Warhol Circus Arrives, With More Odds Than Ends

“The whole thing is a media circus.” Grace Russak, the West Coast director of Sotheby’s, the auction house selling off the hugely hyped Andy Warhol collection, wasn’t just telling it like it is. In Santa Ana Thursday night, she was a kind of subsidiary ringmaster, clicking through a bunch of slides of Warhol’s horde and giving a breezy talk that brimmed with words English teachers once called “emphasizers”: Objects seemed to rank from “very very important,” to “very wonderful” to “exceptional” to merely “collectible.”

From April 23 through May 3, Sotheby’s will auction off 10,000 items that piled up over the years in the late Pope of Pop’s townhouse on the East Side of New York City.

The offerings include paintings by Jasper Johns and Cy Twombley (very very important), 175 cookie jars (mostly collectible) and enough Navajo rugs to restock every Indian trading post from Tucson to Portland, Me. There are Art Deco furniture, 20th-Century jewelry and a Fred Flintstone watch. There are Wiener Werkstatte silver and sharkskin-covered African-style furniture.

Sotheby’s hopes that the goods will bring $15 million or more from bidders who will be competing from around the world.

The county’s glimpse of all this made for an evening of Manhattan emulation: About 20 people slogged through a rainy night to the office space occupied by a facility called the Modern Museum of Art (which has nothing to do with the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan).

The Warhol story, as packaged by Sotheby’s, is a Manhattan art world remake of “Citizen Kane.”

“Truman Capote once said that Andy Warhol was a sphinx without a secret,” Russak told the group. “But there was a secret. Andy Warhol passionately loved to shop.”

Russak said Warhol spent $1 million a year up and down the great commercial avenues of New York, loading the packages into a limousine that followed him at a close distance as he wandered.

He filled his 87-year-old townhouse with so much stuff that he had backed himself into the bedroom at the end. To the image of Sotheby’s appraisers entering the house for the first time, Russak gave the gloss of post-mortem as adventure: “We didn’t know what we’d find. What we did find were rooms that looked like this.”

Click.

The picture showed a room that was, for lack of a more culturally weighted word, a mess. But Russak quickly told her audience that this was not just any mess, but that of an artist.

And not just any artist, but one with an “autograph factor.”

That is what Sotheby’s hopes will make people reach for the cookie jars. In auctioneer lingo, Russak put it this way: “There was a lot of arcade-level property in this collection . . . bits and pieces that in other circumstances we wouldn’t be selling.”

The Warhol auction roadshow, with presentations such as Russak’s and actual exhibitions of the collection, stopped just about everywhere in the world before coming to the county. Pieces have been on view in Cologne, Frankfurt, London and Tokyo to inspire foreign bidding.

Still, there was plenty of interest in the Warhol aura among those who came out Thursday night. Russak noted, in fact, that she had never seen quite so many people at one of her talks who actually looked like Andy Warhol.

There were several young men in the group who came separately, yet all had that Warholian hair, bleached, hacked off at cubist angle. They all wore square window-frame glasses and had faces with that peculiarly planed length and boxy, cultivated blandness of Warhol’s.

Asked his name, one of these men stated, simply: “Andy.”

Pressed, he gave his full name as Andy Takakjian. He said he is an artist who lives in Newport Beach. He had a girl with orange hair with him, named Anne, a jewelry maker who looked like a character in one of Warhol’s movies.

Asked his age, Takakjian would only say: “Somewhere between Eisenhower and Kennedy.”

Was he there that night because Warhol was his hero?

“He’s competition. Or, rather, I should say he was competition. He’s dead now.”

Takakjian was there, he said, because the things Warhol collected offer “a ready reference guide to all kinds of art that is really useful to know about.”

At one point, Takakjian softly disclosed another Warhol echo in his own life: “I have my own junk. I collect typewriters. And telephones.”

“I collect cockroaches,” Anne said. “Actually, they sort of collect themselves. Once in a while, I catch one and spray it.”

Russak, meanwhile, seemed exhilarated by giving another talk about an auction she said is expected to bring a larger crowd than any in its history.

“It is a wonderful promotional tool for the firm,” said Russak, aggressive and honest to the end.

The auction’s proceeds will go to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual and Plastic Arts, whose mission will include support of emerging artists.