Adventures with Warhol, 1986 self-portrait edition

If you want a great example of how the entire business of the art world is built on opacity and information asymmetry, the Christie’s auction of a big Andy Warhol self-portrait next week is a good place to start.

But first let’s go back to this time last year, when Sotheby’s was auctioning off a similar self-portrait: same size, different color, different wig. This information is high up on the official Sotheby’s page for the painting:

According to our research, there are only four other self-portraits from this series in this size. They are located in the following collections:

Self Portrait (Green), Fort Worth Art Museum
Self Portrait (Yellow), Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Self Portrait (Blue), Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Self Portrait (Red), Private Collection

Scroll all the way down to the bottom, however, and you find a loophole: “It is believed that only five of the 108 in. square format self-portraits depicting this exact image exist”.

My emphasis added — and it’s important, because the Christie’s red self-portrait is not the red self-portrait listed by Sotheby’s. Instead, it’s one of two slightly different self-portraits in the same size; the other, a green one, is in the Guggenheim.

Now see how Christie’s explains where the other paintings are. The release quotes Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s co-head of post-war and contemporary art, as saying that “with all other examples in museums, it will be the last chance that buyers will have to bid on a work that shifted art history”. It then goes on to explain:

Warhol painted only seven large scale self-portraits in 1986. All the other versions are in museums or in foundations open to the public. A purple Self-Portrait was acquired in 2010 for $32.5 million for a private museum; other examples belong to Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Fort Worth Art Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

It’s very easy to simply assume, when Cappellazzo says that all the other paintings are in museums, that she means just that. But really it isn’t true. Of the seven big paintings, only four are in museums: one in the Guggenheim, one in Fort Worth, and two in Pittsburgh. There’s also the one that Christie’s is selling — and then there are two more: the purple one which Sotheby’s sold last year, and the red one which Sotheby’s said was in a private collection.

(And when Cappellazzo says that Warhol painted only seven large scale self-portraits in 1986, that’s not really true either: the Tate, for instance, has a huge 1986 self-portrait on show right now, which looks almost identical to the Christie’s one. It’s just not quite as huge: it’s 80 inches square, rather than 106 inches.)

So what does Christie’s mean when it says all the other paintings are in museums (or, later on, “in museums or in foundations open to the public”)? If they’re public, it should be easy enough to find out where they are, right?

Wrong. Ask Christie’s and they’ll suddenly go very quiet when you ask them for the location of the purple self-portrait and the other red one. (Although they will say that the other red one isn’t really red, it’s “coral”.) They obviously know where those paintings are, or think they know, but they’re not telling.

And so we enter the murky world of art-world rumor, which has it that the red one is owned by Peter Brant and the purple one by Bernard Arnault. Brant does have a foundation which is kindasorta open to the public — it’s by appointment only and you make appointments by email. I tried emailing them to ask if they have the red Warhol; they never replied. But I’m pretty sure that the foundation has never shown the Warhol and there’s certainly no public indication that the foundation even owns it.

As for Arnault, his Gehry-designed museum doesn’t even exist yet, and again, there’s zero public acknowledgment that he was the buyer of the purple Warhol last year.

When I asked art collector Adam Lindemann about all this, he replied succinctly that “they always say it’s the last one until someone else needs or wants to sell”. The fact is that auction houses are essentially art dealers and art dealers make their money by putting the best possible spin on the art that they’re selling and by knowing the secrets of who owns what. In this case, while Sotheby’s just said that the red self-portrait was in a “private collection”, Christie’s has upgraded it to being in a museum, or something tantamount to a museum. Which if you ask me is a bit of a stretch.

One of the weird things about conspicuous consumption in the art world is that for all that it’s conspicuous it isn’t public — outside the big public museums everybody tends to be very secretive indeed about what they own and what they don’t. That allows collectors to sell art quietly without admitting that they did so. And it also allows dealers and auction houses to make claims about where paintings are which are very difficult indeed to fact-check. Even when those claims are about “foundations open to the public”.
- Felix Salmon May 2011

Christie’s Blurs The Line Between Public and Private Collections

Felix Salmon has a good post about the Warhol auction racket, if you can parse the Warhols. According to Salmon, seven same-sized large self-portraits exist, each painted in 1986. Christie’s claims ”[a]ll the other versions are in museums or in foundations open to the public”, but only four are easily traced to such institutions: one in the Guggenheim, one in Fort Worth, and two in Pittsburgh. Remaining is the one Christie’s will auction May 11, and one sold at Sotheby’s last year, and another, which was described by Sotheby’s last year as part of a private collection.

