$10 MILLION SHOCK
Rock star finds forgotten Warhol
UNITED STATES: Alice Cooper did a lot of strange things in his early years as a rock star. There was the chicken that died an unnatural death during his 1969 concert in Toronto, and the onstage showers in fountains of fake blood. He also became the owner of a valuable piece of contemporary art and then forgot he had it.
Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Furnier, has just discovered he is the owner of an Andy Warhol silkscreen that could be worth more than US$10 million (NZ$13.4m). Little Electric Chair ,in red, from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, has been discovered in a storage locker along with artefacts from Cooper’s old shows.
‘‘I think no-one was quite as surprised as Alice,’’ his publicist Chris Goodman said yesterday.
Cooper’s sensible acquisition apparently emerged after his manager, the Hollywood agent and producer Shep Gordon, had lunch with a collector who was talking about how much Warhol’s art had been selling for at auction. Gordon thought Cooper had one somewhere.
‘‘Alice had it rolled up in a tube for 30 years,’’ said Richard Polsky, whose company, Richard Polsky Art Authentication, examined the silkscreen.
Polsky said the piece looked genuine and the story added up.
In the early 1970s Cooper had incorporated an electric chair into his stage act. Polsky said Cooper’s girlfriend at the time, Cindy Lang, knew of Warhol’s silkscreens and bought Cooper one for his birthday. At the time, he said, Warhol electric chairs were not selling well.
‘‘No-one wanted to hang one on their wall back then,’’ he said.
‘‘She got the money through Shep [Gordon], $2500, went to the studio and picked it up.’’
Polsky said he understood Cooper had decided to hang on to it, for now. – The Times
"I think no-one was quite as surprised as Alice." Chris Goodman, publicist