I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
On 11 April 2025 Christie’s announced that Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair from the Matthys-Colle collection will highlight Christie’s 20th century evening sale, with a low estimate in the region of $30 million.
On 25 April 2025, Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 9 standout lots at auction this May,” including Lot 55A, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair.
These Big Electric Chair works are very rare at auction because most of them are in major museum collections like the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago, so they have taken on an almost mythical quality within the art market, Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art Alex Rotter said.
On 12 May 2025 the Matthys-Colles withdrew Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair, which did not have a guarantee, from the sale. The lot listing was deleted. Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 8 standout lots at auction this May” with a date of 25 April 2025.
Here, the image is cropped more tightly, which not only makes the chair bigger but almost abstracts it. He’s isolated the chair from the context of a room, so it becomes an everyday object that is elevated as a still life. And what could be a more ultimate still life than a chair that will take the life out of you? It becomes a traditional painting in the vein of 17th century vanitas; a memento mori of sorts.
And yet, the chair is also this transformative object of ending. It can end someone’s life, yet when isolated, is just a chair with electricity running through it. I think that’s the play Warhol wanted to get at. He’s putting this within the canon of still lifes, and the electric chair is the most poignant of all. That’s a very Warholian thing to do, to explore multiple meanings of an object depending on how it’s presented, Alex Rotter no longer said.
In one sense, one might say, it deeply doesn’t matter. It’s just auction house marketing. But things happened.
The painting’s sale was announced. The specialists talked. The painting was marketed. The collectors were praised. The advisers and reporters discussed it. The potential bidders balked at it. The owners withdrew it, and then Christie’s not only erased its traces and actions and publications, it altered them retroactively with no notice.
At this moment this important painting whose comparables are in major museums around the world was put up for sale at a price no one wanted to pay, and so it was withdrawn from sale. The switch was not thrown, the painting was not burned, but it’s perniciously ridiculous to act like it wasn’t strapped in the chair.