Rock star Alice Cooper recovers Warhol painting after 40 years
THE GUARDIAN Rock star Alice Cooper has found an Andy Warhol masterpiece that could be worth millions “rolled up in a tube” in a storage locker, where it lay forgotten for more than 40 years.
The work in question is a red Little Electric Chair silkscreen, from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. Never stretched on a frame, it sat in storage alongside touring artefacts including an electric chair that Cooper used in the early 70s as part of his ghoulish stage show.
According to Shep Gordon, the singer’s long-time manager, Cooper and Warhol became friends at the famous Max’s Kansas City venue in New York City.
“It was back in 72 and Alice had moved to New York with his girlfriend Cindy Lang,” Gordon told the Guardian. “Andy was kind of a groupie, and so was Alice. They loved famous people. So they started a relationship, and they loved to hang out.”
Warhol went to see a concert in which Cooper feigned electrocution in a chair identical to the one in Warhol’s print. The image is based on a press photograph from 13 January 1953 of the death chamber at Sing Sing prison, where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed that year for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Russians.
The artwork had entered Cooper’s touring equipment collection, and disappeared.