Andy Warhol: The extraordinary story of the $100m art fraud committed by the artist’s foundation

This excerpt documents the bombshell moment when, through his lawyer Brian Kerr, Joe Simon uncovered the scale and scope of criminal wrongdoing by the Andy Warhol Foundation and Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. He has found documentary evidence that, in flagrant abuse of the values it professed to hold, the Foundation had confiscated paintings from the offsite factory where many of Warhol’s works were made, on the grounds that they were fake, then sent them to their own authentication board to stage a sham “investigation”, guaranteed to declare them to be, after all, genuine Warhols, many of which were sold for millions of dollars. Fremont seized the pictures on behalf of the Foundation because they were ‘not the work of Andy Warhol’, and, as his letter went on to say:. Under oath, Fremont’s response was, “I don’t know, factually.” open image in gallery Richard Dorment, author of ‘Warhol after Warhol’ Yet, back in 2003, Neil Printz had told Fremont that the estate “deemed” these paintings to be “inauthentic”, to have been “created under false pretenses” and to have signatures that were “not good”. The nine remaining paintings were given ‘C’ status, so that the Board could, whenever it chose, wave the magic wand that only it possessed to transform the former fakes into authentic works by Andy Warhol.