The Andy sale went down in auction history as a vast hit. A mob scene, it was conducted for ten days and made $25 million. I can still remember the excitement of the first day, April 23, 1988. That Saturday, his Art Deco and Art Nouveau possessions were auctioned off. Seven thousand bidders, including collectors, dealers, and fans, poured into Sotheby’s on York Avenue between Seventy-first and Seventy-second for the main event. Few were allowed into the salesroom, where there was standing room only. To the delight of everyone at the Warhol Studio, the sale made $5.3 million. It was twice more than Sotheby’s initial estimate.
Everyone was pleased about the Sotheby’s auction apart from Paige Powell, in charge of Interview magazine’s advertising, and Tama Janowitz, the writer. Both felt that a museum should have been set up to preserve Andy’s memory. At the time, I viewed both dark-haired women as Debbie Downers. Nor did Fred help matters by privately referring to Paige as Rage Bowel. I saw the sale as prolonging Andy’s reputation as an artist and establishing his eagle eye. But then, I wasn’t emotionally involved with Andy as they had been. Still, their idea of a museum went against Andy’s desire; he didn’t want any “leftovers.”
According to Jed Johnson, Andy “just wished his body would disappear and not be a problem for someone else to dispose of.” With this in mind, Johnson sensed that the artist would have wanted the same fate for all his belongings.
In The New York Times, art expert Rita Reif highlighted the record auction prices being paid. She singled out an ivory-inlaid ebony armchair with rounded back designed by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann that went for $154,000; a sharkskin and sycamore console table, raised on bulbous legs, by Pierre Legrain that sold for $209,000; and an ebonized-wood center table, discovered in Andy’s hallway with its legs still wrapped in paper, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh that went for $275,000. “The table looked so nondescript that Fred had to tell the security guard to get his feet off it!” recalls Vincent.
With the spectacular sales of the French Art Deco silverware, I was particularly pleased for Fred. When he traveled to Paris with Andy, and Sandy and Peter Brant—fellow Art Deco enthusiasts—their biggest coup was visiting the Puiforcat emporium and finding a dusty showcase devoted to the work of Jean E. Puiforcat, the most famous silversmith of the ’20s and ’30s. “We asked the incredulous assistants if any of these objects (which to them were totally outmoded) were for sale,” Fred wrote in his Sotheby’s catalogue preface. “And consequently bought almost every item for little more than scrap value.”
Although it was slightly beyond my means, I bought the $95 six-volume catalogue, which was presented in a dove-gray box. Keen to uncover Andy’s “Rosebud” or defuse the enigma, I remember reading the memories or the pieces written by his inner circle. In volume 1, the essay by Sydney and Frances Lewis, fellow Art Deco collectors, referred to Andy searching Les Puces in Saint-Ouen, Clignancourt. “The flea markets allowed his compulsiveness, elusiveness, and sharp eye to work in tandem,” they wrote. Like most collectors, Andy was someone who “just had to have it. A collector gives little thought to where something will be placed or will it fit.”
In volume 2, which catalogued collectibles, jewelry, furniture, decoration, and paintings, the antiques dealer Vito Giallo recalled the artist’s process. “We would compare notes before a sale and I would do the bidding for both of us.” When the lots arrived at Giallo’s shop, “Andy would rush up, buy what he wanted, and then rush back home with his purchases only to put them in a closet.”
On most mornings, around eleven, Andy would arrive at Giallo’s shop with “several Interviews under his arm, ready to pass them out and autograph them. Andy’s collecting was an extension” of his art. When Andy was buying “rows and rows of mercury glass vases, copper luster pitchers, Victorian card cases,” Giallo was “reminded of his paintings of multiple images.”
The banal Andyisms like “Oh, this is fabulous” were an act. “He always had to appear as though he were an imbecile because that would give him an edge,” Giallo said. Still, he understood that Andy was “very canny,” while Rupert Smith, the artist’s master printer, was impressed by how Andy poured his acquisitions back into his art.
On two occasions Andy photographed two thousand pairs of discontinued shoes that Smith had bought (somewhat typically, he would also snap up the boxes and wrapping).
