Andy Warhol's Factory of Truth
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Andy Warhol once gave a silkscreen portrait of Marilyn Monroe to a sceptical friend. "Just tell me in your heart of hearts that you know it isn't art," said his friend. Warhol wasn't offended. "Wrap it up in brown paper, put it in the back of a closet," he replied. "One day, it'll be worth a million dollars."

Perhaps he undersold himself. In May 2022, another of Warhol's Marilyn silk screens, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, became the most expensive work of 20th century art when it sold for $195 million. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn's backstory is as striking as the price.

In 1964, Dorothy Podber, an artist and provocateur, came to Warhol's studio, the factory, pulled out a gun and fired through several of the portraits. Four years later, Warhol himself was shot and nearly killed in the factory, which can only have added to the mystique of bullet-scarred Warhol pictures. The picture deserves the cliché iconic.

But there is a much more obscure portrait that has a claim to be in Warhol's most interesting and definitive work. May I offer for your consideration Che, a silkscreen picture based on a newspaper photograph of the corpse of the recently executed Marxist revolutionary leader Che Guevara. It is in most ways a classic Warhol portrait.

It was made in the same way and by the same man as many of his other instantly recognisable silk screens. But what makes Che so interesting is that when it was first exhibited for sale in Rome's leading art gallery, Andy Warhol apparently had no idea that the picture existed. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

This is another one of our cautionary conversations. And I'm very excited today to welcome Alice Sherwood. Alice has worked for organisations from Accenture to the BBC and is currently a visiting senior research fellow at the Policy Institute at King's College London.

But the reason I wanted to talk to her is because she's written an absolutely delightful book titled Authenticity, Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture. It's absolutely packed with stories I hadn't heard and that immediately made me think and learn. Alice, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Thank you, Tim. I'm really glad to be here.

Well, I'm glad you're here as well. And I found out about this story from your book, Authenticity, and I was a little bit naughty in my introduction because I said that the Che picture was made in the same way and by the same man as many of Warhol's other silk screens. But that man wasn't Andy Warhol, was it? It wasn't Andy Warhol. It's absolutely true that it was the same man who made many of Andy's Warhols.

And it was a man called Gerard Malanga, or Jerry, who was Warhol's very, very long time assistant in all his silk screening and in much else. And in fact, this was so well known and well acknowledged that there's an interview with Andy Warhol for Cavalier magazine when they're asking Andy all about his pictures.

And after a while, he says, slightly irritated, if you want to know about my pictures, why don't you speak to Gerard? He painted most of them. So it wasn't a secret at all. Andy was playing with these ideas of authenticity and authorship. Could you tell me a little bit about the actual process of making these silk screens? What was going on when they were made? Well, a silk screen is effectively a sophisticated multi-layered stencil.

So in order to make a silkscreen, you don't take a paintbrush and a canvas. What you take is an image, which can be a drawing or a photo, and you have various stencils made of it for the different colours. And then what you do is you put the stencils on top of the canvas or paper and you push the paint through with a squeegee to get a layer of that colour. And then you use another stencil

for another colour and push the paint through there. And sometimes you might touch it up a bit with a paintbrush at the end. But mostly when Andy and Gerry worked together, they did very little touching up. It was quite a mechanical, quite a fast process. And the photographs themselves were not by Warhol. And I understand the stencils weren't made by Warhol either.

There was an awful lot of, if you like, borrowing and outsourcing when he wanted to stop being a commercial artist. He was a very successful commercial artist, particularly making drawings for shops and stores and retail outlets of ladies' handbags and shoes. But he wanted to move into the artistic world properly.

And his big inspiration was that he wouldn't make drawings anymore. What he would do would be to take photos and not just any photos, but iconic, striking, emotive photos. So these could be Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor. And then what he would do is have the stencils, the acetates made for him by someone else. And then he and Jerry or other people would make the images.

So you've got these images where the photograph is not by Warhol and the stencil is made by a printer. And then Jerry Malanga is often the guy actually squeezing the paint onto it and doing the silkscreen process. So, I mean, is it fair to say that in some cases Warhol would never have touched the canvas at all?

