When is a Warhol not a Warhol? The $2 million self-portrait turning the art world on its head



By ADRIAN LEVY and CATHY SCOTT-CLARK



This self-portrait by Andy Warhol was worth $2m.Then the mysterious organisation which controls his estate gave it the red stamp every Warhol collector dreads. Now it's worthless. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report on why even in death the creator of Pop Art is turning the art world on its head



The most disputed work of art in the world today is this screen print of Andy Warhol

The most disputed work of art in the world today measures 20in by 16in. It's not unique, nor did its artist actually make it. It's a screen print - one of a series of ten - recreating a photograph taken in a passport booth in the Sixties. But the artist is in it; sallow-cheeked, dead-eyed, unmistakeably Andy Warhol.

His face is set against a pillar-box red background, hence the name - the Red Series (you might recognise it from the posters used by London's Tate Modern gallery to promote its sell-out Warhol retrospective in 2002).

An acetate was made from the original photo and applied to a silk screen. Ink was pushed through the fine mesh on to rough cotton canvas by a technician in a commercial print shop in New Jersey, employing a technique that was then mostly used by American tie manufacturers - an industrial birth befitting a product from the art studio Warhol famously named The Factory. Warhol was not even present in a process of remote manufacture that became the norm for the artist over the next decade.

Complicating matters further, this was not even the first time that the photo booth snap had been used. In 1964 Warhol had made 11 prints from it at his Manhattan studio; these were, mostly, not red. They were printed on linen with different coloured inks for the backgrounds, the layers of the image overlapping, like the famous Marilyn Monroe portraits.

In the Sixties, Warhol had delighted in the superficiality of what he produced.



'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface... and there I am. There's nothing behind it.'



The 'Denied' stamp at the back of the Warhol self-portrait

And the market agreed. The 1964 self-portraits were traded for a few hundred dollars. His 1965 Red Series was given away. Even his paintings that drew inspiration from the supermarket shelf fetched little, an entire group of 32 Campbell's Soup Cans produced in 1962 selling for just $1,000.

But after Warhol died in 1987, prices began to creep up. In 1996, the soup cans were bought by New York's Museum of Modern Art for $15 million. The Economist called Warhol 'a bellwether for the art market', generating $500 million in 2007 alone. The Eight Elvises sold for $100 million in 2008; his 200 One Dollar Bills went for $43.8 million last year. He is in the same bankable elite as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Joe Simon, a film producer now based in London, caught an early wave by buying a Red Series picture in 1989. Simon had decided to invest in Warhol, having met the artist and some of his inner circle when he was a teenager in New York. Knowing the vagaries of the Warhol market, he took advice from the experts: key figures from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thus assured, he bought it for $195,000 from the Lang & O'Hara Gallery in New York in 1989.

By 2001 art market values were rising steeply, and Simon's picture was worth $2 million: he decided to sell. At this point he says he was persuaded to send it in to be included in a new encyclopaedia of Warhol's works that was being prepared by the Foundation. It came back - he was told it was no longer a Warhol. Just to rub it in, 'DENIED' had been stamped in red ink on the back of the canvas, leaving it worthless.

Warhol and Gerard Malanga at The Factory in the Sixties heyday of the legendary studio

He is far from alone. Influential London art dealer Anthony d'Offay also owns a picture from the Red Series, signed and dated by Warhol. He sold his prestigious collection to the nation at a reduced price in 2008, and was much praised by Gordon Brown for doing so, but has since been forced to withdraw his picture from the deal after it was also denied, even though the Tate claims it is genuine.

On the other hand, Gerard Malanga, one of Warhol's principal aides, has told Live magazine how the Foundation has 'confirmed' a work as a Warhol that he says simply cannot be a Warhol - because Malanga made it.

