An article in the New York Times explores a corner of the art world that deals in art that is more recognizable than cutting-edge, more pseudo than Surreal. Along with big-ticket names such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, galleries like Castle Fine Art and Martin Lawrence sell original artworks by reformed forgers such as John Myatt that mimic popular and recognizable movements like Impressionism or Abstraction but without the intimidating price-tag. According to the article, these moderately-priced and pleasant-looking pieces are especially attractive to first-time buyers used to buying luxury goods, for whom galleries even go out of their way to create a welcoming environment by staying open later and employing staff that have been known to smile.  (more…)

A Bloomberg article investigates the lack of transparency in online auctions. The impetus for the report is a recent Paddle8 online auction, which featured 20 works of money-themed art, including a piece by Andy Warhol. After the auction was over and  65 percent of the lots were left unsold, Paddle8 pulled the estimates and bids from the website, opening up the possibility to put the artworks into another auction with no record of their failure to sell. This opacity has become common as more websites and auction houses engage in online auctions, a possible indication that these progressive methods are less than successful. (more…)

After years of financial troubles, the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been seeking legal permission to dissolve and merge with the National Gallery of Art only to meet with pushback from opponents of the plan, including employees and students of the museum’s art college. In a testimony on Wednesday, the opposition cited “broken fund-raising” as the cause of the museum’s downward spiral and argued that the proposed integration goes against the Corcoran’s deed, drafted in 1869. If the plan goes forward, the National Gallery of Art will take over the Corcoran’s collection, which includes work by Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol, while George Washington University will manage the art college.   (more…)

August 4th will see New York City’s billboards, subways, newsstands, and more inundated with major works of art, including pieces by Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close, as part of Art Everywhere U.S.. This new campaign is the product of a collaboration between the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and five American museums which will result in 58 works of American art being displayed on over 50,000 sites across the country. The campaign hopes to recreate the success of Art Everywhere U.K., a similar movement that launched last year, and spread the importance of American art and artists to a greater number of viewers.

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The New York Times reports on the recently finished renovation of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which shifted its focus and exhibition strategy to more carefully and chronologically explore the artist’s life.  “It really is a new Warhol; it’s much more about him,” says director Eric Shiner. (more…)

A lawsuit over the ownership of an Andy Warhol portrait of the late actress Farrah Fawcett has been settled in favor of her husband, actor Ryan O’Neil.  The lawsuit settles a dispute between O’Neal and the University of Texas in Austin, which had received the work from Fawcett’s estate, even though O’Neal maintained the work had been given to him as a gift from Warhol. (more…)

A rare Andy Warhol portrait of Hall of Fame Hockey great Wayne Gretzky will be up for sale at Sotheby’s this Friday in London.  The portrait, made in 1983, is part of a series of works Warhol did exploring the world of professional sports, and is expected to command a price of $200,000.  “This project was very dear to me,” said dealer Frans Wynans, who introduced Warhol to Gretzky, and who has his eye on the piece  “So I’m very keen on the one that has come up for sale.” (more…)

Sotheby’s has announced the cover lot for its fall auction of contemporary art in New York this November 13: a rare work from Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series featuring a gory car crash.  With the rest of the editions from this work already in museum collections, the auction house anticipates that the work could sell for $60 to $80 million.  “It’s the monumentality of the image that is so powerful,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary-art department worldwide. “It’s as if life and death come straight at you, especially the way Warhol juxtaposes the cascading images of mortality with the void of an empty right panel.” (more…)

A new development on the Lower East Side has been green lighted by city authorities, and will include a New York outpost for Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum.  Essex Crossing, a $1.1 billion development planned by L+M Development Partners, BFC Partners and Taconic Investment Partners, will include a community center, rooftop garden, as well as the 10,000 square foot space occupied by the museum. (more…)

Andy Warhol’s former uptown home at 1342 Lexington Avenue has just sold for $5.5 million, just two years after its owners purchased it for $3.5 million, and spent $1 million on a full refurbishment and restoration.  Warhol lived in the apartment from 1959 to 1974, a time that marked some of his most iconic works.  “Whenever we had an open house, we’d get lines of people who just wanted to come by and take photos,” said broker Glenn Minnick. (more…)

A victim of convicted defrauder Marc Dreier has been awarded 18 artworks, valued at over $33 million, from Dreier’s collection, among them works by Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.  Dreier had given the victim a security interest in the works several years prior, in order to get their signature on forged promissory notes, which held a face value of over $110 million.  Other works from Dreier’s collection have already been sold at auction to help pay off his debts to other defrauded investors. (more…)

Several days after the birthday of Andy Warhol, a group of artists in Pittsburgh have begun the process of covering the Andy Warhol Bridge in layers of knitted blankets, part of a project titled Knit the Bridge.  The project, which raised over $100,000 in crowdsourced funding, launched yesterday, and will be on view until September, when the blankets used in the project will be donated to homeless shelters.  “Everybody is jubilant,” said Jenny Tabrum, the technical adviser for Knit the Bridge. “The excitement is palpable in the air because everybody is thrilled that it’s finally happening.” (more…)

Ronnie Cutrone, Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, (1998), via Huffington Post

Artist Ronnie Cutrone passed away this past Sunday, at the age of 65. Perhaps best known for his time as pop artist Andy Warhol’s assistant from 1972 to 1982, Cutrone had been a regular at Warhol’s Factory since 1965, when he was still in high school. At the age of 15, Cutrone became a go-go dancer with the Velvet Underground as part of the band’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show, and befriended many of the artists associated with the West Village arts scene of the 70s and 80s, including Lou Reed and Jim Morrison.