It's absolutely fair to say that. And in fact, later on in his life, he actually had a rubber stamp made of his signature. And he gave the rubber stamp to friends so that they could sign, in inverted commas, his pictures for him. And certainly, as time went on, he outsourced more and more. So you certainly got situations where the whole thing was made off-site.

sometimes with instructions from Andy, sometimes with instructions from someone who knew Andy. And he really wouldn't see the result, sometimes until it turned up to where he was meeting the client, still slightly with the paint wet. So this is a huge break, I think, from...

traditions in art. And it's not like a stylistic break in the way that, say, a Jackson Pollock drip painting looks different to a Rubens. I mean, stylistically, they're incredibly different. But deep down, people really, really care whether Rubens actually painted the Rubens and people really care whether Pollock painted the Pollock.

But in the case of the Warhols, we know perfectly well that Warhol didn't touch the painting in some cases and gave credit to Jerry Malanga. And that was kind of part of the art. He was very deliberately distancing himself from the classical way of making pictures. You know, our classic picture of the artist is the man, it's usually a man, with the brush loaded with paint, conceiving of this great image, which he then paints himself.

And authenticity is linked to a person, a person's idea, a person's inspiration and a person's work. And Andy disposed pretty much of all of that. You know, he actually said once, I want to be a machine. He didn't want works that were literally man-made. He wanted to shock people and to make art industrial. And that really messes with our ideas of authenticity.

No, it really does. I mean, he wasn't, I think, the first artist to not necessarily be doing much of the actual painting. But he does seem to have been the first artist to have made a virtue of it. And I wanted to go back, all the way back to Rubens, because there is this wonderful passage in your book where you describe various negotiations between Rubens and various rich, powerful clients. And what they're arguing about is how much of the painting is Rubens actually going to do?

There's a completely lovely correspondence which is between a diplomat called Sir Dudley Carlton, who is very keen to acquire a Rubens and is prepared to swap all sorts of ancient antiquities and statues that he's bought in Italy for a genuine Rubens. And Rubens is very helpful and says, I offer you the flower of my stock.

But as he describes each of his paintings, he keeps saying, oh, yes, this one is completely wonderful. It was begun by one of my students, but I'll touch it up so it can pass for an original. And each time Dudley Carlton goes, that's not really what I had in mind. And again, Rubens comes back and said, oh, well, I'll offer you another painting. And this correspondence keeps going until Dudley Carlton says, I want one that is by Rubens and only by Rubens.

And at the end of that, Rubens says very charmingly, of course, I'll do that for you, but it will cost you a bit more. So people were very clear that, you know, not every Rubens is exclusively by Rubens. And Rubens was, well, I guess we don't know exactly what the clients were getting, but it seemed that he was quite transparent about it. Now, of course, in the modern world, we have to look back at

Rubens or Rembrandts or whatever. And we have to deduce how much were they actually involved. And I learned from your book that there were these quite fine distinctions between say the Rembrandt and studio of Rembrandt and circle of Rembrandt. Could you explain those to us? Yes. I mean, one of the most fascinating things is there are, if you're in the art market and particularly if you're an auction house, basically nine levels of authenticity for a picture.

So going from totally authentic to really not sure. And you will find them at the back of auction catalogs. But just to pick the key ones, if you have the artist's full name in the description of the picture, so Rembrandt van Rijn, they think it's actually by the artist. Anything less than the full name and...

It's less than totally by the artist. So it might be studio of, which means rather like Rubens, it was done by some students, maybe with some touch-ups or the original sketch by the artist. Or it can be circle of, which means it was done by someone at the same time who was an admirer or working in the same tradition. And that's slightly less valuable, obviously, than one completely by the master.

And then if something is done, say, several hundred years later, but in that style, it's worth a lot less, but it would be described as manner of. And all these gradations affect the authenticity, but also the price. And then there's one other... To a huge extent, right? To a huge extent. So I write about something called a drawing called La Bella Principessa, which the owner...

totally believes is by Leonardo da Vinci, in which case it will be worth, he says, $150 million. But when it was sold, it was sold as manner of, so a 19th century kind of imitation, and it was sold for $22,000. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Well, I'm curious as to what we should make of the decisions of the art market in this respect, because you've got the same painting. It has the same quality, the same visual quality. But if an art historian or a connoisseur

decides to upgrade it or downgrade it and the art market accepts that change in status. I mean, we're talking about adding several zeros or subtracting several zeros to the price of this painting, even though it's the same painting. It's difficult because even art experts are fallible. So sometimes they'll make a judgment and sometimes they'll change it. And the market really does decide that.

