This book was originally published in 1990, three years after Andy Warhol’s death. Since then, as Warhol’s reputation has soared and his prices exploded, I have been asked the same question at least a thousand times: Did you have any idea, when you were working for Andy in the 1970s, how important and expensive he would become? I sort of did, as did most of us who helped turn out his art, his films, his magazine, his books, his TV shows at his studio known as the Factory. But he definitely knew. Or knew that was what he wanted. Beneath Andy’s bewigged feyness and maddening nonchalance lay an iron will and limitless ambition, which he revealed only to a select few and then more as a slip of the mask than a shared confidence.
This has all become more obvious to me as time has passed, and I am able to look back on the thrilling, crazy, exhausting years documented in this book with greater clarity and detachment. As Billy Name, the photographer-in-residence at the first of Andy’s four successive Factories (the one with the silver walls and nonstop parties), said in a 2006 PBS documentary, “He wanted it so much, to be successful. He didn’t want to be second-rate or an underling in any way. And he didn’t want to be first-class or top rank either. He wanted to be a superstar. He wanted to be a big nova that would eclipse everything.… That was the only thing that would satisfy Andy. And it happened.”
Now, a quarter century after his death, it has become almost a cliché to say that Andy Warhol was the most important artist of the second half of the twentieth century, just as Picasso was of the first half. In September 2012, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened an exhibition that gave some indication of how overwhelming the “Warhol effect” had become. “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” matched forty-five works made by Andy since his first gallery show in 1962 with some one hundred paintings, sculptures, photographs, and videos by those who followed. A partial list: Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Richard Artschwager, Chuck Close, Gilbert & George, Julian Schnabel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Tom Sachs, Takashi Murakami, Vija Celmins, Glenn Ligon, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Catherine Opie, Vic Muniz, Deborah Kass, Ryan Trecartin, and the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was represented by a Neolithic vase painted with the Coca-Cola logo.
Mark Rosenthal, the independent curator who conceived the Warhol show at the Met, said he had approached the subject with more questions than answers: “Is Warhol the most important artist? Or has that just become an article of faith? I grudgingly came to the conclusion that it’s true. But I don’t use the words ‘important’ or ‘influential.’ He’s the most impactful. I draw the analogy to a meteor hitting the earth and creating a whole new terrain.”
Yet the criticism of the show was that it was too little and too late. Where was the latest crop of Warhol’s children: Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dustin Yellin, Enoc Perez, the Bruce High Quality Foundation? “Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a ‘well, duh’ exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows,” wrote Peter Plagens, in his Wall Street Journal review, “A Case for the Obvious.” “That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influence—probably the pervasive influence—on contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naif the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.”
I called the final chapter of this book, which covers the period from Warhol’s death to his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1989, “Andy Is Everywhere.” That has turned out to be an almost laughable understatement. Since 1990, there have been Warhol retrospectives in Tokyo, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Brisbane, Australia, as well as several hundred smaller exhibitions in museums and galleries from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Krakow, Poland. Even the United States Information Agency jumped on the Warhol bandwagon, organizing a show of ninety works that toured fourteen Eastern Europe and Central Asia cities, including Saint Petersburg, Prague, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Crowds turned out everywhere: 125,000 at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art; 200,000 at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie; 230,000 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The titles of some of the exhibitions tell a story in themselves: “Andy Warhol: Mirror of His Times,” “Andy Warhol, Mr. America,” “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal.”
No period, medium, or aspect of the Warhol corpus, it seems, has gone unexplored. His 1950s pre-Pop work was the focus of “Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1989. “The Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, and went on to Toronto, London, Marseille, Sydney, Perth, and Auckland, New Zealand. “The Films of Andy Warhol” were screened at the Whitney in 1988 and 1994, as part of the Andy Warhol Film Project, a collaboration with MoMA to catalogue, preserve, and re-release all of the movies, from Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of (1963) to Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977). The Hamburg Kunsthalle mounted the first retrospective of Warhol’s photography in 1999, and Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst was the first to devote an entire exhibition to the Time Capsules, in 2003. (These were the 612 cardboard boxes in which Andy had kept almost every piece of mail he received in the 1970s and 80s; only fifteen boxes were included in the exhibition, but those contained 4,000 items.)
Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol, directed by Chuck Workman, was the first big new documentary to be released after his death, in 1991. It was followed by Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture, directed by Chris Rodley for Britain’s Channel 4, in 2001; Ric Burns’s four-hour opus for PBS, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, in 2006; and Andy Warhol, by Sarah Aspinall, in 2010, which was the first of a four-part BBC series on important twentieth-century artists, the others being Picasso, Matisse, and Dali. Several feature films, including Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), Christine Vachon’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996), and George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl (2006), have had Andy Warhol characters, played by Crispin Glover, Jared Harris, David Bowie, and Guy Pearce, respectively—all rather well. But then, Andy’s look, speech, and walk were highly individual and easy to imitate. And probably, I’ve always suspected, premeditated choices he had made early on in his obsessive quest for fame.
Then there were the books (too many to list), the newspaper articles (ditto), the magazine covers (from New York to French Elle), the Superstar memoirs (Viva, Ultraviolet, Mary Woronov), the Candy Darling documentary, the U.S. Postal Service’s “Andy Warhol” stamp, the Chanel No. 5 advertising campaign based on Andy’s 1985 “Ads” prints, the U2 PopMart tour, the Madonna-as-Marilyn album cover, the Barney’s “Happy Andy War-Holidays” windows, the “Warhol-inspired” limited-edition Dom Perignon and Perrier bottles, the Andy Warhol Makeup Collection from NARS with his self-portrait in eye-shadow, the Warhol Factory X Levis jeans, the Don DeLillo novel Mao II, Rob Pruitt’s chrome “Andy Monument” on Union Square North, the seven-volume Interview boxed set published by Steidl, and the thousands of products licensed by the Andy Warhol Foundation, including T-shirts, dresses, jewelry, watches, perfume, glassware, candy, calendars, lamps, rugs, and skateboards. In its November 2009 cover story, “Warhol Inc.,” ARTnews reported, “Condom packages sold in Japan featuring Warhol’s distinctive camouflage print carry the message ‘They’ll never see you coming.’ ”
Andy is everywhere indeed.
For the first three years of its existence, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, to which Andy had left almost his entire fortune, was a family affair. As his will ordained, the foundation’s board had only three members: Fred Hughes, Andy’s longtime business manager and the executor of his estate, who was made the foundation’s president; Vincent Fremont, who had been vice-president of Andy Warhol Enterprises for fifteen years; and John Warhola, the younger of Andy’s two older brothers. Legal advice was provided by Ed Hayes, a former Bronx assistant district attorney who specialized in criminal law and whose great claim to fame was that Tom Wolfe had modeled the tough-talking, smartly attired defense lawyer in The Bonfire of the Vanities on him. Despite Hayes’s lack of art world experience, Fred hired him the day after Andy died and agreed to pay him a fee equal to two percent of the estate’s value.
In August 1988, Christie’s auction house appraised the estate at $297 million, of which $250 million was for Warhol’s art works, including 700 paintings, 9,000 drawings, 19,000 prints, and 66,000 photographs. The remaining assets were mostly real estate: Andy’s townhouse on East 66th Street; the Montauk compound he half-owned with film director Paul Morrissey; buildings on the Bowery and Great Jones Street, the latter rented to Jean-Michael Basquiat; and a large tract of undeveloped land outside Aspen, Colorado. The house on Lexington Avenue near East 89th Street, where Andy lived from 1958 to 1974, and which Fred had rented since then, was sold to him, for $593,500 by the estate.
