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Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted, No. 11 at Christie’s for $30m This May

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Christie’s is offering a work from Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted series in the May sales with a whisper estimate of $30m. That number represents a very big jump for this particular series in Warhol’s body of work. The last time a Most Wanted work sold at auction, also at Christie’s, in 2011 it achieved a record price for the series of $4.7m. Christie’s current work is a substantially larger work with two images from the mug shots instead of one image in the case of the Most Wanted No. 3, Ellis B. Ruiz which was sold in 2011.

Here is Christie’s release on the painting:

Christie’s will offer Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men, No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr., 1964 (estimate in the range of $30 million) as a highlight of its May 17th Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art.

This diptych belongs to one of the artist’s controversial Most Wanted Men series, which was originally conceived as a monumental mural to celebrate the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and famously destroyed just a few days before the fair’s official opening. Later that year, Warhol made a series of nearly two dozen larger than life size canvases featuring thirteen of these “most wanted” men, among them was the present work.

Part of this important series, Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr. is one of only six subjects that Warhol made two versions of, with this particular work’s sister painting being housed in the permanent collection of the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. With his boyish good looks rendered in Ben-day dots, Most Wanted Men No. 11 John Joseph H., Jr is a haunting reminder of the dark underside of America during a time when the country was projecting a confident, forward looking culture to the rest of the world.

Among his many depictions of American cultural icons, the subject of Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr. stands as one of the most striking. With his chiseled features, dark, smoldering eyes and wavy brown hair, the could easily belong to one of the teenage matinee idols with which the artist began his career. Yet, with a police ID slate pinned to his jacket, and rendered in monochromatic Ben-day dots, this 22-year-old is actually a dangerous criminal, an armed robber wanted by the New York City Police Department.

In the beginning of 1963, the architect Philip Johnson approached Andy Warhol, along with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Peter Agostini, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Robert Mallary, and Alexander Lieberman, to create a mural-sized work to adorn the outside of the Panoramic Cinema Theater, a centerpiece of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair to be held the following year. For his part, Warhol decided to reproduce, on a monumental scale, thirteen mugshots of various criminals taken from a booklet entitled The Thirteen Most Wanted Men.

The Thirteen Most Wanted Men series was controversial from the start. The large-scale mural was painted over just days after it was first installed, although the exact reasons have proved to be difficult to ascertain. Initially it was thought that Warhol himself had instigated this process, saying that he wasn’t happy with the final result. While
press reports at the time reported that, “Mr. Warhol claims that the work was not properly installed and felt that it did not do justice to what he had in mind. Mr. Johnson [Philip Johnson, the architect] said yesterday that he was in
agreement with the artist and ordered the mural removed from the building.” But perhaps more logically, it might
have been felt by the fair’s organizers that a work of art depicting armed robbers and murderers was not in keeping
with the fair’s theme of “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” Whatever the precise
circumstances around this act of censorship (or self-censorship), the resulting controversy has meant this series
has an important place in the artist’s oeuvre.

Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr. was acquired first by Mickey Ruskin, the founder and owner of the
legendary New York nightclub and restaurant Max’s Kansas City. Soon after it opened in December 1965, Max’s
became the regular hangout of a new generation of New School painters and sculptors that included Robert
Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain and Larry Rivers; other artists who frequented the venue included Brice Marden,
Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. But perhaps their most famous patron was Warhol
himself, who would often frequent the famous backroom, taking over the entire space and turning it into the
epicenter of New York night life at the time. In addition to this distinguished provenance, the painting has been
included in a number of important exhibitions including the seminal retrospective of Warhol’s work organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1989, and which later travelled to the Hayward Gallery in London and the
Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Have We Had an Orange Marilyn Moment?

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This look at the history Andy Warhol’s 40 x 40 inch Marilyns is available AMMpro subscribers. First time monthly subscribers get a 30-day grace period. Curious readers are welcome to subscribe to the monthly option and cancel before being billed.

It came out quietly on Christmas Eve when Josh Baer’s Baerfaxt subscription email commented on rumors  circulating in the art market that the financier Kenneth Griffin had bought Andy Warhol’s Orange Marilyn (1964) for, again, a rumored $250m.

Baer isn’t the only one to have been talking about a sale. And, if you can believe it, some think the price may be too cheap. Why?

To answer that, it’s worth taking a look at Orange Marilyn‘s history in the market. The painting’s previous sale in 1998 was a significant event. You could even say that the Sotheby’s auction launched the current Contemporary art market. Continue Reading

Early Warhol Selfie at Sotheby’s in London Tests Warhol Market

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There’s no question that the auction houses have been feeling their way through the market for works by Andy Warhol. It has mostly been dormant for the last couple of years. Buyers have occasionally shown that there is plenty of demand for works that seem fresh or intriguing.

With that in mind, Sotheby’s has one of Warhol’s first self portrait series that has not been seen on the market for 30 years and only sold once before by Thomas Ammann. They are offering the work for £5-7m in London later this month.

Six years ago, another work from this same series was sold at Christie’s for $38m. That work was an assemblage of four canvases. So Sotheby’s estimate is somewhat conservative if you take a simple-minded approach to estimating.

“The debased Warhol is actually the pure Warhol.”

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Blake Gopnik tries to erase the line between the serious Warhol, who was a Pop Art pioneer, and the late, celebrity-fixated Warhol, who viewed commercial success as artistic success:

The “serious” art world once wanted no part of that Warhol. In his own day, Warhol the TV star and painter of celebrities could look like a clear falling-off from, and selling out of, the great Warhol of classic pop art. “A lot of people had difficulty with him moving between the art world and fashion,” remembers John Hanhardt, a veteran film curator who knew him. (“The films are the great body of work—they are simply breathtaking,” Hanhardt adds. Many artists now feel the same.)

Warhol’s critics weren’t wrong to say he sold out. Works like his Shadow Paintings or the metal surfaces he peed on, let alone his Love Boat cameo, don’t register as unique works of genius, as his early works do. But that’s because Warhol had moved on to making un-unique art that tested what selling out might be about, in an America where selling more matters most. When Warhol churned out 102 almost illegible canvases, different only in their colorways, it was partly to explore the power of his brand and the mass production of the Warhol™ product. “I always think that quantity is the best gauge on anything,” Warhol once said, and that maxim came to govern his art. When rich collectors pay through the nose for a single shadow painting, as though it were a Rembrandt, they aren’t understanding what Warhol’s products mean. But they are proving his point, anyway.

“If we are going to be honest about what we’re taking from Warhol, we have to accept the business/art network as what he’s about,” says Bankowsky, the Pop Life curator. “The debased Warhol is actually the pure Warhol.”

The Other Andy (The Daily Beast/Newsweek)

Christie's to Sell First Warhol Self Portrait

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Christie’s announced today that Warhol’s first Self Portrait will star in their New York May sales:

Painted in 1963-1964, Self-Portrait by Andy Warhol marks the first historic crafting of the artist’s iconic image in a photo booth, a radical concept of picture making that revolutionized art history. The four-panel masterpiece executed in four distinct variations of blue, features Warhol for the first time a new guise, that of the enigmatic superstar replete with silver hair, wayfarer sunglasses and a blank expression. It epitomizes Warhol’s desire to be a “machine” and is the perfect portrait of mass media and consumerism. Self-Portrait is a key highlight in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale in New York on May 11, 2011 and has an estimate of $20,000,000-30,000,000.

 

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