Warhol and the war god

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:15:00 +0000

The return of looted art is a 21st century trend. Works stolen by the Nazis have recently been restored to rightful owners or their heirs, while antiquities of questionable provenance have been sent back to Italy and Greece by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles. Still unknown is whether collector Shelby White will bow to pressure to repatriate ancient artifacts she owns that Italy says were illegally excavated.

In this, as with so many other trends in art, Andy Warhol, even after his death, was way ahead of the times.

Warhol died 20 years ago, on Feb. 22, 1987. A year later, as a collection of art and other objects owned by Warhol was about to be auctioned by Sotheby's, I received a call from one of my sisters, who had a friend working with the Zuni Indian tribe. E. Richard Hart, then director of the Institute of the North American West, had been helping the Zunis contact Sotheby's and the Warhol estate about an item listed in the auction catalog -- a Zuni war god, appraised at $2,500 to $3,500. Because I had been a friend of Warhol's, I placed a call to the estate as well.

Salon.com > Susan Mulcahy

Warhol and the war god