Meanwhile, Warhol’s prices, which had long lagged behind those of such contemporaries as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, had taken off almost from the moment he died and the tag “too prolific” became moot. Three months before his death, for example, two prime 1962 paintings, 200 One Dollar Bills and Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener, were auctioned for $385,000 and $264,000, respectively. In May 1988, the year after his death, 210 Coca-Cola Bottles, also from 1962, went for a record-breaking $1.43 million at Sotheby’s, New York. In November, Marilyn Monroe 20 Times was sold for $3.9 million at Sotheby’s. The following May, Shot Red Marilyn (1964) was bought at Christie’s for $4.07 million by Jose Mugrabi, a Colombian fabric merchant turned New York art collector and dealer, who, along with his sons, Alberto and David, would eventually amass more than 800 Warhols, the largest number in private hands.
Between 1987 and 1989, Fred Hughes and Vincent Fremont sold a reported $30 million of Andy’s art directly to collectors and dealers, most notably Larry Gagosian, who had eclipsed Leo Castelli as Warhol’s lead New York dealer, and Thomas Ammann, from Zurich, who had been close to all of us at the Factory for some time. The now legendary Andy Warhol Estate Sale at Sotheby’s—of everything from Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann sharkskin consoles to Bakelite plastic bracelets—brought in an additional $25.3 million over ten days in April 1988; a follow-up auction of jewelry found under a filing cabinet in Andy’s house went for another $1.64 million. In May 1989, Interview was sold to Peter and Sandy Brant for $12 million in a murky private auction run by Ed Hayes.
The magazine had gone through three editors since I’d quit in 1983: Robert Hayes, who had all too soon died of AIDS; Gael Love, who had made it less elitist; and Shelley Wanger, who was hired by Fred after Andy died to “class it up.” Of course, I saw the high price it sold for as a bittersweet testament to the success I had made of it. I later learned that the underbidders were S.I. Newhouse, Malcolm Forbes, Jann Wenner, and Ronald Perelman, who, his then wife, Claudia Cohen, told me, had intended to reinstate me as editor. The Brants, who were longtime collectors of Andy’s work and had been part owners of the magazine in the early 1970s, brought in ex-editor Glenn O’Brien and Ingrid Sischy, the editor of Artforum, as co-editors. But, just like the first time around, Glenn soon fell out with them, and Ingrid took over as editor-in-chief, a position she held until 2008, when Peter bought out Sandy’s half-ownership for a reported $15 million. By then, the Brants had divorced, Peter had married supermodel Stephanie Seymour, and Sandy and Ingrid had fallen in love. Peter hired Fabien Baron and Glenn O’Brien as co-editorial directors, only to have Glenn exit for a third time a year later. While it is always risky to speculate on what Andy would have done had he lived, I have no doubt that these professional and romantic rearrangements would have found their way into the diary he dictated to Pat Hackett, his loyal and discreet “redactor,” from the early 1970s until the day he checked into New York Hospital for a gallbladder operation and didn’t check out.
Ed Hayes filed a wrongful death and malpractice suit against the hospital on behalf of the estate in 1987, which was settled four years later, with the hospital paying John and Paul Warhola an undisclosed sum. Foundation insiders, however, said that it was $3 million and that some of the jurors had told Andy’s brothers they would have awarded them several million more.
The Andy Warhol Diaries caused quite a stir when they were published in 1989, and angered many of Andy’s friends, including Bianca Jagger, who sued for libel and won a judgment against the estate in Britain. The first excerpt appeared in People on my birthday, a present I could have lived without. I was depicted as a vodka-swilling, cocaine-snorting, ridiculously Republican, temperamental brat who was good with the clients. This was partially accurate, and while it would be foolish to deny my bad behavior, I think it’s fair to say that Andy knew how to push my buttons to get the desired dramatic results, as he did with all of us who were closest to him. I had left the Factory six years earlier and proven, to myself at least, that it was possible to have a career après Andy. In any event, his estate raked in another million in royalties.