Suzie Frankfurt’s essay in volume 3 animated Andy’s love of jewelry. Having met the dynamic redhead through her son Peter, I imagined her and Andy’s adventures, such as compiling Wild Raspberries, their cookbook; collecting celebrity autographs; lunching at the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court; enjoying the opera; and going to Forty-seventh Street to meet with the jewelry dealer Larry Ford, who sold Andy “scores of wonderful and valuable things.” According to Suzie, Andy ignored the trends and “developed a penchant for the design of the forties. He loved all those big clunkers—the bigger and more outlandish the better,” she recalled. Within no time, Andy became “a student of gemmology,” allowing him to limit “his collecting to specified categories. He set trends and made fashions.” And occasionally he wore them. At Studio 54, she noticed “a slight bulge under his Brooks Brothers shirt, which turned out to be a rather grand emerald necklace.”
Catherine Hesketh also accompanied Warhol on his bauble hunts. “He bought these incredible jewels that he would hide,” she says. “There were certainly boxes all over the house.”
Rupert Smith recalled jewelry pieces designed by Jean Schlumberger and David Webb—both leaders in their field—and revealed how the bargain-hunting Andy “hated to pay for Tiffany’s straight up unless he could figure out how to call Paloma [Picasso] or somebody and get a discount.” As far as Andy’s large watch collection, “he generally shopped for them himself,” yet somewhat typically wore only one watch: “a woman’s gold mid-seventies Rolex” that “never fitted. Sometimes he would wear the watch over his shirt cuff,” Smith wrote—a style copied from Fred.
One of Andy’s more intriguing quotes concerned his collection of Navajo rugs, seen in volume 4 of the catalogue. He had told The New York Times’ Rita Reif that the Indian weaving he called “ladies’ art” was comparable to American quilts and “yet another proof that women are the world’s major artists.” Due to the whole Edie Sedgwick business, it was accepted hearsay that he used women and didn’t particularly respect them. I wonder about this.
True, Andy resented being used and could see through pushy, ambitious women, whom he would certainly target in his infamous diaries. Yet he was friends with Alice Neel, Marisol, and Florine Stettheimer, all extremely talented artists. There was also Brigid Berlin, who in the 1960s had been a muse for his Polaroid photography, as well as creating her own Tit Prints, and his mother, Julia Warhola, his greatest influence, who had done most of the calligraphy for his commercial artwork in the 1950s. In my opinion, he had a fondness for spontaneous females who were not unlike his mother in spirit. In the Sotheby’s catalogue, David Bourdon refers to her “folksy babushka, her ever-cheerful smile, her old-country manners,” the endless cooking for her son, and the perpetual pouring of milk for the cats. Julia Warhola was an eccentric. This was illustrated when Andy gave her a tape recorder. Her son’s idea being that she would record herself and then send the tapes to her family and friends in Czechoslovakia. Instead, Julia Warhola recorded herself singing Czechoslovakian folk songs and then played them back, preferring to sing “duets with herself.”
When entering his bedroom for the first time, the art historian John Richardson was struck by the “large bedside crucifix and a devotional book” by his bed. “How unlike the popular notion of Andy Warhol the bedroom was!” he wrote in his essay for volume 5, Americana and European and American Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Somehow Andy’s daily, celibate life, attended to by his devoted housekeepers—Nena and Aurora—was as pure in tone as a priest’s. “Before going out to a grand dinner,” Richardson revealed, “Andy would eat a simple meal in the ki
tchen, especially during what he called his ‘turkey and mashed potatoes phase.’”
In Richardson’s learned view, “there was a definite pattern to his [Andy’s] haphazard way of collecting. Thanks to an innocent but canny eye for things that were off-beat or out of fashion, he was always in a position to be one jump ahead of the game.” As for Andy’s hoarding, Richardson notes that it “was only surpassed by Picasso,” who “hung on to old envelopes and cigarette packs.”