All parties will of course argue for the urgent need for clarity in the best interests of art. Out of up to 1,200 applications each year, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, an offshoot of the Foundation, says it rejects less than one in five. But Warhol, who set out to query the very nature of art by making it into a commodity, would have been intrigued to see how the concerns grow in line with auction prices; eminent art critic Richard Dorment says the whole authentication saga has now entered 'the realms of farce'.

But this farce will soon be a very public affair. Because Malanga and Simon are now threatening to shed light on the secretive contemporary art market by taking the Foundation to court.

Much of Warhol's collection - 100,000 prints, paintings and drawings - was left to the Foundation formed after his death in 1987. Its pockets are deep, releasing more than $200 million in grants since its inception, financed by the sale of his art. As well as trading in Warhols and licensing the reproduction of his iconic images globally, the Foundation has come to control the market by deciding what is and what is not a genuine work.

To do this it has been working on a catalogue raisonné a multi-volumed encyclopaedia that when completed is supposed to list every Warhol and is known as the 'cat res' among dealers. In 1995 it also created the Authentication Board to police the market. This decidedly untransparent collective rarely comments on what it does but its decisions can send a work's value soaring at auction or consign it to a skip.

Ivan Karp, a celebrated New York dealer, who in the early Sixties acted as Warhol's first unofficial manager, and who today runs the OK Harris gallery on West Broadway, said: 'There's no other business of this magnitude and with this volume of trades that remains completely unregulated and whose decisions - on authenticity - remain completely opaque. And with Warhol, an artist who strived to remove himself from his art, having faith in these organs is critical if the market is to be sustained.'

With Old Masters, such as Rembrandt, academics scrutinise the brush strokes or the application of paint, and also use science to determine who painted a work.

Malanga, the aide taking legal action, told Live: 'Warhol dealt mostly in prints, and in multiples, producing 250 Marilyns and anywhere between 650 and 900 Flower pictures. He was a whirlwind whose commercial methods like silk screening also generated any number of un-numbered and unsigned "out of edition" works - extra prints produced to allow for smudges and tears. So with an artist like him, to make these judgements is far from easy. And the actual processes deployed by the Board remain a mystery.'

The famous Liza Minnelli (left) and Marilyn Monroe (right) portraits. Warhol is in the same bankable elite as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock



All that is set to change, however, with the court case that centres on the Red Series self-portraits.



In 1989, Joe Simon approached Fred Hughes, formerly Warhol's business manager, and after the artist's death a key figure in the Foundation. Simon also knew Vincent Fremont, the Foundation's exclusive sales agent, who had worked with Hughes to validate works by Warhol before the creation of the Authentication Board in 1995. Both Hughes and Fremont recommended Simon buy the Warhol self-portrait. The work was undoubtedly vintage Warhol, Simon claims to have been told.



'Warhol's signature was on the back, which explained its inflated price tag: $195,000,' he said.

Before trying to sell, Simon and his anonymous buyer were allegedly approached by the Foundation to have the picture included in the 'cat res'. Although it had already been authenticated, Simon and the buyer were said to have been advised that doing so would increase the value of the picture.



'What's been happening with these portraits is a kind of art world putsch. The Board is un-Warholing Andy Warhol'



Simon agreed. He contacted Fremont, allegedly meeting up with him in Los Angeles to get help wording his submission. Yet the picture subsequently came back with its 'DENIED' stamp. Furious, Simon contacted the Board but it wouldn't reveal its reasoning. Simon sought out Fremont again. Court papers allege the sales agent advised him to 'trace the history of the piece'. Simon started digging, accruing massive bills.



In 2003, he submitted a bulging file of sworn statements and photographs supporting his Red Series picture to the Board. Among the art-world insiders supporting his case were Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, whose curators in London had concluded that the work was a Warhol.

Warhol's former business manager, Paul Morrissey, said so, too. Although he had never been contacted by the Board, Morrissey signed a statement declaring that he recalled the manufacture of Simon's picture.



'We wanted to find another way to make money,' he said.

