IN THE SPRING OF 1964, Andy Warhol made a series of eleven identical self-portraits, using a head-and-shoulders shot taken in a Times Square photo booth, silk-screened on linen. As Simon discovered in that warehouse in Queens, the 1964 series is instantly recognisable because the background colour of each painting is different, and all are painted, in places, by hand, with visible brushwork and areas of thick impasto. These, the Board considers genuine.
But, during the summer of 1965, Andy Warhol made a second series of eleven self-portraits, using the same acetate as he had used the year before, but printed on canvas by a commercial printing company. The uniform background colour gave the series its name: The Red Self-Portraits. These pictures have virtually no evidence of Warhol’s hand in the form of brushwork or impasto. It is a painting from this series that Simon owned, and which the Authentication Board denies is the work of Andy Warhol.
Those who disagree with the Board’s verdict maintain that the context in which the Red Self-Portraits were made is crucial to assessing them. They point out that, at this stage in his career, Andy Warhol was constantly experimenting with new ways to make art. The summer of 1965 was a moment when Warhol was cutting back on painting to concentrate on making films and videos. For them, the second series epitomises this creative gear change and is perfectly in keeping with his increasing interest in creating fine art by mechanical means.
During the summer of 1965, Warhol was turning out about a film per week and getting into serious debt as a result. At the same time, Bruce Torbet and his partner Juan Drago were making a film about Warhol, trailing after him to record how he worked. In a tape recording now in the Andy Warhol Museum, Drago tells Andy that, to improve the sound, he should shoot less. Warhol replies, ‘I don’t cut; I shoot a 1200-foot reel and I don’t cut… I don’t believe in cutting. We want to do a twenty-four-hour movie, following someone around.’1
With running times of five and a half hours and eight hours respectively, Sleep and Empire are hard to watch, especially if you are employed or have something more interesting to do. On the other hand, the shorter films featuring actors and with notional storylines, such as Haircut (No. 1) or Kitchen, are at least watchable. Seeing them today, we may be struck by how far in advance of his time Warhol was when he made them. Now, they look like prototypes for reality TV shows like Big Brother and Love Island.
Just like Warhol’s early films, these trashy but enjoyable programmes offer audiences voyeuristic experiences in exchange for their willingness to tolerate inane dialogue and long stretches of inaction, quickened by glimpses of insipid sex. Until Chelsea Girls, few Americans had seen a Warhol film. For the vast majority, Warhol was the pop artist who made the Campbell’s Soup Cans, nothing more.
Pete Palazzo was the art director who gave Warhol his start in New York, commissioning the young artist to make the pretty line drawings used in advertisements for I Miller shoes, which used to appear weekly in the New York Times from 1955 to 1960. In 1964, Palazzo introduced Warhol to Richard Ekstract, a publisher of magazines about consumer electronics. Andy was fascinated by tape-recordings of the human voice, and so would call Ekstract regularly to acquire taping equipment and blank tapes at little or no cost. With his numerous contacts within the electronics industry, Ekstract could do this easily.
One of Ekstract’s contacts was with Philips Electronics, which owned a company called Norelco. During that momentous summer of 1965, a new machine appeared on the market – one that used tape to capture not just sounds but moving images. Manufactured by Norelco, it functioned like a movie camera, except the ‘film’ could be played back instantly, just like playing back sounds on a tape recorder. It was called a ‘video recording machine’. Richard Ekstract became Warhol’s conduit to Philips and other electronics firms. In a letter to the Board dated 12 November 2002, Ekstract writes that Warhol ‘began soliciting me regularly to obtain recording tape and tape equipment at a discount or for free. I always obliged.’2
Ekstract arranged for Norelco to loan Warhol a prototype for one of the first consumer videotape recorders, together with recording tape – but only for a period of one week, in mid-July 1965. Warhol described the machine in his book, Popism: The Warhol Sixties : ‘It wasn’t portable, it just stood there. It was on a long stalk and it had a head like a bug and you sat at the control panel and the camera rejointed itself like a snake and sort of angled around like a light for a drawing board. It was great looking.’3 An audio tape supplied by the Warhol Museum documents his infatuation with the new technology. In it, Andy Warhol and Ondine discuss the video camera. Warhol says that Norelco has given him the use of the camera for a month. Asked how much it cost, he answers, ‘about fifteen thousand dollars.’4 On side B of the same tape, Warhol is heard discussing the camera with a new friend, eighteen-year-old photographer Stephen Shore. The moment captured on tape has historic interest, since the then-unknown Shore would become one of the most influential American photographers of his generation.
