It should look great in the movies, the camera winding through rooms choked with accumulations to catch a world-famous artist hiding jewelry in the canopy of his bed. The acquisitiveness of ”Citizen Kane” here meets the campiness of ”Sunset Boulevard.”
And there will be movies-two of them are planned-as who could resist the story of the poor boy from Pittsburgh filling a house off Park Avenue with so many possessions that they forced him to live in only two rooms and check the contents of the others like an anxious grandma morning and night?
A fuss is being made because this bewigged and bemused painter changed the course of art history even as he held values that place him among the most vulgar bourgeoisie of our time. He was the artist-as-glutton. And in this, as in so much else, the late Andy Warhol turned out to be an exemplar.
Sotheby`s auction house in New York has just begun the dispersal of the Warhol collection. When the final gavel falls on the morning of May 3, the sale will have been the longest and largest ever on the firm`s premises, requiring 16 sessions in 10 days to move nearly 3,500 lots of more than 10,000 individual items.
Such was the expected interest that for the first time Sotheby`s distributed its catalogue (6 slipcased volumes, $95) months early, through a book publisher, Harry N. Abrams. The 1 p.m. sale Sunday-of jewelry and collectibles-also is the house`s first session held on a Sunday.
Experts from 27 different departments were involved in pricing objects that range from paintings by Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein (estimated between $350,000 and $450,000) to a Campbell`s Soup Bowl inscribed ”Andy” in the center ($50-$75). Everything has been displayed together since Thursday in rooms totalling 70,000 square feet, nearly the entire space of Sotheby`s former headquarters.
At least since 1977, when the Museum of American Folk Art mounted an exhibition called ”Andy Warhol`s Folk and Funk,” the artist was known as an avid collector, but because he invited so few people to his home, only a very few were aware of the extent (and range) of his habit.
”I knew Andy Warhol for 25 years,” said John Marion, chairman of Sotheby`s North America. ”I saw him around the galleries and occasionally spoke to him. He attended jewelry sales and Old Master and 19th-Century and American painting sales. I knew him as somebody who was very interested.
”But he rarely bid on anything himself. He usually traveled with other people who did the bidding, and I never knew if they were buying it for him or he was advising them or what. So I was totally flabbergasted at what we found. Neither I nor any of our experts had an idea of how much there really was.”
Warhol owned a vast number of things not typically Warholian, classic furniture and decorative objects that would seem to belie his image as a man of the moment. But he also owned 175 cookie jars and 313 watches. There were bags of high school class rings and Bakelite bracelets. His kitchen cabinets held 332 pieces of Fiesta Ware. His library included 1,000 books, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Jackie Collins. One almost could imagine a category and find it already represented.
In 1974 the artist bought a six-story Georgian-style townhouse at 57 E. 66th St., moving in with Jed Johnson, a designer who has recalled that, even then, at the beginning of Warhol`s compulsive shopping, it took months to pack everything he had collected. Many of the earliest acquisitions-American Indian artifacts, tin boxes, advertisements, crockery-were put in storage on the fifth floor, not to be seen again until after his death.
Warhol also had been collecting Art Deco objects and furniture, most successfully in the late 1960s under the guidance of Fred Hughes, the artist`s natty business manager and now executor of the estate. Hughes` preface to each of the sale catalogues cites a 1969 visit to the emporium of Paris silversmith Jean Puiforcat during which they purchased nearly every item for little more than the value of scrap. The `20s material, in general, is the best of the collection.
”The things we`re offering are certainly the finest I have ever sold in Art Deco furniture,” said Barbara Deisroth, Sotheby`s head of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, ”and I would venture to say the finest sold anywhere, whether here or in Europe. There`s so much of it, and it`s very important, particularly the furniture by Pierre Legrain, which simply doesn`t appear on the market.
”There are some wonderful Deco collections around, but this is really the first major American one to come up for sale through an estate. Most of the others are still in their infancy, less than 20 years old, whereas Warhol`s was a formed collection of fabulous pieces that didn`t exist in great quantity in America. There were some avant-garde collectors of Ruhlmann and Frank and Dunand in this country but very few. The work is more likely to come up in France than here.”
The rest of the collection is-to put it mildly-uneven. Upon moving to 66th Street, Warhol found his American furniture not of the same character as the house and urged Johnson to buy work in more appropriate classical styles. Many of the pieces, particularly the ones dating from the end of the 19th Century, again are splendid examples, though they are fewer in number than those in Art Deco.
Warhol`s later shopping companion, Stuart Pivar, has said that the artist did not buy to decorate, as then his pursuit would have been determined by what the house would reasonably accommodate. Even so, in the mid-`70s Johnson acted on Warhol`s behalf with ideas of decoration and display in mind. The elaborate stencilling, painting and wallpapering he did in, say, the artist`s bedroom was to provide a showcase for the works he had acquired.
This changed after Johnson moved out in 1980. Warhol`s entertaining at home-the little there was-completely ceased, and rooms began to be used for storage. The artist`s studio, on 33rd Street near 5th Avenue, also was a repository, as he bought many things on each outing and came to shop two or three hours nearly every day. (The exception was Saturday, which Pivar has said he reserved for his own painting.)
”He bought a great deal from everywhere,” Marion acknowledged. ”He bought at all the auction houses. He bought at dealers, flea markets, you name it. He was constantly on the prowl, as they say.”
In addition to buying, Warhol often was given or sent things, most of which were ephemeral. These items, too, he saved, filling a total of 1,200 boxes that he had sealed and dated; they were the ”time capsules” he once considered selling at auction-as surprises. The estate has not yet gone through all of them and they are not in the present sale, but at his death the boxes-filled with perfume bottles, invitations, hotel stationery, airline flatware, mail-lined the walls of one of the rooms, reaching to the ceiling.
Warhol died of a heart attack after gallbladder surgery on Feb. 22, 1987. In May, the estate hired Steven Bluttal and Tim Hunt as curators; the following month they began to go through the collection.
”I knew Andy for about two years but had no idea of the volume of the collection,” Bluttal said. ”I just figured he had a few of these, a few of those and so on. I knew that Andy made some money and that he spent it. He bought things. He shopped. I saw him shopping a lot. So I wasn`t surprised at the collection, just the volume. That was what I couldn`t believe. You and I buy something, take it home, take it out of the bag and put it on the shelf. Andy just threw the bags in the corner. The piles of stuff were very high. We had to go through layers. It was like excavating.”
At the end, Warhol was living in a second-floor bedroom and basement kitchen; all other rooms were used for storage except the quarters for his Filipino maids, Nena and Aurora. The photographs of the house taken since his death occasionally try to give a sense of how it looked but, in truth, represent only art directors` notions of clutter. Little in the building stayed as it was starting with Sotheby`s involvement last August.
”When I first went in there, I was dumbfounded,” said Deisroth. ”Andy just liked the game of getting things. He wasn`t into using them or for that matter displaying or even enjoying them. Many pieces never were uncrated. We didn`t move furniture around. We just took the debris out. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of things.”
