On the tumblr this morning, @voorwerk reblogged this odd Andy Warhol sculpture, which looks like a crumpled up tabloid page from the New York Daily News. A friend once had a Warhol sombrero made of crumpled dollar bills, so maybe there was a phase when not everything got swept into the time capsule?
The vitrine especially made me think of the lost 1950s Rauschenberg “paper painting” made of tissue liners of shoe boxes, perhaps gleaned from his window dressing era. In any case, it all seemed possible that such a thing could be a “Warhol.” But this thing is different.
It is a page from the newspaper silkscreened on a thin sheet of aluminum. It sold at Christie’s in 2021, and had belonged to Martina Batan. Which is important, but let’s just stare in awe at the back of this thing for a moment.
Batan was the director of the Ronald Feldman Gallery, a major dealer of Warhol’s work. In 1989, two years after the artist’s death, Feldman scoured the corners of the warehouse to stage a show full of Warhol oddities, counterprogramming for the massive MoMA retrospective that had just opened days earlier. It included this Daily News piece [rotated differently], and another newsprint sculpture, made from a page of the October 24, 1983 NY Post.
In 2020 Sotheby’s rawdogged a “screenprint on foil” —no vitrine or nothin’—from the Oct. 24th 1983 NY Post, from Keith Haring’s personal collection. It’s inscribed from Warhol to Haring’s boyfriend Juan DuBose [who left it to Haring, who left it to his foundation.]
And it turns out the front page of that same day’s Post had been screenprinted onto foil and given to Warhol’s boyfriend John Gould. It turned up among Gould’s things found in his mother’s attic in 2017. [Though the sale featured tons of other gifts from Warhol, such as an odd, broken painting and a bundle of knee socks and little swimsuits, this newspaper piece ended up not included.]
So what happened here? Did Warhol test the concept out one week, and then when the Post came in hot with coverage of the Oct. 23rd attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, he decided to make a series, and then gave them to friends? John got the cover, Juan got the left half of the inside spread, and the right side ended up at Feldman? [“GRIM MARINE TOLL HITS / 172… COULD TOP…”] Screenprint is obviously a repeatable medium, yet there doesn’t seem to be more than one of each page.
Also intriguing? Batan seems to have bought her sculpture back in 2002, presumably from whoever bought it in 1989.
It feels like a trip to the catalogue raisonée is in order. Oh wait it only goes through 1978!
Previous Warhol oddity sold from the Haring estate: A signed strip of canvas
Related: [These remind me of crumply sculptures William Powhida made by laminating paper to aluminum sheet. Sort of like in After the Contemporary in 2017 at the Aldrich, but I’ll chase down some specifics.]
[A little while later update:]
via Peter Huestis comes the reminder of Warhol: Headlines, a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery curated by Mollie Donovan. I don’t have the catalogue handy, but the checklist includes two of these screenprint-on-metal works [called mylar, which doesn’t hold a fold, so maybe something else?] the one from Feldman Gallery above is/was in the collection of Chris Makos.
Meanwhile, there were also three screenprint on canvas works that reproduced the three NY Post pages above. All are 24 x 20 inches, and 1983.
New York Post, Front Page (Marine Death Toll)
New York Post, Page Two (Grim Marine Toll Hits), and
New York Post, Page Three (172–Could Top 200)
This answers some questions.