Stephen Shore says, ‘What kind of camera is this?’
‘It’s a videotape,’ Warhol replies.
‘Did they rent it to you…?’
‘No, no. They’ve just, um, it’s not mine… but we’ll see. But we’ll see.’
With this bulky machine, Warhol would make his first masterpiece of video art, Outer and Inner Space, starring his troubled friend and muse, Edie Sedgwick. In exchange for the week’s loan, Warhol agreed to appear on the cover of Ekstract’s magazine and to be interviewed about the new machine.
Warhol was quick to realise the video recorder’s potential for making art. He is heard on a tape recording saying, ‘maybe they’ll let us keep it,’ and complaining about how expensive the tapes are.5 Desperate to have the loan of the expensive equipment extended, he came to an arrangement with Ekstract. The publisher would persuade Philips to let Warhol keep the equipment for longer and would obtain for him more video cartridges and other electronic goods, either at cost or for nothing. In exchange, Warhol offered Ekstract a new series of self-portraits, printed from the original acetates he had used for the series he made the previous year, which the publisher could use as barter.
Ekstract bought the canvases and took them, with the small acetates, to Norgus Silk Screen Company in Madison, New Jersey. In a letter to the Board dated 12 November 2002, Ekstract wrote, ‘During the screening of the prints, Andy was on the phone giving specific instructions on paints, colors, order, etc.’
Jennifer Sordini, a former archives intern at the Warhol Museum, transcribed tape recordings made in the Factory that summer, now owned by the museum. She says, ‘While there is no hard evidence of this transaction between Warhol and Ekstract, it is obvious from the tapes that Warhol wanted very badly to keep the video camera and was trying to come up with a way to keep it. Also evident in the tapes is Warhol’s concern for money; throughout the tapes, he schemes to get discounts and to get people to work for him for free.’
Warhol kept the equipment for at least four months, long enough to shoot his first video of Edie Sedgwick, and (with Paul Morrissey, his business manager at the time) to film a party under the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which Ekstract gave to celebrate the first issue of the new magazine. In 1965, we must remember, an original Andy Warhol painting was worth almost nothing. He often bartered pictures for services or goods, settling his dentist’s bills, his restaurant tab at Max’s Kansas City, or the cost of a recording session for the Velvet Underground with a piece of artwork. Morrissey was the manager of the Factory, which meant he looked after financial matters. He has said that he was not involved in those deals, because they were relatively small. This suggests that Morrissey saw the barter of pictures for equipment as significant in terms of the financial worth of the goods Warhol obtained, in return, through Ekstract.
At that point, there was no second series of the self-portraits to exchange for the equipment. Andy would have to make a new one. Preoccupied as he was with film and video that summer, he had neither the time nor the inclination to undertake the arduous silk-screening process himself. Another drawback to using the traditional silkscreen process was the expense. At the time, a single screen cost fifty dollars. Warhol needed five screens for the Red Self-Portraits, at a total of $250. At the time, rent on the Factory was $100 per month. The series would cost Warhol two and a half months’ rent if he did the screen-printing himself.6
Morrissey is clear that it was his idea that Warhol should turn the acetates over to Ekstract and let the printer do the whole job, thereby ensuring that the publisher, not Andy, would have to pay for the expensive silkscreens, and saving Warhol time, and the trouble of cleaning the mess.7
Prompted by Morrissey, Andy simply told Ekstract to send the acetate to a commercial printer for silk-screening, and Ekstract therefore bought the canvases and took them, with the small acetates, to Norgus Silk Screen Company in Madison, New Jersey, where the series was printed with Warhol’s written and telephoned instructions. Ekstract is adamant that, ‘The… self-portraits I had made were produced in complete accordance with Andy Warhol’s wishes and under his direction.’
In a handwritten letter to the Board written on 1 November 2002 (later typed) recounting the events of that summer, Morrissey also testifies that Warhol spoke to the printer over the telephone to give him specific, detailed instructions regarding the colours he wanted the printer to use.8 Both Warhol and Morrissey communicated with the printer, but Morrissey makes it clear that neither was present during the silk-screening process.9
In almost every way, the commercially screened series differs from the one Warhol screened by hand. The red background, the blue eyes, silver hair and pink face were all screen-printed as opposed to painted by hand. Instead of acrylic paint, the background colours were probably screened using a product called plastisol. As the name implies, this plastic-based screen ink gives the picture a shiny, ‘sealed’ look. The colours of images printed over the plastisol background will not ‘sink’ into the primer layer or fabric in the way they do when the underpaint is acrylic. Paul Stephenson, the London-based artist who has made a study of Warhol’s screen prints, believes this is an important reason why Simon’s Red Self-Portrait looks so unlike other works of the sixties.