The Andy Warhol Foundation, which operated out of the former Con Edison substation on East 33rd Street that had been the fourth and last Factory, made its first grants in 1989, giving away $1.99 million. Among the fifty-eight recipients was the art department of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the alma mater of Brigid Berlin, the Hearst Corporation heiress who during her more than two decades at the Factory had worked her way down from Superstar to receptionist. Fred had kept Brigid on at the foundation to archive Andy’s tapes—he carried a Sony cassette recorder everywhere he went—but she spent most of her office time stitching needlepoint pillows. She would call me every so often with reports of how crazy things were getting, especially with Fred, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly after Andy died. Apparently, he was overdoing the steroids he had been prescribed for the disease, and becoming increasingly belligerent and hysterical.
In February 1990, Fred appointed Archibald L. Gillies III president of the Warhol Foundation, and elevated himself to chairman. Like Ed Hayes, Arch Gillies had no art world experience. But he had gone to Choate and Princeton, he had worked for Nelson Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney, and his wife ran Brooke Astor’s foundation, all of which impressed Fred tremendously. When Fred hired him, for $150,000 a year, he had been president of the World Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, for eight years.
Gillies’s first act was to fire Ed Hayes, a decision supported by Fred, who had become convinced that Hayes was plotting to have him legally removed as executor on the grounds of mental deficiency, an accusation Hayes dismissed as medication-induced paranoia. Gillies then persuaded Fred to expand the board, adding Agnes Gund, the president of MoMA, and Brendan Gill, an elderly New Yorker writer who often escorted Fred’s idol, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, around town. Soon after, Peter Gates, the old family friend Gillies had hired to replace Hayes, advised Vincent Fremont that earning commissions on the sale of art while serving as a trustee, though permissible under I.R.S. regulations for non-profits, could become problematic. With a wife and two young daughters to support, Vincent signed a five-year contract making him exclusive agent for the foundation’s art holdings, and gave up his seat on the board. At the next board meeting, in December, Arch Gillies claimed Vincent’s seat, with Gund, Gill, and John Warhola voting for him, and Fred, most emphatically, against.
The Warhol Wars, as the press would call the ensuing three-way legal battle, were just beginning. Fred resigned as chairman in February 1992, telling friends, “To know Arch Gillies is to loathe him.” In April, Ed Hayes petitioned New York State Surrogate’s Court for the remainder of the $12 million fee he said he was due, based on a 1991 appraisal that had valued the estate at $600 million. Christie’s, he claimed, had deliberately undervalued Warhol’s art in 1988 for tax purposes. Peter Gates countered that the estate was actually worth less than that estimate, and that Hayes, who had already been paid $4.85 million, owed it about $3 million. Furthermore, if the foundation had to pay Hayes what he was asking, Gates said Hughes would be liable, because the agreement Hayes had drawn up the day after Andy’s death didn’t include a personal-indemnity clause. The dispute grew meaner when Gates hired a private investigator to look into rumors that jewelry and art works had gone missing from the Warhol estate, and the detective started asking former Factory employees about how Fred came to possess about one hundred of Andy’s paintings.
Fred had received a $2 million advance on his executor’s fee, but from 1990 to 1992, he spent an estimated $7 million in antiques, objets d’art, and collectibles from dealers and shops in New York, Paris, and London. Brigid thought he was determined to “amass an even bigger and better collection than Andy’s so that he can have an auction that lasts more days with more catalogues.” Faced with mounting legal and medical bills, he decided to put ten of his Warhol paintings in Sotheby’s May 1993 auction. Only two sold: Old Telephone (1961), for $552,500, and Portrait of Princess Diana (1982), for $57,500. Four Warhols were in Christie’s sale the next night. None sold, setting off widespread talk of the collapse of the Warhol market. Thomas Ammann told me that he and Larry Gagosian had offered Fred several millions for his ten paintings before the auction, but Fred turned down their offer.
While covering the Hughes vs. Gillies vs. Hayes debacle for Vanity Fair, I learned that Dominique de Menil, the revered Houston arts patron who had been Fred’s mentor since his college years, and her daughters, Adelaide, Christophe, and Philippa, all art world figures themselves, had written letters to the foundation’s trustees on his behalf. “My mother is saddened and pained by [Fred’s situation],” Christophe told me. “All of us feel that they have a big problem and they have to resolve it with fairness to Fred, with compensation that reflects what he has done for Andy.” My article (“The House That Fred Built”) appeared the first week of July. The foundation signed an agreement with Fred on July 20, which paid him $5.2 million and granted his claims to the Warhol artworks in his possession. Ed Hayes would get his payday two years later, when Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger awarded him $2.35 million, on top of what he had been previously paid, for the “remarkable job” he had done for the estate.
