Secret Behind the Warehouse Legend: You Art What You Eat

Today’s Art column is a recollection by Francis “Fingers” Leonetti.

I think people are confused about Andy Warhol, whom Truman Capote described as “a sphinx with no secret.” Now comes Sotheby’s, the New York auction house that sent someone to Santa Ana last week to tell us about a secret embedded in “the Warhol Legend.”

It turns out that the Pope of Pop, who started a studio called “The Factory,” made avant-garde films and founded Interview magazine, also was a “passionate shopper.” Sotheby’s is selling off his 175 cookie jars, 57 Navajo blankets, 313 watches and other stuff. None of this surprises me. There was another artist who passed away not long ago and left his secrets behind--and also for sale. The guy was Artie Warehouse, Artie being short for Arthur.

Sotheby’s may not like my going on like this, but before everybody goes completely bug-eyed over the Warhol legend, I thought I’d tell the real story. It starts with Artie’s lucrative career in culture, and that began by total accident, when Artie was a deli man and neighborhood gadfly in Soho before it was Soho. He had Artie’s Delicatessen, and one day an old customer chomping a pastrami on rye yelled at him with a full mouth: “Artie, you’re an artist!”

Artie shrugged with his big shoulders and stammered: “I don’t know. . . . I mean . . . sure. . . . Yeah, I guess.”

At the time, I was a sort of regional distributor, with a route that was a gift from my godfather. Artie was my pal since childhood--and my fence. I stole things, Artie got rid of them.

I had just hauled in a crate of Dr. Brown’s cream soda when I saw the whole scene with the pastrami sandwich.

Some young guy eating at the counter asked Artie, “Are you really an artist?”

Artie doesn’t say he’s not, and the guy snaps out a card and says he owns an art gallery in the Village. He asks for some more examples of Artie’s work, so Artie shows him the menu. The guy chuckles and keeps saying that this is very fresh art, and Artie keeps nodding and assuring him that, yeah, sure, it was all perfectly fresh. By this point, Artie, who wasn’t as thick as he looked under that big white apron of his, made a joke and said: “It’s Eat Art.”

The guy looks very serious and says: “Eat Art? Wow! That’s wonderful!” That was before those other monosyllabic arts, like Op or Pop, which was Andy’s thing. Artie’s joke drove the gallery guy crazy. The guy asks to see how Artie worked. Quickly, Artie starts making sandwiches, which he arranges in a row on the Formica. When he’s done, the guy tells Artie he is giving him a show at this gallery.

The show was a giant happening, as they called them back then. People paid hundreds of dollars for these sandwiches. The sandwiches got put in museums, which had to buy deli coolers to display them.

The Delicatessen was a real scene, with the strangest collection of hungry people you ever saw. It was a great business but not all laughs. One day Artie gets frustrated and exclaims: “Everybody gets famous for 15 minutes and after that you have to keep making sandwiches.”

Art lovers and museums had a problem with Eat Art--you could collect it, but how could you keep it for more than a few hours?

The solution was my idea. We photographed the people eating. Artie, a big one for home movies, also brought his 8-millimeter camera down to “The Delicatessen” and filmed the whole thing because he was worried that years later he would look back and not believe it. He made a film called “My Ham & Swiss” and another one called “Flesh” that was all about corned beef. He started a magazine called Dining. By the end of 1961, Artie was rich. His sandwiches sold for about $50,000. Oil kingpins from Oklahoma would fly in with their wives and get their picture snapped with a Reuben. By this time, Artie was living on the Upper East Side, in a big townhouse. I was still stealing, and Artie said that if I got caught it could blow our cover as artists, so he gave me all the money I needed to buy things. I was the accumulator.

I bought a lot of food. We filled the townhouse with refrigerators and went crazy for hours every day, buying out entire deli departments and freezer sections at grocery stores. One day an old cheese slicer who worked at Shopwell’s yelled at Artie, “You crazy old glutton!” It was clear the old scene was falling apart.

Artie withdrew to the townhouse, except for shopping trips. One day Artie choked on a dry bagel. I brought Zabar’s in to hold the auction. Everything went: Artie’s 217 boxes of Sara Lee Croissants, his 409 cans of Campbell’s soup, his 79 bags of dried lentils.

The sale brought in $10 million. Zabar’s got mega-publicity. I inherited Artie’s millions. But I needed something to do, so I opened a Nouvelle Cuisine deli back down in Soho, which still wasn’t Soho.

One day in December, 1961, I served a hoagie with watercress and sliced squab to a young commercial artist whose hair looked like somebody had cut it in his sleep, whose face was white as chalk. He looked like a sick owl. He said in this whisper: “Mr. Leonetti, you’re an artist.”

I pulled up a seat next to his table, and said, “Let me tell you about a real artist,” and told him about a thick-eared deli artist he’d never meet. People may insist Andy Warhol had his career figured out by then, but I’m telling you it’s not so. He didn’t decide a thing until he bit into a pastrami sandwich made with the recipe of Artie Warehouse and was enthralled.

From the way he listened, I decided to work for him.

“I guess the sandwich has had its 15 minutes,” he said, his attention drifting back to the menu. “What’s the soup today?”

The rest is history.