He claimed that the Red Series was conceived to barter for a video camera, then new technology. The intermediary was Richard Ekstract, now a New York publishing tycoon. Ekstract told Live that he used his contacts to get the equipment Warhol needed, while Warhol 'designed the Red Series of self-portraits'.

Taking telephone bids for Warhol's Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can at Christie's in New York in 2006. It went for $11.8 million

Warhol selected a photo-booth shot of himself.



'Andy had acetate transparencies made and gave them to Ekstract,' recalled Morrissey. Warhol then dealt with the printers, Norgus, in New Jersey, by phone.

According to Billy Name, Warhol's collaborator and one-time lover, who became The Factory's official photographer, the Red Series was an important stepping stone for Warhol, who would in the Seventies turn increasingly to remote manufacture. Name, 69, tall, with a long, grey beard and ponytail, was also not approached by the Board. He has returned to live in Poughkeepsie, a small town on the Hudson River, where he was born.



'Andy didn't have time to be bothered with printing those things,' he said. 'He was busy doing other stuff. Afterwards he gave some to Ekstract as payment and all are as Warhol as can be.'



So it appears Warhol commissioned the Red Series, supervised its manufacture, and was proud of the results.

In 1969, he dedicated and signed a copy of one of the pictures for 'Bruno B', his nickname for Bruno Bischofberger, a Swiss art dealer and his business partner in Europe. The following year a Red Series picture illustrated the cover of an early 'cat res' project on Warhol's work compiled by Professor Rainer Crone, one of the first academics to document Warhol's art. In 1986, when Warhol came to London for an exhibition of self-portraits staged by Anthony d'Offay, Warhol signed d'Offay's copy of the catalogue, his black marker pen racing across the image.

After Warhol's death, two Red Series pictures that he gave as gifts to silk screen printers were sold at auction with a Christie's catalogue stating that the pictures came 'directly from the artist'. The provenance was good enough for veteran Parisian dealer Daniel Templon, who bought one that he then sold in 1988 to Ronald Feldman, a distinguished New York dealer, and formerly a close Warhol ally.

Now a powerful voice in the Warhol market, Feldman told Live that he verified the picture with the Warhol estate in May 1988 before he sold it, too - this picture ending up with Simon.

Within a decade of Warhol's death, the Bruno B version had been bought by a private collector in Germany and in 1996 was exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin. Words on the back of a postcard produced for the show reveal that the image was copyrighted and licensed by the Foundation in New York which evidently still endorsed the work.



Towards the end of the decade d'Offay himself bought the picture, again checking with the Foundation, before selling it to Charles Schwab, an American investment tycoon, and chairman of the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

However, by 2003, Simon's picture was inexplicably no longer a Warhol. Despite having been made using material supplied by Warhol and the earlier endorsement of Fremont and Hughes, the Board now declared: 'We know of no independently verifiable documentation to indicate that Warhol sanctioned anyone to make the picture.'



'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface... and there I am. There's nothing behind it'. Above, Warhol and The Velvet Underground with Nico

Schwab, who was also invited to submit his work for verification purportedly to have it included in the 'cat res', had his denied too. A perplexed d'Offay had to pay back the £1 million he had charged them.

The Board concluded in its surreal ruling: 'It is the opinion of the Authentication Board that said work is NOT the work of Andy Warhol, but that said work was signed, dedicated, and dated by him.'

Another of the Red Series also emerged in Sussex, belonging to salvage expert David Mearns, who claimed that his family had been persistently asked to present their picture for inclusion in the 'cat res' too - a claim the Foundation disputes. Mearns declined, as did Ekstract, who revealed that he had been similarly approached and had also refused to send in his Red Series picture.

As uproar over the Board's behaviour intensified on both sides of the Atlantic, Ronald Spencer, the Board's dapper lawyer, gave an interview in 2005.