There were fireworks over the Allegheny River for the May 1994 opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the city of Andy’s birth and youth. The $12 million, 88,000-square-foot museum in a 1911 Beaux Arts warehouse, elegantly recycled by Richard Gluck-man, the contemporary art world’s favorite minimalist architect, was a joint venture of the Warhol Foundation, which gave it 3,000 of Andy’s works and its archives; the Dia Center for Art, which gave sixty early paintings and eighty drawings; and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, which would oversee its operations. On display over seven floors were everything from Brillo Box (1964) sculptures to Rorschach (1984) paintings to three decades of Andy’s wigs. The museum’s director was Tom Armstrong, who had given Warhol his only New York retrospective while he was alive, at the Whitney in 1972, but he would resign nine months later, reportedly over disagreements with Arch Gillies and Carnegie Institute president Ellsworth Brown about the museum’s direction and fundraising efforts.
The three-day weekend began with a black-tie dinner for 1,100 guests on Friday, and continued with a twenty-four-hour public opening starting Saturday at midnight that drew 25,000 visitors. “Andy Warhol’s message will resonate so long as we continue to do battle with our consumer souls,” said Teresa Heinz, the widow of recently deceased Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, in her toast at the dinner. The Heinzes were friends of Andy’s—he loved “walking brand names”—and their family foundation had contributed $5 million to endow the museum. Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey was there, too, along with Billy Name, Ultraviolet, Peewee Herman, Debi Mazar, John Waters, Dennis Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Kenneth Jay Lane, John Richardson, Michael Chow, Nan Kempner, and Ann Bass (the last four Warhol commissioned portrait subjects). “Here we are with Andy in his tomb,” said Taylor Mead, the star of several Warhol films, to Village Voice writer Guy Trebay. “His temple. His heaven.”
Fran Lebowitz, who had started writing for Interview a few issues after I started editing it in 1971, told Carol Vogel of the New York Times, “I look exactly the same, but everyone else looks so much older.” That was most true of Fred, who was in a wheelchair, though as always he put up a good front in tiger-stripe trousers, velvet slippers, and an embroidered vest. Vincent had arranged for the foundation to pay me $7,500 to seat the dinner, which involved a week of place card shuffling with Lea Simonds, a Carnegie trustee. She took care of the natives, and I made sure the New York, California, and European collectors, dealers, and press would be happy with their dinner partners. My date was Doris Ammann, who had taken over Thomas Ammann Fine Art after the death of her brother, at age forty-four, the previous June.
On July 17, 1996, another tragically premature death shook our tight little circle of former Warhol employees and intimates, when TWA Flight 800 from JFK to Paris mysteriously exploded over Long Island, with Jed Johnson, Andy’s beautiful former film editor, decorator, and boyfriend, among the 230 people on board. The following evening, a small group—Marina Schiano, Katherine Ross (now Mrs. Michael Govan), Fran Lebowitz, Doris Ammann—went to the apartment of Jed’s twin brother, Jay, and his partner, Tom Cashin, to offer comfort and support. I’ll never forget Pat Hackett on the phone with the authorities for hours, trying to claim Jed’s body, which had been found in the ocean, with barely a scratch.
Multiple sclerosis finally took Fred on January 14, 2001. We had not been on good terms when I quit the Factory and we remained distant afterward. But we reconciled not long before he died, when Marina Schiano, the Yves Saint Laurent executive who had married Fred for a green card in the early 1970s, took me to see him at the house on Lexington Avenue. He was in bed, wrapped like a mummy under tightly pulled covers to keep his limbs from flailing about. “Who ever would have thought that Bob Colacello would be the one to save my skin,” he blurted out, referring to my Vanity Fair article, which made me laugh, though I wanted to cry.
