Warhol Foundation corruption scandal Automatic translate

PHILADELPHIA. Revealing material was published this week by the New York Review of Books (NYRB). They shed new light on the authentication processes used by Andy Warhol. The article is about a lawsuit that began in April 2010, more than a year before the announcement that the Andy Warhol Heritage Authentication Council would be closed. Subsequently, in September 2012, the Artist’s Fund decided to sell all the remaining works from its collection - about 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings and photographs - through Christie’s auction house.

Andy Warhole

The lawsuit, with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as the defendant, was initiated by a Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company. The court documents said that it was necessary “to raise the question that some decisions of the Council on the authenticity of works [art] were not based on professional judgments, but were made for other reasons, such as financial gain or a conscious need to save face,” writes critic Richard Dorment in his NYRB article.

In response, Joel Wachs, president of the foundation, replied: “This is just another interpretation of old lies, distortions of facts and half-truths that were made in the past, all of which were completely discredited, and not one of the facts was not proven in court. ”Wack declined to comment further.

In April 2010, the NYRB published reports, which served as the basis for the lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation. The company, which under the contract with the Fund provided liability insurance, refused to pay the expenses incurred during the trial of the case initiated by Joe Simon-Whelan in 2007. Whelan did not agree that the Foundation refused to recognize the authenticity of the painting, which the plaintiff had owned since 1965. Then Whelan was the first to raise the issue of the corruption of the Warhol Foundation and the deliberate overvaluation of the artist’s paintings. In this dispute, the court took the side of the defendant, and legal costs amounted to about $ 10 million.

The meetings of the Warhol Foundation Authentication Commission were held in secret, which is not standard practice for such events. The Warhol Foundation lawyer Ronald Spencer explained this approach by an attempt to protect the artist’s work from mass fakes. However, some minutes of Council meetings were disclosed during the Simon-Whelan process. According to a NYRB journalist, these notes provide documentary evidence that there were several instances where the Authentication Council recognized the authenticity of works previously recognized as not belonging to Andy Warhol. In his testimony at a trial in July 2010, one of the Council’s employees, Vincent Fremont, admitted that he, as the Foundation’s sales agent, sold works that had previously been recognized as fakes. At the same time, sales were formally recognized as legal, since later the Council recognized these works as genuine.

In his investigation, Richard Dorment focuses on 44 paintings by Rupert Jasen Smith, who worked closely with Andy Warhol from 1977 to 1987. These works, some of which seem to have false signatures, were returned to the Foundation in 1991 as not belonging to Warhol. But by October 2003, some of the works were again recognized as genuine, and then sold by the Foundation. Initially, these 44 works were in Smith’s own collection, until his death in 1989. Two years later, the Warhol Foundation asked the heirs to submit the work to the Foundation, as their sale or publication could threaten the “integrity of the art market and the reputation of Andy Warhol” (quote from a letter dated September 25, 1991, which fell into the hands of a NYRB journalist). At the same time, Smith’s heirs did not receive any compensation from the Fund.

In June 2003, these works were presented at a meeting of the Authentication Council. The minutes of the meeting show that the paintings were recognized as not belonging to Warhol, because they "were created under false pretexts [and], the circumstances in which they were made [were] essentially dishonest." Board member Neil Printz also noted that "some of the captions in the paintings are highly controversial." Despite this, the Council decided to discuss the same issue again at its meeting in October 2003. By this time, the council reversed its previous decision and found that some of the works were, in fact, genuine. In addition, it was decided to hold another meeting in relation to the remaining paintings. It is not yet clear how the board of directors came to this decision, since further meeting reports are not available for study and publicity. It is also not clear to whom and when those works whose authenticity was established by the Council were sold. Dorment suggests that these were not only minor prints, but also full-fledged paintings on canvas.

The dispute between the Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company and the Andy Warhol Foundation was settled out of court in October 2010. A year later, the fund announced its decision to close the Authentication Council. This was supposed to save more money that could be spent on charitable purposes of the fund, instead of, according to Vax, paying astronomical legal costs. Currently, the Foundation continues to work on the completion of the full catalog of Andy Warhol’s works with brief annotations for each work.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru