ALERT BY NOW TO WACHS and his ways, Bob Silvers published more letters to the editor in the 25 February 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, this time under the far-from-neutral title, ‘The Warhol Foundation on Trial’, with the headline emblazoned on the cover of that issue. The letter for which I was most grateful came from the journalist Paul Alexander, a person whom I did not know and had never spoken to. Alexander began by ridiculing the idiocy of the Board’s refusal to accept as authentic a picture Warhol had signed, dated and inscribed, describing its behaviour as ‘Orwellian in its absurdity’. He then recounted how, for years after Warhol’s death, he had written about the activities of the Warhol estate and Foundation for various publications as a prelude to publishing his book, Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions (1994).
When Alexander read the exchange of letters between Wachs and me in the 17 December 2009 issue, he was particularly struck by one detail – that the president of the Warhol Foundation had shown up at the office of the New York Review of Books to deliver, in person, material that he claimed would serve to discredit me in the eyes of the editor. That triggered a memory of Alexander’s own. In March 1994, he had published an article in ARTnews documenting in some detail a lawsuit between the Foundation and its lawyer, Ed Hayes, concerning the true value of Warhol’s estate. The Warhol Foundation responded with a tactic I recognised: Archibald Gillies demanded a meeting in the office of the magazine’s editor. Alexander was present. When Gillies arrived, he spent the entire meeting attempting to discredit Alexander’s journalism: ‘He had brought with him a list of some one hundred “factual errors” in my article, as if I could have slipped that many errors past the magazine’s excellent fact-checking department – but when we looked at the so-called errors none seemed to be actual errors. None. The whole episode was merely an attempt by the Warhol Foundation to intimidate me.’
Alexander’s letter helped me to weather the coming months and years. I now knew the mud Wachs had just thrown at me was routine procedure, the Foundation’s way of discouraging journalists from poking around in its affairs. Soon after Wachs’s dramatic appearance on Hudson Street, someone who identified himself only as the director of a well-known New York art gallery wrote to the editor of the New York Review of Books in support of the Authentication Board. The writer was Michael Findlay, who worked for the Acquavella Gallery.1
One of Simon’s allegations in the forthcoming lawsuit was that a few powerful dealers enjoyed a special relationship with the Andy Warhol Foundation. One was Acquavella. His antennae now attuned to a side of the art world to which he had not previously been exposed, Bob Silvers wrote to Mr Findlay to ask whether his gallery had ‘ever purchased a work by Andy Warhol directly from the Foundation’. Without answering the question, Findlay immediately withdrew his letter.2
I had never met or corresponded with Rainer Crone and did not know he intended to write, so I was thrilled when I heard that a letter from him had arrived at Hudson Street. More than support for me, it contained his own first-hand, eyewitness account of how Warhol had personally approved the publication of the ‘Bruno B.’ Red Self-Portrait as his own work, and how Warhol had personally chosen the picture for the image on the dust jacket of the catalogue raisonné. It is an important document. Crone was an academic heavyweight. He had taught at Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia and New York University. At the time of writing to the New York Review of Books, he was Professor of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. What is more, he knew two of the visiting scholars on the Board, Robert Rosenblum and David Whitney.
Crone met Warhol as a young German PhD candidate, funded by a two-year doctoral grant from the German government. Between June 1968 and July 1970, he wrote the first catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s paintings, films and works on paper. His catalogue was published in Stuttgart, New York and London in 1970. Crone went out of his way to declare that, in writing this work, he had received no commercial backing or financial support from any gallery or individuals, including collectors and art advisers.
The resulting work is a milestone, not because it is definitive, but because it was written so early in Warhol’s career and with the artist’s full cooperation. To grasp the importance of Crone’s emphatic support for Simon’s case, it helps to know that he wrote the primary published source of information about Warhol’s art in the 1960s. That status lasted from 1970 to 2002, when his catalogue was supplanted by the publication of the first volume of the Foundation’s catalogue raisonné.
The 1970 catalogue was republished in revised editions twice – in 1972 and again in 1976. The later editions included an additional 406 works approved by Warhol. In all editions, the Red Self-Portrait is listed as entry #169. The existence of two revised editions strengthened the argument for the picture’s authenticity. It meant that, if Warhol had any reservations about including the 1965 series of Red Self-Portraits in the first edition, he had ample time to remove the picture before the publication of the second and the third editions. He did not. As Fremont stated when the authenticity of the ‘Studio-type’ Elvis series was questioned, ‘If Warhol had wanted to destroy them, he would have. He had twenty-plus years to do that.’3
Crone made no attempt to list every known painting Warhol had ever made. Instead, he catalogued and illustrated at least one painting from every series.4 Whenever Crone did not include a work in his catalogue, he has been proved right. No one, including Crone himself, considers his catalogue flawless, but he was a formidable eyewitness. No one was better qualified to tell us whether Warhol himself believed the 1965 Red Self-Portraits to be his own work.
