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Alice Cooper finds Andy Warhol original rolled up in a tube

By | Published on Wednesday 26 July 2017

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper has found an Andy Warhol artwork that may be worth more than $10 million rolled up in a tube in a storage facility. The screen print of an electric chair was mistakenly placed in the musician’s touring archive and only recently rediscovered.

According to his long-time manager Shep Gordon, who spoke to BBC Radio 5 Live, Cooper was given the print as a gift in the early 70s by his then girlfriend Cindy Lang. At the time, a section of Cooper’s live show saw him staging an electrocution in an electric chair “very much” like the one in Warhol’s print.

The artwork was never placed on a frame and remained rolled up in a tube. At some point it was placed in a storage locker with the stage sets from that tour. More recently, Gordon mentioned the picture to an art dealer friend, who recommended he try to find it. It took several months, but eventually it was discovered. “We found a tube, like the type you keep posters in, and there it was”, he said. “Oops!”

Of how one might forget that they own a Warhol original, Gordon noted in an interview with The Guardian: “Andy Warhol was not ‘Andy Warhol’ back then. And it was all a swirl of drugs and drinking … It was a rock n roll time, none of us thought about anything”.

The most a print of Warhol’s ‘Little Electric Chair’ artwork has ever sold for is $11.6 million is 2015. It’s unclear what the exact valuation of Cooper’s copy might be, although it would apparently be less as it is unsigned. Still, Gordon hints that it has still been valued at a pretty substantial amount. When Cooper learned the figure, said Gordon, “his jaw dropped and he looked at me. ‘Are you serious? I own that!'”



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