Fake Heroes: Ten False Icons and How they Altered the Course of History by Otto English

Author:Otto English
Format: epub

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In 1967, after five years of churning out Warhols, Malanga got fed up with the Factory and went on holiday to Italy. By the beginning of 1968, he had run out of money and when wiring Warhol failed to elicit any response, his Italian girlfriend suggested that he might like to turn a then hugely popular photograph, of a certain recently deceased Argentinian revolutionary hero, into a silkscreen. The Che series was born, created by Gerard and knocked off in his girlfriend’s flat in Italy. Having given her one as a present, Malanga then began soliciting interest with galleries before the Tartaruga in Rome agreed to sell them, believeing they were “Warhols”.

Now arguably they were as much Warhols as many of the other silk-screens made by Malanga, but as the February exhibition approached, the young poet began to get cold feet and tried to contact Warhol to check that he was OK with his assistant making pictures “by him” that he didn’t even know existed. His wires were met with silence and when the gallery owners began demanding to see proof that would demonstrate that the pictures were genuine, he began, understandably, to get extremely jumpy.

In her book Authenticity, author Alice Sherwood explains what happened next:

“Eventually Andy broke his silence. He agreed to authenticate the pictures on condition that he received the proceeds of sale.

‘CHE GUEVARAS are originals,’ his telegram ran, ‘however Malanga is not authorised to sell. Contact me by letter for adjustments. Andy Warhol.’

When the Malanga ‘Warhols’ became Andy Warhols by a process of retrospective authorisation, it marked a shift from the artist’s hand to the artist’s brand”.⁶

It’s an incredible story and one which neatly demonstrates the conundrum that sits at the heart of Warhol’s body of work. In the early years of his career, the issue of authorship had not been much of a problem and Warhol had even revelled in the superficiality of it all saying: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface … and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

By any measure, Warhol was being deeply exploitative of the people around him, and Malanga most of all. While outwardly celebrating the brittle nature of it all, he was also beginning to make serious amounts of money off the ideas, talent and creativity of other people, while passing it all off as his own work. His “get out of jail” free card was his very USP. But does it really fly? If someone else is having the ideas and doing the work and making the silkscreens 4,000 miles away, can they still be Andy Warhols?

Bendor Grosvenor, art historian, art critic, former art dealer and an actual expert in the area, tells me that the Che pictures demonstrate some of the “madder aspects of the art market”:

“Warhol’s art is mostly to do with branding. The nature of the creative element is as he acknowledged very limited. It’s other people’s photos presented in bright colours. And since his

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