Another reason is the entire absence of halftones in the head, shoulders, and upper torso. Halftones are in fact tiny islands of hardened photo emulsion. The anonymous technician at Norgus must have underexposed the enlarged acetate. This means that the halftone dots were not under ultraviolet light long enough to ‘harden’, and therefore stick to the screen. They were literally washed away.
The printer can intensify the strength of the halftones by laying in more than one layer of ink. The more often the printer pulls the squeegee, the more ink is layered, so the stronger the contrasts of the halftone print. To compensate for this loss of contrast, the printer at Norgus may have ‘hit’ the halftones several times. But this only intensified the black. Look at the upper shoulder and torso in the Red Self-Portrait. Either an area is black, or else there is nothing – no gradations, no tonal transitions, no shading.
Another factor that affected the appearance of the picture surface in the 1965 series was the canvas weave of the screens. The linen screens used for the 1964 series probably had a mesh count of about seventy-seven threads per inch. By contrast, the canvas screens used for the second series had a mesh count of around half that – thirty-five threads per inch. The low thread count also contributed to the loss of halftones in the 1965 series; they simply fell through the gaps in the weave.
Why did Ekstract not buy canvas with the higher mesh count, as Warhol usually used? The reason, as he explained to the Board in a letter of 2 November 2002, was that ‘at that time, the recommended supplier had only cotton canvas in stock for the portraits – so we used that – the stretcher on the other hand was readily available from the supplier Andy recommended.’
This only raises another issue. Why would Warhol hand the small acetates to Ekstract and then give him only minimal guidance on the printing process used to make his work? It is a legitimate question, and I believe Stephenson has come up with the correct answer: at this point in his career, Warhol was fascinated by Marcel Duchamp and his work. Because of Duchamp, Andy became intrigued by the role of chance and accident in making art. Many printers who worked for him will tell you that he loved it when they made a mistake. When printers botched a job, Warhol would tell them to leave the work as it was – and he even asked them to do it again, though it isn’t usually possible to make accidents happen on purpose. In short, he gave the acetates to Ekstract because he was curious to see what Ekstract would come up with. It was like taking his hands off the wheel to see where the car would end up.
There may, however, be an even simpler explanation. Whenever anyone asks why Warhol did something, the answer – what you might call his default setting – is that he wished to expend as little time, effort and money as possible. In the words of a printer who worked closely with Warhol, but wishes to remain anonymous, ‘he was cheap and lazy’.
No one – least of all Simon – underplays the real and instantly observable distinctions between the two series. But these differences do not in themselves prove that the 1965 series is not Warhol’s. His working method was like photographer’s: often, he allowed other people to do the technical work of priming the canvas, painting the background colours and screening the pictures – but it was he, and he alone, who controlled the acetates. In the same way that a photo by Diane Arbus is considered authentic even if printed by someone else on different paper stock and with different levels of contrast, so the crucial factors in determining the authenticity of a Warhol are, first, that it was printed from the original acetate, and, second, that it was printed with the approval (though not necessarily the supervision) of the artist.
The word ‘approval’ is essential. To what degree did Warhol acknowledge these unusual works as his own? Once again, the answer is found in events that took place during the summer and early autumn of 1965. After the series was printed, Ekstract returned the acetate to Warhol, who exhibited the finished paintings at the premiere of his new videos – including Outer and Inner Space. Ekstract takes up the story from here:
I agreed to sponsor the world premiere of these videos in an underground location. The party was held [on 29 September 1965] on an unused rail platform underneath the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, adjacent to the tracks of the New York Central Railroad. Guests had to enter through a fire door on East 49th Street and descend two long staircases to reach the tracks, which then had to be crossed to reach the platform. The hotel ran an electric line down the platform so that Warhol’s videos could be shown using the bulky equipment needed to project the sound and video. Food could not be served because there were rats around.10
The New York Herald Tribune sent a photographer to document what sounds like the opening night from hell, which included a staged ‘happening’ in which two costumed ‘Elizabethan’ swordsmen suddenly began duelling on the platforms. The photo feature appeared in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Ekstract threw the party for the publicity it gave his magazine. Almost in passing, he mentions, ‘The Red Self-Portraits were on display for all to see and a new chapter of art history was written in the bowels of Manhattan.’