So where are the two Warhols in question? Christie’s doesn’t want to say, but according to art world gossip recounted by Salmon, collector Peter Brant has the red one, and Bernard Arnault the purple. Both have semi-public foundations — or at least, in the case of Arnault, plans to create one — and that’s good enough for Christie’s.

Now, obviously using the words “public collection” to describe private collections with sharing intentions isn’t particularly accurate, and it’s good that Salmon called it out because ultimately it means the piece isn’t as rare as Christie’s claims. Collector Charles Saatchi does better than either Brandt and Arnault in respect to making his collection public — The Saatchi Gallery maintains regular hours — but that’s still no guarantee that he won’t sell the work. In fact, he has a bad reputation for unloading recently acquired art.

All this goes to say that even when private collections are made public, that doesn’t mean that a collector will love those works enough to never sell them. This makes a difference, because for a buyer, there’s a pretty big distinction between purchasing a work that will likely be the only one of its kind on the market, and owning a work of which two others are floating around. Surely this is exactly the kind of distortion that could inflate the painting’s sale price.

by Paddy Johnson on May 6, 2011

Thiebaud Gets His Slice, Chamberlain Sets Record Sotheby’s Stone Sale

A raw, twisted steel 1958 John Chamberlain sculpture, Nutcracker, sold for $4.8 million last night at Sotheby's in New York. The price achieved an auction record for the artist, selling to a Gagosian Gallery representative who paid more than double the presale $1.8 million high estimate. Gagosian recently signed on the 84-year-old artist, following a two-decade partnership with Pace Gallery.

Nutcracker was the most coveted artwork on offer in a single-owner sale from the estate of Upper East Side dealer Allan Stone, who died in 2006 at the age of 74. The sale included 42 lots totaling $54.8 million, topping the $46.8 million high estimate. The lure of estate material and low estimates resulted in a healthy 93 percent of lots finding buyers.

While results were steady, the mixed quality of works on offer was more suited to a day sale than an evening sale. Nevertheless, Sotheby's gave the Stone estate the royal auction treatment, having snatched the business away from Christie's, where a first round of works were sold in 2007.


Stone was a compulsive buyer who filled his suburban home with whatever caught his eye. His daughter, Olympia Stone, directed and produced a 2006 documentary about her father, The Collector: Allan Stone's Life in Art. Two skyboxes filled with Stone family members and friends watched the proceedings, snapping photos and sipping champagne.

This sale launched a weeklong series of contemporary art auctions at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips de Pury, stocked with big-money paintings by Warhol and Rothko.

Last night's sale included a group of 18 works by painter Wayne Thiebaud. Sotheby's strategy, offering a large pool of work by a single artist, can risk flooding the market. In this case the gambit paid off. Seventeen sold, totaling $27.5 million, above the $18.3 million high estimate.

"The work that was really great sold very well," San Francisco dealer Gretchen Berggruen told A.i.A. "[Thiebaud has] a much broader following than people think because he's always been labeled a California artist." Berggruen purchased Various Cakes for $3 million, above the $1.8 million high estimate.

Stone originally met Thiebaud in 1961, a year after he founded his gallery. They continued to work together until Stone's death. Thiebaud's 1961 still-life painting of rows of symmetrical Pies, thickly painted on a cream background and in step with a then-emerging Pop style, sold for $4 million, above the $3.5 million high estimate.

International phone bidding from Europe, Israel and Asia helped propel Thiebaud's prices. An 11-inch-tall 1962 work, Four Pinball Machines (Study), soared over a $900,000 high estimate, selling for $3.4 million.


The sale also featured Abstract Expressionist artists, including nine pieces by Willem de Kooning, who is the subject of a major survey at MoMA this autumn. "The quality of the De Koonings weren't very good, and they didn't generate much enthusiasm," noted dealer David Nash, of Mitchell Innes & Nash, after the sale. The most significant de Kooning, a 1947 greenish-yellow and raspberry painting on board titled Event in Barn, missed a $5 million to $7 million estimate, selling for $4.8 million.

The most hotly pursued de Kooning was the pink and flesh-toned painting on newsprint, Woman in a Landscape (1965–66). Estimated to sell for $700,000 to $900,000, more than four bidders pushed the price up to $1.1 million. It eventually sold to an unnamed phone bidder.

"The sale was a good warm-up for the week, but many of the key players didn't show up," observed dealer Edward Tyler Nahem. "Tuesday night will be packed."

TOP: Wayne Thiebaud, Pies, 1961. Oil on Canvas, Est. $2,500,000–$3,500,000. Sold: $4,000,000
ABOVE: Willem de Kooning, Event in a Barn, 1947. Oil, enamel and paper collage on board. $5,000,000–$7,000,000. Sold: $4,800,000.

by Lindsay Pollock 05/10/11