures such as silver spray-painted Coca-Cola bottles.1 His real-estate portfolio included his maisonette at 1342 Lexington Avenue; a town house at 57 East 66th Street; a house co-owned with Paul Morrissey in Montauk; land in Colorado; and several properties in downtown Manhattan, including the former Consolidated Edison Building on Union Square, where he had his last Factory, and a house at 57 Great Jones Street, which he leased to the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.2 Over ten days in April 1988, Sotheby’s sale of his collections of over 3,000 lots of jewellery, watches, cookie jars, Navajo rugs, folk art, and paintings netted £25 million. A single lot, one of Cy Twombly’s Chalkboard paintings, brought $990,000, while David Hockney’s portrait of Warhol sold for $330,000. The six-volume catalogue alone cost $95.3 In his will, Warhol directed that these assets be used to establish a foundation dedicated to the advancement of the visual arts.4 The Andy Warhol Foundation was also bequeathed tens of thousands of artworks, which it was allowed to sell.
For all his wealth, at the time of his death in 1987, Warhol’s reputation as an artist had long been in decline in the USA. For two decades, the American public had been reading about his starry social life, but the more his name appeared in the gossip columns, the less important his new work felt. The Campbell’s Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes, the portraits of Marilyn, Elvis and Liz: all were works of the sixties – relics of a moment in American culture that, to younger Americans, felt as distant as the Jazz Age.
The market for Warhol’s work spiked just after his death, then plummeted during the financial slump in the early 1990s.5 A few years after that, as the artist’s wobbly reputation began to recover, so did his prices. A full-scale re-evaluation was well under way by 1995, when the Museum of Modern Art paid $15 million for his 32 Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, first exhibited in 1962.
As we learned more about the man and his life through the publication, in 1989, of David Bourdon’s biography, followed swiftly by Victor Bockris’s Life and Death of Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries and Colacello’s biography Holy Terror, both the ambition and the consistency of his artistic project began to crystallise. Once the link had been made between his art and his private obsessions and compulsions, Warhol looked very different from the spaced-out painter of movie stars we thought we knew. We came to understand that his achievement was to combine the visual excitement of pop with a depth of thought that elevated him far above the clichés pinned onto him in the sixties.
Renewed respect for Warhol’s achievement quickly translated into a rise in the value of his work. Since the Andy Warhol Foundation owned thousands of his paintings, drawings and prints, its wealth would increase exponentially in the coming years. The Foundation needed to be run by professionals. In 1990, Fred Hughes appointed Archibald Gillies as its first president. A well-connected lawyer, and formerly president of both the World Policy Institute and of the John Hay Whitney Foundation, Gillies created a board of twelve trustees – many of whom were lawyers, including Peter Gates, who worked for the law firm Carter Ledyard, and who was Gillies’ personal lawyer. With Gates appointed as its secretary, Gilles’ newly formed board moved swiftly to remove anyone connected to Warhol or the former Factory. Hughes, already suffering from the multiple sclerosis that would kill him in 2001, was ‘retired’ to the position of president emeritus. One employee spared from dismissal was Fremont, who was offered a contract that made him both exclusive sales representative for the Foundation and its licensing agent.
Gillies’ turbulent presidency lasted eleven years. Almost from the start, rumours of corruption and scandal swirled around the Foundation. As early as the mid-1990s, the attorney general of New York concluded an investigation into accusations of high salaries, lavish expense claims and general mismanagement by ordering a new audit committee to report quarterly to his office, though no legal wrongdoing had been found. ‘There’s nothing about the Foundation Andy would have been pleased with,’ said Paige Powell, a close friend of Warhol’s. And his former superstar Brigid Berlin added, ‘All they’re doing at the Foundation is spending Andy’s money.’6
One of the Foundation’s priorities in the decade after Warhol’s death had been to complete an initiative started by Hughes: the establishment of a museum dedicated to his work. In partnership with two other institutions, the Dia Center for the Arts and the Carnegie Institute, it spent millions to create the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, then gifted the institution about 3,000 of Warhol’s paintings, drawings, prints and photographs. Included in the donation were most of his archive and all 610 of the Time Capsules, containing about 300,000 pieces of ephemera – like playbills, fan magazines, postcards and news clippings – that he had collected between 1974 and his death. Finally, the new museum was granted the copyright to many of Warhol’s most iconic images. The largest single-artist institution in America, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in May 1994. Almost at once, it became a place of pilgrimage, offering visitors the overwhelming experience of seeing the power and beauty of works they might only have known in reproduction.7
The main work of the Foundation was to support the visual arts. By its twenty-fifth anniversary, it had awarded nearly $250 million in grants to hundreds of museums and non-profit arts groups, large and small, both in the US and (to a limited degree) in Great Britain. In an average year, it made grants totalling about $13 million to projects ranging from the restoration of works of art, churches, historic buildings and monuments, to the publication of books and catalogues, or support for exhibitions and (less often) political organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union. It also awarded research grants and stipends to individual artists. Too frequently, though, its philanthropic activities were overshadowed by a seemingly endless stream of accusations and investigations into its finances and integrity.