6. Andy Warhol’s Pop Empire Art Fraud
Upon Warhol’s death in addition to the brief will, the artist left behind 4,118 paintings, 5,103 drawings, 19,086 prints, 66,512 photographs, a large portfolio of real estate. The will appointed Fred Hughes, Warhol’s manager, as executor of his estate and Foundation chairman. Fred Hughes was given full reign and began in earnest with a spectacular ten-day sale at Sotheby’s in April 1988, which consisted of over 10,000 pieces of clutter.These pieces raised $25,313,238. After a successful wrongful-death lawsuit with the hospital where Warhol had died, the real business of setting up the Foundation began. The Foundation was valuing drawings at $800 apiece at the very same time they were being priced at an average of $25,372 for an insurance claim. Photographs, which were being sold for up to $20,000, were described to the court as drafts with no real value as Warhol was ‘not a photographer’. These were valued for estate purposes at five cents apiece. By 1995, the Foundation’s tax returns showed a valuation of artwork in their collection at an astonishingly low figure of $110,792,252. This alleged creative accounting not the only behaviour to raise eyebrows. It is believed that the Foundation and its authentication board could possibly have authenticated and sold paintings that had been seized as fakes with bad signatures. These works were deemed to be fake by the artist’s estate and initially at least, by the Foundation’s own authentication board. Read the whole story here