Morrissey, on the other hand, considered the event at the Waldorf to be of little importance.11 His focus was always on business. In his statement to the Board, he makes this clear: ‘[When] the party was over, I asked if the images [the Red Self-Portraits] were going to Leo Castelli. No, [Warhol] said that they would be useful to trade for things [presumably electronic equipment].’ There might have been several reasons for this. Castelli was then paying Warhol a monthly stipend in exchange for receiving all of Andy’s work. One way Warhol got around his obligation to the dealer was to barter his work for goods and services.
Except for a single self-portrait, which he kept for himself, Warhol gave the whole series to Ekstract to use as barter for future access to electronic equipment. Most of the original owners of the 1965 series of Red Self-Portraits, therefore, had connections with the world of consumer electronics or publishing. Not only do we know the exact circumstances under which the 1965 series of self-portraits was created, but also the names of most of the first owners.
The full list comprises Ekstract himself, Jay Schwab and Ennis Azzinaro (both employed by Philips-Norelco), Walter Goodman of Harmon Electric, and Bernard Nieman of Audio Times. Ekstract says that he also gave one portrait to the printer at Norgus, Norman Locker, for doing the silk-screening, and another to Gus Hunkele, Locker’s partner. Ekstract may also have gifted a Red Self-Portrait to his accountant. In a letter to the Warhol Board in 1995, painter Alan Fenton wrote that his friend, Richard Ekstract, ‘had given Warhol a Betamax which he used in his early film-making activity. Warhol was so appreciative on receiving this Betamax that he gave both Richard and myself one of the self-portraits’.12 That accounts for nine out of the eleven printed.
What is so extraordinary about these events is how fully documented they are, which is by no means always true of Warhol’s work. The accounts from Morrissey and Ekstract differ in emphasis, since both men were remembering events that took place decades earlier, but neither contradicts the other, and each supplements the other’s account. Scholars tend to place great weight on the testimony of eyewitnesses who, as here, testify without payment and without expectation of reward.13
Learning how the series was made and that some or all of the pictures were shown at the party beneath the Waldorf did not mean that Warhol approved them or claimed them as his own work. One reason why Morrissey’s 2002 letter rang true for me is that it describes only what he saw at first hand. He has nothing to say about whether Warhol considered the pictures works of art. The stark fact remains that they look utterly different from everything he had done until that summer. Our knowledge of how they were made does not prove their authenticity. In his own mind, Warhol may have consigned them to the status of leftover party decorations, gifted to Ekstract precisely because he did not consider them worthy of exhibition at the Castelli Gallery.14 That is what makes the testimony of the next eyewitness so decisive.
Samuel Adams Green inherited his blue blood and patrician manner from a distinguished family of Boston Brahmins. An art dealer, curator and occasional actor in Warhol films, Green became director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia at the age of twenty-five. But he was not around over the summer of 1965. He first saw one of the Red Self-Portraits in October 1965, when he helped to hang Warhol’s first retrospective at the ICA.15
Green met Simon a few times in the 1980s, but they had not become friends. When they met again in February 2002, Simon asked him to put his account of what happened at the ICA in writing for the Authentication Board. Green agreed, and wrote that Andy Warhol liked the flat, machine-made look of the new series. Green emphatically did not. He felt so strongly about it that he did not wish to include one in the exhibition, ‘because it seemed too “manufactured” to go with the other paintings.’ But Warhol was insistent that the new Red Self-Portrait should hang in the show: ‘Andy was pushing for it… because he said it exemplified his new technique of having works produced without his personal touch: he wanted to get away from that.’ So, the very qualities I found jarring in Simon’s Red Self-Portrait were the ones that had most pleased Warhol, who was trying to eliminate all evidence of his hand in the making of it. At the time of the exhibition, it is understandable that Green could not grasp what Warhol was doing.
Fifty years later, it isn’t difficult to understand at all. Hang a self-portrait from the 1964 series side by side with one from the series made in 1965, and it is the 1965 picture that looks strange. But hang portraits from both the 1964 and the 1965 series next to almost any Warhol portrait from the 1970s, and the one that looks out of place is the 1964 portrait. The 1965 picture now looks prescient, a harbinger of the work to come. As usual, Warhol was way ahead of everyone else.