You don’t need us to tell you that Andy Warhol is one of the biggest names in art. His art works are some of the most ubiquitous — his famous Marilyns and Maos are splashed across everything from t-shirts to calendars — and this week saw his first major US retrospective since 1989 open at the Whitney, proving that we can’t get enough of the man who famously “wanted to be a machine”. But despite the rampant fandom, not everyone is so enamoured. Since the ‘60s, revolutions, bad dates and authorities have destroyed some of his most iconic pieces. Here’s a few that’ll — sadly — never see the light of day again.
Portrait of Iranian Empress, Diha Pahlavi — Iran, 1978
Warhol was close to the Iranian Empress, Diha Pahlavi — she purchased many of his pieces when she opened a contemporary art museum in Tehran. There are still prints of the Empress circulating through exhibitions and auctions, but the piece that greeted visitors of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was a casualty of the revolution. “A portrait of me, which was painted by Andy Warhol and hung in the museum entrance and was cut into pieces when the revolution started,” Pahlavi told Deutsche Welle in a 2017 interview. She added that the other Warhol pieces were untouched, but most of them have remained locked in the vault since the ’70s.
Self-portrait — Texas, 2017
Andy Warhol, "Self-Portrait", 1964. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York
A bad first date could end in life in prison for a Texas woman, Lindy Lou Layman, who allegedly destroyed two Warhol paintings, totalling somewhere between $300,000 and $1 million, in December 2017. Among the works damaged was a silk-screen self-portrait of the artist. According to local news reports, Tony Buzbee, a Houston lawyer, is accusing the woman of ruining his art in a drunken rage. “He said that she walked into his home, began shouting ‘I’m not leaving’ along with obscenities while damaging three of his paintings and two of his sculptures … stated that she poured red wine on the paintings, ripping them off the wall with her hands,” court officials said.
The trial is still ongoing, but Layman has denied the changes.
Mural of 13 Most Wanted Men — New York, 1964
During the 1964 World’s fair, all eyes were on the New York borough of Queens as it hosted international exhibits. Days before the fair’s opening, Andy Warhol had installed a mural of mug shots entitled, 13 Most Wanted Men. The work consisted of pictures taken from a 1962 police book featuring criminal suspects that law enforcement had failed to catch. New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, saw the artwork featuring the roughed up criminals as a black eye on the city and had the building painted over with silver paint before fairgoers arrived. Luckily Warhol kept the screen with which he made the mural and later transferred the images onto canvas.
“Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again” runs through to 31 March 2019 at Whitney Museum of American Art.