It takes into account all the available information and says, well, we can listen to this scholar and we can listen to that scholar, but we notice that that museum didn't exhibit that painting as a Leonardo. And on balance, the market will decide the value of this work. Well, you described these nine grades of authenticity, but it seems that Warhol kind of obliterates many of those grades. This brings us back...

to the story of the Che Guevara silk screen that I teased people with at the beginning of this episode. Tell us how this Che Guevara painting comes into existence. It's quite a fascinating tale. Well, it starts, as we said, with Andy and Jerry, with Warhol and Malanga. And in 1963, when they meet...

Warhol is looking for somebody to help him do these silk screens, these pictures that aren't what we would traditionally call paintings or art. And Malanga, as well as being very cool and very beautiful, which matters to Warhol, has also had experience of silk screening, not art, but actually men's ties, men's neckwear. So he already knows how to do these things and he's got a useful skill and they set to it.

And they create an astonishing number of screen prints in the first year. I think they do something like 60 Liz Taylors, a handful of Elvises, a lot of those car crash pictures. All of these are multiples. So lots of screen prints. And within the screen prints, if you've ever seen a Warhol poster,

quite a lot of repetitive images too. So they work really, really hard churning out these things. And Andy is building a name for himself. And they're getting more and more into the underground and artistic circles, both Malanga and Andy. And by about 1964, 65, Andy is also getting very interested in film. He's made some things on film.

And he's quite keen to use one of the very newfangled video cameras. But video cameras then are very, very expensive. And what he does is he comes to a deal where he says, look, I will run off some screen prints of a portrait of

myself from an acetate he'd made a year earlier and I will give those to you in exchange for having the video to use. So he's really getting into using these screen prints almost as currency because there are so many of them. He swaps them for all sorts of things.

And Gerard is involved in those and Gerard is actually involved in his films. And then what happens is that they've both done so much of this screen printing and filming that Gerard is beginning to tire of what he calls the factory scene. And he is also in love, actually, with an Italian society beauty called Benedetta.

And he follows her to Rome. He says to Andy, look, I'm just going to stop. I'm off to Rome. I'm off to Italy for the film festival. And Andy tries to persuade him to stay because obviously he's a very valuable person in the making of all these screen prints. But no, no, no. Gerard heads off. About a month in to being in Italy, Gerard runs out of money. So he telegrams Andy and says, I am broke.

You promised, please send money. But he gets no reply, possibly because Andy is not really very amused that Gerard has left him in the lurch. I mean, Andy could be quite cruel, I think, to his associates, couldn't he? Yes, he was certainly very keen on getting the best use out of them. So we have Andy in New York. He's lost his assistant. Yeah.

Jerry in Rome, chasing this society beauty, running out of money, writing to Andy, Andy's ignoring him. So what happens next? So what happens next is that Gerard simply does on his own and for himself what he has always done with Andy, which is he takes a striking image, in this case, one of the Che Guevara taken after his death.

And he sends the photograph off to get some acetates made. And then he runs off some screen prints. At first, he runs off a couple and he gets in touch with Andy and says, listen, I'm doing these as war holes. I'm sure you won't mind. And again, he doesn't get an answer. So he assumes it's OK. And then he runs off 50 more versions and copies for an exhibition called

at an Italian art gallery called the Tartaruga Gallery. And he's very clear that he is proposing to sell these as Andy Warhol's. They're not Circle of Warhol, to use the old distinction. They are Andy Warhol's. Absolutely. And Andy doesn't say yes, but he doesn't say no. Andy doesn't say anything. Gerard keeps saying, I assume it's OK.

And of course, the way he tells and sells it to the gallery owner is that these are Warhols. I mean, the gallery owner undeniably believes that they are. So the show is a complete sellout. And in fact, the pictures, the paintings are sold before the exhibition even opens. It's a huge success.

And Gerard does try telling Andy, look, I've made you a huge success in communist Italy, he says. But he still doesn't get any answer from Andy. The rumours start flying that these are not actually real Warhols. And the gallery owner gets wind of these rumours and he confronts Malanga.

