Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Andy Warhol's Factory of Truth

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. What happens next is a landmark event in the history of art and authenticity… Tim Harford is joined by Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity, to discuss truth and fakery in modern times. Today, authenticity seems to matter more than ever — and yet we’re also constantly assailed by people and products that are not what they seem. What’s going on here? And what’s the attention economy got to do with it?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new podcast, McCartney, A Life in lyrics. Listen to McCartney, A Life in lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin Andy Wallhole once gave a silk screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe to a skeptical 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 underold himself. In May 2022, another of Warhol's Marilin silk screens, shot Sage Blue Marilin became the most expensive work of 20th century art when it sold for $195 million. Shot Sage Blue Marilin'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 warhole pictures. The picture deserves the cliché iconic, but there is a much more obscure portrait that has acclaimed to be in warhol's most interesting and definitive work. May I offer for your consideration? Che. A silk screen 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 war-hole portrait. It was made in the same way and by the same

man as many of his other instantly recognizable 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 Halford, you're listening to 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 Kings 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 Corsionary 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 chair 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 Warhol's. And it was a man called Gerard Malanga or Geri 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 and he 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 silk screen, 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 colors. 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 Jerry work 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 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 Melanga is often the guy actually squeezing the paint onto it and doing the silk screen 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 surrounding, 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 warholz, we know perfectly well that warhol didn't touch the painting in some cases and gave credit to Jerry Melangue 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, 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. And 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 initially for a genuine rubens. And Rubens is very helpful and says, I offer you the flower of my stop. 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 Carton 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 Colton 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 Rembrandt or whatever. And we have to deduce how much where 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 in auction house, basically nine levels of authenticity for a picture. So going from totally authentic to, um, really not short, 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 at 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 huge extent. So I write about something called a drawing, called La Bella Prinshipessa, 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 at 19th century kind of imitation, and it was sold for 22,000 dollars. Corsionary tales will be back after the break. I'm Paul Monde, a poet who over the past several years had the good fortune to spend time with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean the fact that I dreamed the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just

quite as cut and dried as we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations in our new podcast McCartney, a life in Earth. McCartney has been asked many times to write his autobiography and he's always declined. But as we ventured on this journey line by line, it became clear how much of McCartney's life is indeed embedded in his lyrics. It was like going back to an old snapshot album looking back on work. I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts and if you want to binge the entire season, add free right now. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney Aliphonderic Showpage in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus. Your membership also unlocks access to addfree binges from Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Laurie Santos and many other top hosts. 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, 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 noticed 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 Melanga. 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 tailors handful of Elvis's 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 warhole, 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 a 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, no, Gerald heads off about a month in to being in Italy. Gerald 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 Adi is not really very amused that Gerard has left him in the lurch. I mean, Andy could be quite cool, 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. 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 Jerry 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 Jacobiard taken after his death.

And he sends the photograph off to get some ass states made. And then he runs off some screen prints. and he sends the photograph off to get some assetates 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 warholes. I'm sure you won't mind. And again, he doesn't get an answer,

so he assumes it's okay. And then he runs off 50 more versions and copies for an exhibition at an Italian art gallery called the Tata Ruger 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.

Jared keeps saying I assume it's okay. And of course the way he tells and sells it to the gallery owner is that these are Warhol's. I mean, the gallery owner undeniably believes that they are warhots. I mean, the Galarionna 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 real warhols. And the Galleriauna gets a wind of these rumours and he confronts Melanga and he says to him,

listen, are these real or not? Because I have to tell you that forgery carries the 15 to 20 year prison sentence initially. So this is a big problem for Jerry because he's been running off these things. I mean, they're really not, clearly not warholes. And he is now facing spending half a lifetime in an Italian jail. So what does he do? It's an absolute disaster.

From his point of view, there 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. Geri 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. I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul Piccartney. The result is our new podcast, McCartney, A Life in lyrics. Listen to McCartney, A Life in lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm back with Alice Sherwood, the author of the book Authenticity. We're talking about or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 authorized to sell them. Contact me for the bill. Let's just underline that for a second. So, Wahol 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. Here's these complaints from Italy, that there are these forgeries circulating.

He gets this begging message from Melanga saying, you've got to help me. And his response is to retroactively create genuine Andy Warhol's. When he sends this telegram and he says, the Che Guevara paintings are genuine. What is he doing? Is he stealing Jerry Melangas paintings?

Is he saving Melangas 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 warholes. 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, 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

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 for me,. 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 there's one of the reasons why Leonardo da Vinci works are so highly valued and Vermeer works are so highly valued, 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 be drawn 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 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 are And so resources aren't the scarce thing. The real scarcity is our attention.

I think you could classify your warhole buyers as people who are cash rich at time poor. And what warholes do above all is their attention grabbing. They become a must-have because you can appreciate a warhol very quickly. We immediately recognise, as you said earlier, something as a warhol. We know it's a warhol and if we put it on our walls, everybody else will know it's a warhol, too, without any explanation needed. So it's a very time-effective purchase. We've moved into something where the economy, 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, 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. I can't help but draw a line between warhol and people. I wanted to ask you about people. So people 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 follower ship. 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,

a certain ownership of an artwork. So if it affects me, anybody can look at the artwork. That's free. It's 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 people and this $70 million cryptographic token? And what do you think Andy would have made of it? Well, I think people'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 people 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 people. 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 favorite 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 Radius, 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 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 Hanvon Megren. 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 Megren was something of a hero, it feels like a story with something to tell us today. I think it's a wonderful story, and 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, Braggius had been longing for some more vamiers to show up. So I think there's a huge effect

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. And 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 the 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 is 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, and 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 fan migrants, not very convincing forgery of a lost Vermeer masterpiece.

It's called The Art Forger, The Nazi, and the Pope. Porsche retail is written by me, Tim Haafard, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Finds with support from Edith Husslo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytel Moulard, John Schnarrz, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler.

Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Erie. 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 add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Hi, I'm Michael Lewis.

My first book, Liars Poker, told the story of my time in Solomon Brothers, which was then one of the world's most powerful banks. In three years, I went from trainee to successful banker. It felt back then like a modern day goal rush. I thought at the time I was documenting a like an unprecedented event that would never repeat itself. It turned out it was just the beginning of an era that never ended. I've recorded for the first time a full audiobook version of Liars Poker. You can get it now at pushkin.fm.