Ronnie Cutrone, Quick Change Artist (2004), via Galerie Gmurzynska, Art Basel Miami 2011

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Following two costly lawsuits against the Foundation by collectors Joe Simon and Susan Shaer in 2007 after their Warhol works were deemed “fake” by the Foundation’s Authentication Board, its insurance firm, Philadelphia Indemnity, refused to pay its share of legal fees. “Philadelphia Indemnity said it was not liable to pay for the Warhol Foundation’s defence because the organisation had “failed to notify them—as [its] insurance policy required—of ‘any specific wrongful act’ committed by one of the foundation’s members, including the publication of material ‘with knowledge of its falsity’”, according to a 20 June article in the New York Review of Books.” This derived in an over two year-long legal dispute between the two organizations, which was finally settled last week, in favor of the Foundation, which has already processed the insurance company’s payment. (more…)

Alexander Gilkes takes the Podium at Phillips to Begin the Auction

Last evening, Philips held its contemporary art sale at its Park Avenue headquarters, offering a total of 37 lots. The sale concludes a very successful run of strong contemporary art auctions in New York during the past week, and the saleroom was high in energy and anticipation as a result, a clear carryover of enthusiasm from the ground-breaking sale held at Christie’s the previous evening. (more…)

Andy Warhol (Installation View), via Alexandra Bregman for Art Observed

On May 12^th, The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut opened its first show of the year with a selection of works by Andy Warhol. Paper mogul and avid collector Peter Brant has been personally buying Warhol’s work since 1968, and has amassed a reported 200 paintings, prints, polaroid portraits and magazine covers, from which he has pulled for this impressive show. Mr. Brant co-curated the exhibition with Heiner Bastian, the latter of whom worked on the traveling Warhol retrospective of 2001-2002, which traveled from Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, London’s Tate Modern, and MOCA LA in Los Angeles. (more…)

The Financial Times has published a profile of painter George Condo, tracing the artist’s early work in New York, his early meetings with Andy Warhol, and his dedicated approach to his practice.  “I can’t stand a white canvas,” Condo says. “If someone wanted to drive me insane, they could put one in front of me and not give me any art materials to work on it. That would be the perfect torture.”   (more…)

Painter Eric Fischl has published a memoir of the 1980’s New York art scene, chronicling the excesses and darker side of the high-profile art world of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Mary Boone.  Titled Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the Canvas, the tell-all book includes a story about an infamous 1983 party thrown by Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, with “lookout towers, armed guards, and a glamorous crowd . . . some naked,” with waiters offering “glasses of Champagne [and] a choice of cocaine or heroin.” (more…)

Sotheby’s and The Whitney have announced a major auction of works to benefit the construction of the museum’s new downtown location in Chelsea.  Featuring works by Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder, the New York auction, held on May 14th and 15th, will attempt to augment the $562.4 already raised by the museum with an expected $8 million in proceeds.  “The Whitney has been there for these artists, especially early on in their careers before people really knew them,” said Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg. “I think for many of them, they feel that this is a way to give back.” (more…)

Since opening in 2011, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has faced criticism for its dearth of Post-War Contemporary Art.  In response, the museum has gone on a spree of acquisitions to fill out its collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Mark Rothko.  “It’s fair to say that we are very actively seeking to shore up the 20th century, including early Modernism,” says museum president, Don Bacigalupi, “though not to the exclusion of other things.”  (more…)

The closing of Christie’s online auction of works by Andy Warhol has seen the auction exceed expectations, pulling in a total of $2.3 million to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation.  With an online attendance of over 65,000 visitors, bidding for a number of works was extremely competitive, as evidenced by the sale of Warhol’s lithograph of Marilyn Monroe’s lips for $112,500, over 40 times its estimated sale price.  Christie’s has already announced its next Warhol online auction in April, focusing on the artist’s time at Studio 54. (more…)

A selection of 10 works by Andy Warhol depicting endangered species will go under the hammer later this month at Sotheby’s.  The Endangered Species series, referred to by the artist as “animals in make-up,” include a bighorn ram, Pine Barrens tree frog, African elephant, and others, is expected to sell for £250,000 to £350,000.  “I think he was making a statement by representing these animals in the same way as Monroe, the Queen, and Muhammad Ali. He wanted to highlight the issue of them disappearing.” Says Séverine Nackers, Sotheby’s head of prints in Europe. (more…)

As part of its ongoing week of Andy Warhol online auctions, Christie’s has posted an interview with the creator of Girls (and daughter of artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham), Lena Dunham, discussing her take on Warhol, and how the artist would engage with contemporary society today.  “He would watch Real Housewives. We all just have to accept that. ”  She says. (more…)

Christie’s has announced its first online only auction of works by Andy Warhol, with all proceeds going to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.  The auction includes a selection of highly recognizable works, as well as a number of Warhol’s photographs, and will open for bidding on February 26th.

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