The ever-unfolding scandal of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board and the Warhol Foundation's apparently massively criminal machinations is just mind-boggling.
Richard Dorment wrote in the New York Review of Book last fall about veteran London dealer Anthony d'Offay's run-in with the Board over a Red Self Portrait, an early (1964-5) silkscreen work which was signed and dated by Warhol, and inscribed, "to Bruno B," as in Bruno Bischoffberger, his longtime European dealer. A painting which Warhol chose for the cover of his first catalogue raisonne, published in 1970. Which included the painting.
And despite all this, the Authentication Board declared the painting was not authentic. Anyway, the Book Review has now run a series of letters and replies and followups including corroborations from Paul Alexander, new accusations by Warhol Foundation chairman Joel Wachs, and fierce rebuttal by Dorment.
It seems that, after the d'Offay/Bruno B rejection, the Board set to work contacting owners of other Red Self Portrait paintings with the intention of proactively deauthenticating them. And now at least one owner has filed an anti-trust suit against the Foundation and the Board, charging conspiracy and fraud. [The Foundation controls and sells several thousand works by Warhol easily worth several billion dollars on the street.]
Anyway, it's all there for the reading, but the most devastating piece in my mind is the letter by Rainer Crone, the German art historian who collaborated with Warhol to publish that first catalogue raisonne. First off, it's just a great story, well told, and a strong, firsthand argument for Warhol's significance. Crone addresses the evolution of the mechanical reproduction techniques and Warhol's awareness of its implications for the idea of authorship. [He also describes silkscreening as, "in the end, a fusion of painting and photography," which is so obvious, I'd never thought of it that way before.] The ending is unequivocal:
When, in 1986, Warhol came to London for his show at Anthony d'Offay's gallery, he signed in d'Offay's presence one copy of my 1970 book in two places: one signature was across the dust jacket, which reproduces the "Bruno B" Red Self Portrait eight times. The other was on the book's half-title page. It is important to realize that Warhol and myself--as I described above--together chose the "Bruno B" Red Self Portrait for the cover of the book. Warhol's signature across the "Bruno B" image on the dust jacket gives further unequivocal evidence that Warhol still in 1986 not only was authenticating the work itself, but remained proud of the painting, as well as of my early catalogue raisonné (then sixteen years in print), which had proved so many times before to be a very reliable source.Will the Warhol Foundation's financial leverage in the art world help it blunt or silence any real discussion of its practices? Do Warhol collectors or Foundation grant recipients--or applicants, for that matter--feel it best to just shut up and let it pass? Does pointing to this reporting mean I'll never need to stress about finding the time to apply for another Arts Writers Grant?It is hard to believe that Warhol would have signed my book and the image of the "Bruno B" Red Self Portrait if there had been the slightest doubt in his mind that it was not "his work." The combination of the dedication on the back of the painting with the choice of that image for the cover of the catalogue raisonné, together with his endorsement sixteen years later of the image by signing across it, leave no room whatever for any doubt as to the authenticity of the work and the artist's intention.
To deny a painting chosen by the artist for the cover of his first scholarly publication when that work is signed and inscribed to the artist's longtime dealer is an act of folly and gross misjudgment. Art scholarship does not consist of the theories constructed after the artist's death by those who never knew him. Its bedrock is the body of work that the artist authenticated--beyond a shadow of doubt--in his lifetime.
What Andy Warhol Really Did [nybooks.com via @harrislieberman]
Previously, from almost exactly 4 years ago: BBC documentary on Richard Eckstract's denied Red Self Portrait [image reproduced above]