And he says to him, listen, are these real or not? Because I have to tell you that forgery carries a 15 to 20 year prison sentence in Italy. So this is a big problem for Gerry because he's been running off these things. I mean, they're really not, clearly not war holes. And he is now facing spending half a lifetime in

in an Italian jail. So what does he do? It's an absolute disaster from his point of view. There he is, no money, threatened with jail and a very, very angry gallery owner. And he wires Andy a telegram saying, I will be in an Italian municipal prison without bail. Please help me. Please, please help me.

And then, what I think is a very nice 60s touch, signs it, peace, Gerard. So there we are. Gerry Malanga is, in his own words, trapped like a rat in Rome. He's threatened with 15 to 20 years in prison. He writes to Andy Warhol one more time, begging for help, and we'll hear how Warhol responds after the break. ♪

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I'm back with Alice Sherwood, the author of the book Authenticity. We're talking about authenticity in art. We are talking in particular about a very interesting episode in Andy Warhol's life. Where we left it, Warhol's long-term assistant, Jerry Malanga, had gone freelance, sold his

silk screen prints in Rome, claimed they were Warhol originals. Warhol possibly didn't know anything about it. Warhol certainly hadn't said anything about it. And when Jerry Malanga was threatened with jail for forgery, he begged Andy to save his skin. So Andy broke his silence. What did he say? Eventually he breaks his silence and he agrees to authenticate the pictures that Malanga has made.

on the condition that he receives the proceeds of the sale. So he wires the gallery owner and he says Che Guevara's are originals, however, Malanga not authorised to sell them. Contact me for the bill. Let's just underline that for a second. So Warhol may not have even known these paintings existed. I mean, he may have known because Malanga was writing to him, but he may not even have known these paintings exist.

hears these complaints from Italy that there were these forgeries circulating. He gets this begging message from Malanga saying, you've got to help me. And his response is to retroactively...

create genuine Andy Warhols? When he sends this telegram and he says the Che Guevara paintings are genuine, what is he doing? Is he stealing Jerry Malanga's paintings? Is he saving Malanga's skin? Or is the whole thing this astounding piece of conceptual art? How do we even understand what's going on here? I think we need to look back at Andy, who was very, very keen on money.

to understand what was going on in his head. And Andy, a couple of years earlier, had worked out that he could put his name on things and they would become more valuable or they would become Warhol's. So he was ahead of the game, if you like, in terms of understanding how art might become a brand. And he even put an advert in the Village Voice saying, this is Andy Warhol saying,

I will put my name to any of the following. And he sends a long list of all the things that he would happily sign or endorse from records to film equipment to food. So I would say it's unlikely that top of his mind, he's tried to save Malanga's skin. So I think it's, in my view, something quite different. For me, it is the moment when

Warhol realised and enacted the fact that what an artist said about a work could be more important than the work itself. He was the artist as authoriser. So I call it the authenticity shift from a concept of artist's hand to the artist's brand.

where you have a whole collection of products that can have the artists or the brands mark on them, but don't necessarily need to have been made by the person whose name they bear. I think it just points up what a tangle we have got ourselves in about what is authentic in a world where things are not just handmade, but machine-made and multiplied.

and where an artist like Andy can make 10,000 works in a lifetime. You know, you've written about Vermeer. He made somewhere between, I think, 21 and 40. This seems to be an extraordinary paradox because people everywhere, but particularly in the art market, people prize scarcity. Ideally, they prize uniqueness. And that's one of the reasons why...

Leonardo da Vinci works are so highly valued and Vermeer works are so highly valued because there are so few of them. And yet Warhol breaks all those rules and yet the Financial Times called him a one-man art market index. His whole thing was ubiquity and repetition.

So he breaks the scarcity rules, he breaks the uniqueness rules, and yet his works are worth an enormous amount of money. So what lessons should we draw from that? I think the lessons that we want to draw is that we're living in different times so that oil paintings, if you like, belong to a time where there were fewer objects, more time to appreciate art.

layers of subtlety and layers of paint and the way they were applied. And things were scarce. Pictures were limited by the hours of an artist's life. And the number of objects that people owned and the number of things vying for people's attention were far fewer. So we were clear what authenticity was. Now we live in very, very different times. We live in very crowded times. We're assailed by images all the time.

And so resources aren't the scarce thing. The real scarcity is our attention. I think you could classify your Warhol buyers as people who are cash rich, but time poor.