Andy “hid what he had,” Jed Johnson wrote in an essay also in volume 5 of the Sotheby’s catalogue. That stemmed from “the peasant’s wisdom that if people (either the very rich or the very poor) knew that you had anything good, they’d probably take it away from you.”
Henry Geldzahler, a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, presented Andy’s collection as constituting “an isle of invulnerability in a world that, at the same as it rewarded him financially, was yet full of pitfalls, vicious journalistic harangues among them.” Geldzahler sensed that Andy “longed to be” an “establishment figure” but that constant criticism stopped him.
The final question of what Andy would have thought of his very own auction remains. “Would he be mortified to think of people gaping at the goods he left behind?” Jed Johnson wondered in his essay. He recalled running into Andy when John Lennon’s “personal effects were being put up for auction” by Yoko Ono. Johnson asked him what the stuff was like and the artist cringed and said, “Oh, it’s just, you know, toilet paper that he touched.” Demonstrating his sense of the ridiculous, Andy had had a good old laugh about it.
16 Andy’s Estate and Aftermath
While the Sotheby’s sale became seed money for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, there was the rest of the artist’s estate, which included his Manhattan house, Montauk acreage, land in Colorado, downtown properties, and an inventory of art that The New York Times described as rivaling the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1982, Andy changed his will. Fred Hughes remained executor, but Vincent Fremont replaced Jed Johnson as backup executor. Meanwhile, the main thrust of the eleven-page document stayed the same. True, a foundation was to be created “for the advancement of visual art”—and it was incorporated on May 26, 1987—but it was also stipulated that business be conducted as usual. Warhol’s paintings would finance every endeavor, as they always had. It was a balancing act—“we had to keep enough paintings in the foundation,” Fremont says—but on the other hand, “since the main asset of the foundation was the art,” it was up to Hughes and Fremont to “create cash.”
According to The New York Times, the estate’s art inventory was so vast—imagine 700 paintings, 9,000 drawings, 19,000 prints, and 66,000 photographs by Warhol, as well as works by other contemporary artists—that an entire team of people was required. This included the aforementioned curators Steven Bluttal and Tim Hunt, plus Beth Savage, who eventually became collections coordinator for the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Sally King-Nero, who is now working with Neil Printz on Warhol’s catalogue raisonné.
In the inventory, there were stacks of 1950s drawings dating from Warhol’s commercial and fine art periods. “Andy never liked showing those,” says Fremont. “He didn’t like looking back. He liked to create.” Nor was all the work signed. From the ’70s and ’80s, there were all the thousands of Polaroids used for the portrait sessions as well as stacks of remaining paintings. Each sitting with Warhol usually led to a choice of four portraits, but since clients rarely bought all of them, a surplus amount was created. Warhol’s later work consisted of Shadows (1978), the Oxidation paintings (1978), Dollar Signs (1981), the Rorschach (inkblot) paintings (1984), Self-Portrait (1986), and the Camouflage paintings (1986), as well as the work that had not been exhibited, such as the B&W Paintings: Ads and Illustrations (1985–1986) and all his collage portraits from 1975.
Nevertheless, the cream of the crop was Warhol’s secret stash of 1960s work. What he referred to as his “rainy-day paintings” included the Jackies, the Marilyns, and the Elvis canvases that were printed and kept on a roll, then cut according to demand. “Andy never wanted people to know what he had,” Fremont says. To such a point that when Warhol became interested in insuring his rainy-day treasures, he abruptly stopped. “Because he realized that he’d have to reveal what he had,” continues Fremont.
An extraordinary concept, considering the fire hazard attached to every working art studio. And the Warhol Studio, on a daily level, was both highly functional and experimental. There was a risk factor. Yet the strange, obsessive behavior fit in with Andy’s “peasant’s wisdom,” as Jed Johnson wrote, to hide his belongings because people—“either the very rich or the very poor”—were not to be trusted and could take it all away. It’s hard not to think of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel. Nevertheless, such wisdom was further illustrated by the discovery of a “secret stash” of precious jewels, designer watches, and unmounted gemstones hidden in a space between two stacked metal filing cabinets. Found in late June, it led to another Sotheby’s sale in December 1988, named the Andy Warhol Collection: Jewelry and Watches Part II.
