Andy Warhol
Brillo Boxes, 1969

The Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s modern art museum, has determined that six Andy Warhol Brillo boxes in its collection are fakes. They were turned out by carpenters three years after Warhol’s death, at the request of the late Pontus Hulten, the Museum’s famous director in the 1960s, who needed them to promote a show in Russia in 1990. The Museum now claims that Hulten later sold some of the boxes with the false claim that they had been made in 1968 and donated several to the Museum.

The irony in the row is that Warhol himself questioned the idea of “original” art – choosing everyday items as subjects and producing thousands of prints of the same work. Andy Warhol often left assistants to “mass produce” many of his most famous pictures, among them images of the Campbell soup tin.

Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that only artworks the artist was directly involved in producing can be considered a Warhol original, according to reports in the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph in the UK.
Andy Warhol paintings are among the most prized 20th Century artworks. A screenprint of Campbell’s soup tin fetched £10m at an auction, while a Marilyn Monroe picture from 1967 reached £11m at auction in 1998. Was it really real?

Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
– Andy Warhol –