Richard Ekstract is mentioned in a recent WSJ article which features the book “Warhol After Warhol: Secrets, Lies, & Corruption in the Art World.” Richard got cheated out of millions of dollars because he couldn’t get his Warhol painting authenticated. Read on for the details.

Roger M. Heuberger emailed this recent WSJ article to Marcia Grand and me. I coincidentally bought the ereader version of the book a week ago. Thank you Roger.

By Belinda Lacks

In 2003, Richard Dorment received a call from a man named Joe Simon, a film producer who had bought a print of Andy Warhol’s “Red Self-Portrait” in 1989 for $195,000. Mr. Simon now wanted to sell his print for $2 million, but there was a wrinkle: It had been declared a fake by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Mr. Simon asked Mr. Dorment, an art historian and, at the time, the chief art critic at the Daily Telegraph, to offer some expert insight into why the print had been rejected. Mr. Dorment said he didn’t want to get involved—he’s no Warhol expert, he demurred—but Mr. Simon steamrolled over his objections and eventually pulled him into a high-stakes dispute with a formidable art organization.

At the heart of the debate were Warhol’s working methods. To mass-produce his paintings, Warhol used a commercial printing technique called silk-screening, a quick process for making multiple copies of an image. Prior to Warhol, silk-screening was rarely used for fine art, but it proved to have many advantages over traditional printmaking methods, such as etching, which limits the number of prints that can be made. Early in his career, to create texture, Warhol would add paint flourishes by hand to his silk-screened pictures. By the 1970s, most of his work was produced by third parties, with the artist delivering instructions to his printers over the phone. Outsourcing further allowed him to churn out so many prints that his art dealers feared he’d flood the market. It also made him one of the world’s easiest artists to fake.

Today, discerning which Warhol pictures are genuine is the business of authenticators, whose trained eyes and in-depth knowledge are supposed to be bulwarks against forgeries. Sometimes authenticators make bad calls, prompting other experts to weigh in and correct the error. With reputations and multimillion-dollar fortunes at stake, convincing an authenticator to reverse a decision is rarely easy. Armed with conclusive evidence, however, it shouldn’t be impossible—unless, as Mr. Dorment discovered, you’re going up against a powerful, moneyed and secretive authentication board. “Warhol After Warhol: Secrets, Lies, & Corruption in the Art World” is Mr. Dorment’s riveting memoir of how he tried to prove the authenticity—and importance—of Mr. Simon’s “Red Self-Portrait.”

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Mr. Dorment initially concedes that Mr. Simon’s painting looks like a fake. “Red Self-Portrait” is one of Warhol’s best-known works, but it was originally made as a series of 11 silk screens in 1964, a year before Mr. Simon’s print was produced. The subject matter of both versions is the same—the expressionless face and shoulders of a young Andy Warhol, photographed in an automatic photo booth in Times Square—but there are some critical differences. The first batch was printed on linen (Warhol’s preferred material) with an acrylic-paint background; Mr. Simon’s was printed on cotton duck using a plastic-based ink that gives the picture a shiny surface.

The authentication board recognized the 1964 series as genuine; in 2006 one print from the series sold for $3.7 million. But the board deemed Mr. Simon’s picture to be counterfeit, and stamped the back with a red “Denied”—a stain that, in effect, makes it worthless. Mr. Dorment spends much of his scholarly yet wholly accessible account discrediting that judgment. Drawing from eyewitness statements of those who knew and worked with Warhol, the author argues that not only did the artist authorize the second printing, he also approved of it—so much so that he chose the 1965 version over the original to be the cover image of his first catalogue raisonné, published in 1970.

Warhol’s motivation for producing the later series explains its perceived faults. In 1965 Warhol’s friend, a magazine publisher named Richard Ekstract, arranged for the artist to borrow a prototype of an early consumer videotape recorder. Warhol quickly realized the camera’s filmmaking potential and wanted more time with it, so he cut Ekstract a deal: For an extension on the use of the camera and other electronic equipment, Warhol would produce a new set of “Red Self-Portraits” for the publisher. To save money, Warhol’s business manager hatched the idea of turning over the original acetates to Ekstract so the publisher could foot the costly silk-screening bill. Since Warhol didn’t directly supervise the work, the pictures look very different from their predecessors.

Why, then, would the Warhol board deny the authenticity of the second series? “As far as I could see,” Mr. Dorment writes, “they did this for no other reason than because the date of its creation did not accord with their predetermined belief that Warhol did not start making ‘hands-off’ works until the 1970s.” In any case, the board refused to disclose the rationale behind its decision, so Mr. Simon spent years gathering documentation to disprove it. Having failed to accomplish that, in 2007 he brought a $20 million lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the authentication board’s parent organization. Mr. Simon accused the foundation of artificially driving up the value of its own collection—from which it occasionally sells pieces—by removing legitimate competing artwork from the market. (The board contacted other owners of the later “Red Self-Portrait” series and invited them to submit their pictures for authentication with, according to Mr. Dorment, “the deliberate intention of mutilating them.”) Mr. Dorment wrote articles in the New York Review of Books in support of Mr. Simon’s picture, attracting the wrath of the foundation’s president, Joel Wachs, who, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, accused Mr. Dorment of applying pressure on the board to authenticate a different painting owned by Mr. Simon that was truly a forgery. Mr. Dorment calls the allegation a libel designed to “damage my reputation for integrity both as a critic and as an art historian.” The Guardian eventually printed a correction.

Mr. Simon’s case proved ill-fated. A friend, the Russian oligarch Leonid Rozhetskin, promised to pay his legal bills. But before the trial even began, Rozhetskin disappeared and was later found dead. (Apparently Rozhetskin had fallen afoul of one of Vladimir Putin’s cronies.) That left Mr. Simon at a disadvantage against the deep-pocketed foundation. Mr. Dorment recounts the courtroom antics in painful detail, as the defense counsel buried the real issue of authenticity under what he describes as a mountain of theatrics, obstructions and diversions designed to prolong the trial. The foundation ended up spending $7 million in legal fees, forcing Mr. Simon, who could no longer afford litigation, to drop the case.
Mr. Dorment’s is an entirely one-sided account; we never really get to hear the foundation’s version of any of these events. But then he might say that is his point: In the context of Warhol, the foundation’s version of history shouldn’t be the only official version allowed. For Mr. Dorment, the board’s refusal to recognize the picture is an affront to Warhol’s legacy—the very thing the foundation was established to protect. The picture is not only authentic, Mr. Dorment asserts, but “the hinge that opened the door into Warhol’s hands-off working methods.”

In 2011 the authentication board stopped accepting submissions from the public but, as Mr. Dorment notes, continues to wield influence through its catalogue raisonné, which excludes the 1965 edition of “Red Self-Portrait,” rendering it virtually untouchable. In 2022 Richard Ekstract—who died earlier this year—offered his unsigned “Red Self-Portrait” for auction. Estimated to fetch between $500,000 to $700,000, it failed to sell.

Ms. Lanks is a New York-based editor and writer