Crone explained to readers of the New York Review of Books that the ‘Bruno B.’ Red Self-Portrait was ‘a perfect example of Warhol’s technique of making multiple silk screens of the same image’ (in different colours etc.) and was produced using the more ‘hands-off’ approach he continued with in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Ever since I published the 1970 catalogue in close cooperation with Warhol,’ he concluded, ‘I have been guided by the idea that a catalogue raisonné should be produced in close consultation with the artist.’
Crone’s fascinating letter was far too long to appear in the print edition of the New York Review of Books. It was, however, published in its entirety on the paper’s website.5 In it, he gives a unique insight into how Warhol worked and – just as interesting – how careful he was to protect his legacy by supervising the young German scholar closely, and by personally choosing the image that would be reproduced on the dust jacket. Crone’s testimony was unimpeachable. It was important for me that he confirmed the authenticity of the portrait in a publication read by so many artists, curators, academics and dealers, even if it was in the online edition.
There were two artists who I felt sure would help once they read what Crone had to say. Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger both sat on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation. I was convinced that, after reading Crone’s letter, one or both would defend a fellow artist’s absolute right to determine what he did and did not paint. Unlike curators and scholars, they had nothing to lose. Or perhaps, I speculated, the two trustees would use their influence to compel Printz and King-Nero to engage in public debate, in a place that enabled scholars like Crone to challenge their conclusions. But neither artist said a word – or, if they did, it was in private. Corruption in the art world takes many forms, and silence is among the most corroding.
I was getting a crash course in how self-interest in the art world works. At a dinner at Tate Modern, on the night of 12 April 2012, to celebrate the opening of an Agnes Martin show, I found myself seated next to Arne Glimcher, founder and owner of Pace Gallery and one of the most powerful art dealers in the world. This was by design. Before we sat down, Glimcher told me he’d asked Tate director Nicholas Serota to engineer our meeting because he wanted to congratulate me on the articles I’d been writing in the NYRB. Like so many other characters in this story, Glimcher looks like he’s been sent by central casting to play the role of a suave international art dealer. In his case, this was literally possible. According to his entry in Wikipedia, he’d produced several Hollywood films including Gorillas in the Mist, and directed Antonio Banderas in Mambo Kings. He’d also had a small on-screen role in Still of the Night with Meryl Streep. During the long dinner, Glimcher stated that he would never buy a painting not signed by Warhol himself.
In 2008, d’Offay had sold his collection of contemporary art to the British nation, accepting £28 million for a collection that was then conservatively estimated at £125 million and today would perhaps be valued at ten times that. The ‘sale’ was, therefore, more of a donation – one that Prime Minister Gordon Brown called ‘the greatest gift this country ever received from a private individual’.
Anthony d’Offay gave the collection jointly to Tate and the National Gallery of Scotland, but stipulated that the pictures should be circulated in provincial galleries and museums throughout the country. The former dealer even provided a generous endowment so that exhibitions of artworks drawn from the collection could be staged in venues outside the great hubs of Edinburgh and London. The importance of d’Offay’s collection for the popularisation of contemporary art in the United Kingdom cannot be overstated. His imaginative scheme enabled people in all walks of life to see, perhaps for the first time, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jeff Koons, Agnes Martin, Diane Arbus, Bruce Nauman, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Gilbert and George, and Jenny Holzer.
Among the many works included in the d’Offay collection was Warhol’s ‘Bruno B.’ Red Self-Portrait. The Board’s rejection of the picture necessarily called into question its monetary value. Until its status was resolved, d’Offay was forced to withdraw the painting from the gift.
Nicholas Serota was the most powerful person in British art. When he wanted something to happen, it usually did – whether it was his choice of artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the creation of a new gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, or indeed the conversion of a former power station into the building in which I’d met Glimcher, Tate Modern. But, as a person, he was modest, softly spoken and never anything but circumspect in voicing an opinion. Above all, he was wily. As the director of one of Britain’s national museums, which happened to be one of the galleries that had received the gift from d’Offay, Nicholas Serota could make no public statement challenging the exclusion of the Red Self-Portrait, nor could he be seen to be taking sides in the dispute over its authenticity. What he could do, using the simple expedient of a carefully thought-out seating plan, was to put a journalist – me – in touch with one of the few people who had the stature, the authority and the ability to blow the whistle on what the Foundation was doing.