In 1996, Irving Blum sold 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans to MoMA for $15 million. Blum had given Andy his first show, in 1962, at his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and had bought the entire set of small, hand-painted canvasses for $1,000, after they had failed to sell at $300 each. As Sarah Thorton later wrote in The Economist, “In addition to setting a new benchmark price, the sale signaled Warhol’s canonization.”
Since then, Andy’s prices have gone in one direction: up. In 1997, a Marlon Brando painting from 1966 went for $1.65 million at Sotheby’s; in 2003, at Christie’s, it went for $5 million; by 2012, it had changed hands again for $23.7 million. In November 2006, Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong real estate billionaire, bought a fifteen-foot-high Mao for a then record-breaking $17.4 million. The following May, Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos paid $71.7 million for Green Car Crash, which to date is the second-highest price paid for a Warhol artwork at auction. That same month, Larry Gagosian arranged for Steven A. Cohen, the Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge-fund mogul, to acquire Turquoise Marilyn from Chicago collector Stefan Edlis for $80 million. Andy had made five of these various colored Marilyn Monroe portraits in 1964, which were larger than the more numerous 1962 series. The other four are owned by Conde Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse, Doris Ammann, Philip Niarchos, and Peter Brant, who paid $5,000 for his in 1967 (when, he likes to point out, a Cadillac cost $3,500).
In 2008, Andy entered the pantheon of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million—Cezanne, Picasso, Klimt, Munch, Giacometti, Pollock, de Kooning, Johns—when Eight Elvises, which had hung in the Rome palazzo of Annibale Berlingieri for forty years, was sold by French art consultant Philippe Ségalot to an unnamed buyer rumored to be a member of the Qatar royal family. Even the 2009 slump in art prices that followed the near-collapse of the world financial system could not stop Warhol’s momentum. That November, Greek collector Pauline Karpitas cashed in her 200 One Dollar Bills, which she had bought for $385,000 in 1986, for $43.8 million, more than three times Sotheby’s high estimate.
Even the once disparaged commissioned portraits, which I had become so good at selling to augment my meager Interview salary, were in demand. A 1974 portrait of Leo Castelli, Warhol’s longtime New York dealer, went for $1.7 million in 2007, and Aby Rosen, a New York real estate mogul, was putting together a sizable collection of what we used to call “leftovers” at the Factory, meaning unsold canvasses Andy had made in hopes that clients would take more than their original order. Among Rosen’s acquisitions were the portraits of Mick Jagger, Dolly Parton, Rudolf Nureyev, and the Shah and Shabanou of Iran. Some of those were loaned to the Grand Palais in Paris for the largest-ever exhibition of Warhol portraits, “Le grand monde d’Andy Warhol,” which opened in March 2009. (True to form, Yves Saint Laurent’s partner, Pierre Bergé, withdrew the late designer’s likenesses the day before the opening because they were hung in the same room as those of Valentino, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Diane von Furstenberg, and Halston.)
In 2010 alone, 1,256 Warhols sold at auction for a combined $367 million. That year the highest price was the $63.4 million the Mugrabis received for selling at Phillips de Pury and Co. Men in Her Life, which depicted Elizabeth Taylor with two of her husbands, Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher, and which was also probably bought by a Qatari royal. By 2011, Art & Auction magazine estimated that Warhol’s total sales, of 2,595 lots auctioned from 1977 to 2010, amounted to more than $1.5 billion, surpassed only by Picasso’s $3 billion for those years. “One reason why the Warhol market is so vibrant is that there is something incredibly cool about Andy,” said Larry Gagosian in a 2009 interview. “He feels like a living artist. He is incredibly present in our culture.”
