Andy Warhol
Soup cans, Marilyn, the Factory, and a body of work built on the printed image.
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928 to Slovak immigrant parents, and was the most successful commercial illustrator in New York before he painted a single soup can. From 1962 he used photographic silkscreen to remove the hand from painting entirely, running Campbell's cans, Marilyn, Elvis, dollar signs, electric chairs and car crashes through the same industrial process at the Factory, where he also made films, managed the Velvet Underground and published Interview. He was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanas in 1968, and died after routine surgery in 1987.
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board was dissolved in 2011 and no body issues opinions, so provenance carries the entire burden. The prints are a very large and well-documented market catalogued by Feldman and Schellmann, where portfolio, edition, publisher, signature and stamp determine value, and where posthumous editions, unsigned trial proofs and outright reproductions all circulate. Colour fading is the commonest condition fault and is decisive on flat screenprinted fields. Polaroids, drawings and the Time Capsules are separate markets in their own right.
If you own a work by Andy Warhol
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.