Reuters’s Financial blogger Felix Salmon is all in a twist about the Warhol market these days. Though Salmon tends to see the art market through caricatures of evil billionaires manipulating the market for their own aggrandizement, here he focuses on a simple statement of fact by Christie’s Contemporary art head, Amy Cappellazzo about the number and whereabouts of Warhol 1986 fright-wig self portraits in the 106 inch square size that were said to be only five when Tom Ford’s was sold at Sotheby’s in 2010:

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. […]

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.

Adventures with Warhol, 1986 Self Portrait Edition (Reuters)