Good Morning America did a report on the revelation from Ryan O’Neal’s new reality show that seems to have uncovered Farah Fawcett’s missing Warhol portrait:
An estimated $30 million Andy Warhol painting of the late actress Farrah Fawcett that has been missing since her death two years ago might have been found in the home of her lover, Ryan O’Neal. She had willed the painting to her alma mater. A similar looking picture was seen in his bedroom on his new reality-TV show with daughter Tatum O’Neal. Fawcett did not include O’Neal, her on-again, off-again boyfriend of 30 years, in her will.
It should be noted that Warhol’s portrait of Michael Jackson had trouble finding a buyer at $1m in 2009. Before Jackson’s death the painting had been sold for $300,000. So the idea that Fawcett’s portrait is worth $30m is just sloppy reporting presumably based upon the prices for Warhol’s self portraits during the recent auctions in New York. Even though there was a massive show of the 1980s celebrity and society portraits recently–and an example of Debby Harry will go up for sale this week at a substantial sum nearing eight figures–the prices for work from this part of Warhol’s oeuvre have hardly reached the levels reported for the Fawcett painting.