Was Andy a vampire? A prophet? A charlatan? He’s been called all three, repeatedly. Sometimes it seems a kind of transubstantiation has occurred, a commercial version of Catholic Communion, through which Warhol has become the world, and the world has become Warhol. One cannot avoid Andy’s most prescient line—“In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes”—probably because it rings truer every day. He seems to have predicted everything. The O.J. Simpson slow-motion car chase, the Paris Hilton sex tape, Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony in which off-screen inquisitors ask if he achieved orgasm before or after Monica Lewinsky—straight out of, respectively, Sleep, Blue Movie, and the Chelsea Girls confession scene in which Pope Ondine torments poor Ingrid Superstar about her alleged sins. Reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Wikileaks, Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal—all pure Warhol. A society in which narcissism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism run rampant, celebrity and notoriety have merged, and fame is the ultimate goal—Andy would feel right at home.
But a gift for prophecy does not fully explain Warhol’s omnipresence, nor why massive numbers of people who know almost nothing about art relate to his. Andy always thought big, and went for big, simple, slam-bang images—Soup Cans, Dollar Signs, Torsos, Skulls. Not for him the obscurities of Johns, the encrustations of Rauschenberg, the refinements of Lichtenstein, or the poetics of Twombly, darlings of the cognoscenti all, but not global superstars on the order of action-movie heroes. Perhaps Warhol’s greatest talent was for making art that was simultaneously simple and complex, obvious and subtle. All the great modern American themes—individualism, capitalism, consumerism, religion, sex, addiction, death—are there, but presented so casually, even flippantly, as to make them easy to go down, to make them cool, as Gagosian would say. Andy always credited his success with being in the right place at the right time—and that he was. During the second half of the twentieth century America was the new Rome, the dominant world empire, but a very insecure one, eager to assert itself but increasingly ashamed of having done so. In Warhol it found its self-image, ready-made for idolatry and mockery. Not surprisingly, the wise old Europeans got him—got us—way before we did.
For the distinguished art critic Arthur Danto, Andy was “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.” For Jeff Koons, he was “the smartest dumbbell in town.” I’ve come to see my long-ago boss as a religious artist for a secular society—the Michelangelo of Modernism, the Giotto of Pop, the Piero della Francesca of the Media Age. This also helps explain his mass appeal. A Catholic of the Byzantine not Roman persuasion, he was making actual icons of the saints of our popular culture, the martyrs of fame, the battered souls we worship long after they have gone: Marilyn, Liz, Elvis, Jackie. Perhaps it was only coincidence that the last paintings he made were based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but they were done at a time when he knew he wasn’t well and told associates that he would die if he went into a hospital.
Of course, there are those who have not fallen under the Warhol spell. For them, Andy was the Chauncey Gardiner character in the 1979 movie Being There: a simpleton turned into a god for uttering pseudo profundities, such as “Life is a state of mind.” One of Warhol’s severest critics was also one of his closest collaborators. Paul Morrissey, the director of most of the feature films produced by Warhol, including Flesh, Trash, and Heat, maintains that Andy was essentially untalented and dependent on his associates for all of his ideas. “Andy’s entire vocabulary consisted of ‘gee,’ ‘wow,’ and ‘oh, really,’ ” Paul told my parents when we visited him in Montauk after Andy had died. “Your son and Pat Hackett put all those big words in Andy’s mouth in his so-called Philosophy book that made people think he was brilliant. The only thing Andy could think to say after he met people was ‘Are they rich?’ and ‘Are they Jewish?’ ” Paul had divided the Montauk compound with the Warhol estate, keeping the main house and out buildings, while the estate took most of the land, which was then donated to New York State for a nature preserve. In 2007, he sold the property to Millard Drexler, the retailer behind the Gap and J.Crew, for a reported $30 million.
That same year, Joe Simon-Whelan, a London film producer who had had a purported Warhol work he owned declared “inauthentic” by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, filed a $20 million antitrust suit against the board and the Warhol Foundation, accusing the board of colluding with the foundation to artificially increase the value of its holdings. Simon-Whelan claimed that Fred Hughes had authenticated the 1964 Self Portrait before he died, and he also had a letter from Paul Morrissey supporting his case. He finally gave up in 2010, after the foundation had spent almost $7 million in legal fees to defeat him. The following year, the foundation decided to dissolve the authentication board. In September 2012, it announced that it would sell or donate its remaining Warhol artworks, and become an exclusively grant-making organization.