In general, Warhol’s paintings were not stretched on frames, because they were easier to transport that way. “We didn’t use art handlers then,” says Fremont. This was a decision Andy welcomed because it not only was cost-effective but also kept affairs private. When Si Newhouse and other prominent collectors were shown paintings, they were looking at flat canvases—or, in Charles Saatchi’s case, inspecting a Marilyn x 100 (1962) stapled to the wall. Such events usually happened on Saturday because no one else was around.
Famous for saying, “Good business is the best art,” Warhol actually meant it. Financially, he felt responsible for all the enterprises he had created. As he often said to Wilfredo Rosado, “I’ve got to keep the lights on.” Being enmeshed in the money side, Andy kept tabs on promised checks arriving in the office, even when traveling in Europe, and he surprised Larry Gagosian by being “accessible and uncomplicated when it came to business.”
Still, this practical, commercial side did not stop him from being deeply serious about his craft. Indeed, the most telling entries in his diaries are the Andy Agonistes ones about the art world. These range from noticing a fake Campbell’s Soup Can at a show of his “early stuff” at Irving Blum’s New York gallery; realizing that his prices are a seventh of Roy Lichtenstein’s and a tenth of Jasper Johns’s in the fall auctions of 1983; complaining that he has “only two collectors” while his contemporaries have fifteen or twenty; questioning whether Leo Castelli was “getting senile” when his New York dealer dissed his work in a USA Today interview; and being offended when the British gallery owner Anthony d’Offay ignored his suggestions regarding the 1986 Self-Portraits (Fright Wigs) show.
Even though most entries illustrate Warhol’s stalwart belief in his talent, like most creative types, his fear was being dismissed and left behind. Yet unlike most creative types, he had constant attention via his fast track to the media. Andy defined terrific copy. The provocative quotes, the instantly recognizable face, the band of celebrity and jet-set friends, the nightclubs and parties, the Cheshire Cat—now you see me, now you don’t—stance. However, in many ways, while courting the press, Andy did in his reputation. “The art world did not embrace him,” recalls Peter Brant, a key Warhol collector. “There’s a line out of Death of a Salesman—‘He’s liked, but he’s not well liked’—that applied to Andy in the art world.”
Nowadays, Warhol’s need to publicly pour himself into everything would be applauded. But in the 1980s, pre–social media, it perplexed. To repeat Thaddaeus Ropac’s theory, “People became tied up with Andy’s performance and not the art.”
Larry Gagosian, like many others, agrees that “the performance” confused people. “Unlike his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Andy was a swish gay,” the art dealer says. “He wasn’t locked in his studio, having dinner with
German curators, and going to bed at nine-thirty.” Established art collectors did not know what to make of it. “David Geffen—a smart guy—didn’t collect Warhol because of associating him with Studio 54 and seeing him there at one a.m.”
Yet no one was more industrious than Warhol, or more involved. As Fremont, Gagosian, and many others attest, he was constantly in his studio, working there on weekends and fixing the mistakes of his assistants, particularly if they screwed up the colors. If Warhol had a hero, it was Pablo Picasso. “Andy had his eyeballs set on Picasso and always joked about it,” says Fremont. “Andy wanted to do more than him.” But when publicly asked about Picasso, Warhol’s reply was characteristically glib. “I never think about Picasso, I just think about Paloma.”
The fecund and ever popular Spanish artist had died on a professional top note. This was not the case with Warhol, whose market value was way down. The highest price for a ’60s painting was $600,000. With this in mind, the aim of Hughes and Fremont was to rebuild Warhol’s reputation as the great American artist via important exhibitions such as MoMA’s retrospective. It opened in February 1989, then traveled, into the following year, to the Art Institute of Chicago, London’s Hayward Gallery, Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou. Curated by Kynaston McShine—reputed for his Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell exhibitions—it was a haunting reminder of the force, scale, and breadth of Warhol’s achievements.
After Andy Page 19