'It has to do with the intent of the artist... If Warhol conceived the idea and he then directed someone else to prepare a silkscreen, and he then supervised the process of production and in effect signed off on it, whether or not he signed his name to it, as long as he said, "That's good, that's what I wanted," Warhol created that work,' he said. But had Warhol not designed and commissioned the Red Series, works he'd supervised, signed, gifted and promoted, and that the Foundation had itself copyrighted in 1996?

Ivan Karp, the New York art dealer who orginally inspired Warhol to create the 1964 series of self-portraits, told Live: 'It's a kind of putsch. The Board is un-Warholing Warhol.'

Karp pulls out two square Warhol self-portraits from a drawer. The first is blue, the second red. They were produced from an acetate provided by Warhol to a college in Detroit that printed them. Pleased with the results, Warhol had signed the work, while the Board had rejected them - three times.

While researching his picture, Simon learned that the signature on the back, which had dramatically increased its price, had been applied by the Foundation using a rubber stamp. Simon has since found many others whose work had been similarly 'signed'.



Exasperated, he launched a legal action. To get around the waiver barring such a move, his lawyers looked for a pattern behind the Board's decision-making that might render the contract void. They argued that rather than being obtuse, error-prone or misadvised, the Foundation and Board were trying to restrain the market at times of glut and rehydrate it during a drought. Seth Redniss, a New York advocate acting for Simon, drafted writs that accused them of steering a conspiracy to monopolise and rig the trade, favouring some dealers over others, fixing prices and dealing fraudulently with submissions.

Last summer, a judge allowed Simon to proceed with a period of disclosure - both sides demanding reams of confidential documents from the other - a process that should be completed this spring. For the first time the Board and the Foundation will have to explain how they pull the rabbit from the hat.

The Board has given little public response to these events. It said: 'There are clear distinctions between what Warhol made and what he did not. The goal of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is to clarify these distinctions.'

The Andy Warhol Foundation knows what is at stake but Joel Wachs, president since 2001, told Live he wanted to refrain from 'litigating in public.'



Instead, the Foundation that sits on assets of approximately $300 million and spent $681,824 in legal bills last year alone, recently hired David Boies, one of the most feared and expensive U.S. anti-trust lawyers. Nick Gravantes, working with Boies, welcomed Live into his firm's Lexington Avenue offices.

'We are trial lawyers and have not, I'd suggest, been hired to make the peace,' Gravantes said. 'Not only will we win but we are coming after Simon. We'll extract millions in a counter-suit for wasting our client's time in fighting a spurious case.'

There is a suitably surreal postscript to the saga. Wrapped in a black, ankle-length Astrakhan coat, a fur shapka flapping around his ears, Gerard Malanga meets us on the frozen station platform at the genteel town of Hudson, two hours north of Manhattan. Now 65, he worked for Warhol from 1963 to 1970, overseeing the creation of hundreds of prints at The Factory, having started as a technician on $1.25 an hour.

'Before I arrived, Andy was doing stuff on his mother Julia's kitchen table,' Malanga recalls. But then Warhol mechanised the creative process, transforming The Factory into an assembly line to mass-produce pictures.

In the early Seventies Malanga left Warhol to photograph and write. He paid little attention to the rising hubbub surrounding his mentor until a chance encounter in 2004 got him thinking again. He saw American sculptor John Chamberlain, who said he had made millions (a reported $3.8 million) by selling a set of Warhol prints entitled the 315 Johns. Malanga claims he created the prints himself, working independently of Warhol in 1971. Supposedly made for a show at the Guggenheim Museum, they were not used, and finally ended up stored in Chamberlain's attic.

'I stewed over it for weeks, got mad and the following year called a lawyer,' says Malanga.



He is now suing for $250,000 in damages and $3 million in compensation. Chamberlain says Warhol gave him the prints in 1967 in return for a sculpture. His lawyers argue that even if Malanga made the prints, the artist 'was the conceiver of the work', a line of reasoning accepted by the Foundation and Board.

Yet what appears to be the same history and artistic process have led to the opposite result for the Red Series. How can there be two such different outcomes?