After forty years’ dedication to the Warhol cause, Vincent Fremont was informed his services would no longer be needed, as all future sales would be handled by Christie’s auction house. The first auction, in November, brought in $17 million for 354 lots, including 64 Polaroids, one of which—Self-Portrait in Fright Wig—sold for $50,000. Polaroids of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Muhammad Ali, and Farrah Fawcett went for upward of $25,000 each. Polaroids of me in drag, which Andy had badgered me into doing in 1975 for his “Ladies & Gentlemen” series, and which I never thought would see the light of day, were suddenly all over the Internet. Alberto Mugrabi bought most of them.
Since 2001, the Warhol Foundation has been headed by Joel Wachs, a liberal Democratic politician from Los Angeles, who has involved it in political controversies, such as the 2010 brouhaha over the National Portrait Gallery’s removal of a David Wojnarowicz video depicting a crucifix covered in ants. The Warhol Museum remained something of a well-kept Pittsburgh secret during the fifteen-year tenure of its second director, Tom Sokolowski. He resigned in 2010 and was succeeded by chief curator Eric Shiner, who hopes to attract international attention with a huge celebration for the museum’s twentieth anniversary in May 2014.
Meanwhile, the icons keep soaring: Four Marilyns, May 2012, Phillips de Pury & Company, $38,245,000; Double Elvis, May 2012, Sotheby’s, $37,042,500; Statue of Liberty, November 2012, Christie’s, $43,742,500. The products keep coming: Target’s edition of 1.2 million “Warhol-themed” Campbell’s tomato soup cans, 75 cents each, in stores as of September 2012. And the exhibitions keep opening: two shows in the fall of 2011 in Washington, D.C., alone, “Warhol: Headlines” at the Hirshhorn Museum, “Andy Warhol: Shadows” at the National Gallery of Art.
The opening of Peter Brant’s Warhol exhibition at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, on a Sunday afternoon in May 2013, was like a family reunion. One entered through a room filled with memories: Andy’s cookie jars, Fred’s satin-covered daybed, 1950s gold-leaf fashion drawings hung around Phillip Johnson’s small, gold, round Marilyn. The old gang was there—Jane Holzer, Bruno Bischofberger, Vincent and Shelly Fremont, Christopher Makos, Doris Ammann and Georg Frei, Larry Gagosian, Tony Shafrazi, Francesco and Alba Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Schnabel’s son, Vito, a rising-star private art dealer, arrived in a black Porsche convertible driven by one of the anonymous members of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, and shared a picnic table with Leonardo DiCaprio, Owen Wilson, and Vlad Doronin, the financial backer of Interview’s new Russian and German editions. Eli and Edythe Broad were there from Los Angeles, as were MoCA co-chair Maria Bell and then-director Jeffrey Deitch. The precocious Brant boys—Peter II and Harry—dropped bon mots for reporters, while their still-gorgeous mother, Stephanie Seymour, just smiled and posed. But, of course, it was the art that stole the show. To see in one large room the Flowers, the Electric Chairs, the Brillo Boxes, the Car Crashes, a triple Elvis, the famous Shot Blue Marilyn—the best of the best—was to understand why Warhol matters. Genius was the word in the air, though it had to compete with the fumes from roasting pig.
The fourth volume of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculpture, covering late 1974–76, will be published this year by Phaidon Press. Volume 1 (1961–63) was published in 2002; Volume 2 (1964–69) in 2004; and Volume 3 (1970–74) in 2010.
The Whitney Museum of American Art will mount a retrospective of his art and films in its new building in the Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in 2016.
The complete Andy Warhol diaries will be unsealed in 2037.
For better or for worse—the phrase seems to attach itself to Warhol quite naturally—the little holy terror from Pittsburgh’s Slavic ghetto has left his mark.
Long Island
2014