And what warholes do above all is their attention grabbing. They become a must have because you can appreciate a warhole very quickly. We immediately recognise, as you said earlier, something is a warhole. We know it's a warhole. And if we put it on our walls, everybody else will know it's a warhole too without any explanation needed. So it's a very time effective purchase. We've moved into something where the economy is

The scarcity in the economy was things and money to an economy where the scarcity is really scarcity of attention. And therefore, the sort of things that we respond to, and particularly in the art world, are ones that are much more like posters. Things have to stand out and they have to stand out quickly.

Now, I can't help but draw a line between Warhol and Beeple. And I wanted to ask you about Beeple. So Beeple, as many people will know, is a digital artist. He has been creating digital art and posting it on the web every day for quite a while. And

attracting quite a followership. So he's created this brand value. He's got people's attention. And then people announced that he was selling, well, not really selling an artwork. He was selling an NFT, a non-fungible token, asserting ownership of an artwork. So effectively, anybody can look at the artwork and

That's free. It's infinitely reproducible. But only one person has this cryptographic token that asserts you own the work. And that cryptographic token sold for nearly $70 million. And I would love to ask Andy Warhol what he makes of it all, but I can't ask Andy Warhol because he's no longer with us. So I want to ask you, Alice. Well, what do you think of Beeple and this...

$70 million cryptographic token. And what do you think Andy would have made of it? Well, I think Beeple's $70 million price tag for his work is absolutely spot on for our attention-grabbing society, our attention economy, because it was all over the papers and all over the media. And of course,

If you get a high price for work, that in itself feeds the value of the work because it makes it part of the attention economy. I think Warhol would have beaten Beeple to it, to be honest, because he was always ahead of the game. He knew about the artist as a brand before anyone else. And I think he was always one for new tech. So I have a hunch that Andy might have been Beeple.

Now Alice, before I let you go, as a student of authenticity and someone who clearly knows a great deal about art and art markets and the history of art, I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on one of my favourite cautionary tales which loyal listeners will know all about. The Art Forger and the Pope is the title of the episode and this was an occasion in the 1930s where

A great art critic, Abraham Bradyus, was persuaded to authenticate this newly discovered work as a Vermeer. And not only a Vermeer, but the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. And Vermeer, as we've alluded to, is a mysterious figure. He didn't paint many paintings. It was sensational art.

to discover a new one. And of course it was too good to be true. And the whole thing turned out to be a rotten fraud perpetrated by a really repulsive character called Han van Meegeren. And yet a lot of people believed it. And a lot of people continued to believe that even when the fraud was discovered, that van Meegeren was something of a hero. It feels like a story with something to tell us today. I think it's a wonderful story. And yeah,

As you say, so much of the fraud that was perpetrated, it was the story that people wanted to hear. And in particular, as you say, Bravius had been longing for some more Vermeers to show up. So I think there's a huge effect there.

in the success of any forgery, art forgery or any other sort, if it taps into something that people want and some deep desire. So I think there's a universal thing to watch out for, which is if something really makes people feel strongly, you know, look again at what's going on there.

So, Alice, the book, just to remind people, is called Authenticity, and you're really wrestling with this subject from every direction. It's full of fascinating stories. Having read it, I was left with a question for you, which is, is this a more authentic age than before because we value authenticity, or is it more inauthentic than ever? I think, and this has obsessed me for all the time I've been writing the book, that

We are in an age where authenticity is more important to us than ever before. And the pursuit of authenticity in very many ways has become one of the most important goals in life. And yet, at the same time, we have created this world that is faker than ever before.

really across the board. It doesn't matter whether you're talking to art people or academia or fashion or technology or policy, they're all worried about how inauthentic things are becoming. So we have this peculiar paradox which is really what I wanted to investigate. I'm very much reminded of that famous phrase by William James which is that at the end of our days

Our life experience will equal what we paid attention to, whether by choice or by default. So we are, if we don't pay attention to the things that are worthwhile, if we're too distracted by the fakes, we're at risk of living lives that are less our own. And that really matters. Thank you so much, Alice Sherwood. Thank you.

Alice Sherwood's book, Authenticity, is available to buy now from all good booksellers. And if you enjoyed this conversation, you might also like to go back and listen to our episode on Van Meegeren's not very convincing forgery of a lost Vermeer masterpiece. It's called The Art Forger, The Nazi and The Pope.

Portionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Liet-Elma Laad, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori and Erik Sandler.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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