The Rock legend Alice Cooper will sell a Warhol silkscreen that he had “completely forgotten” he even owned.
The red Little Electric Chair (1964) silkscreen will be auctioned at Larsen Gallery in Scottdale, Arizona, and is estimated to sell for $2.5m to $4.5m.
Cooper rediscovered the silkscreen—which had been given to him by his girlfriend, Cindy Lang, “during some crazy years”—a few years ago, rolled up in a tube in his garage. “One day I was talking to [the actor] Dennis Hopper when he was still alive and he said he was selling a couple of his Warhols and I remembered mine and said ‘I think I have still a Warhol somewhere. So I went digging around looking for it.”
As you do.
The silkscreen, from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, had never been stretched onto canvas before.
Cooper and Wahol met in the 1970s at Max’s Kansas City venue in New York City and became friends, with many a misspent night at Studio 54.
“I met Andy Warhol when I lived in New York City, and it was just when Alice Cooper was becoming the scourge of Rock N Roll and of course that attracted the whole Warhol Crowd,” Cooper says. “You’d go to clubs like Max’s Kansas City and they were all there and we’d hang out. It was a very surreal time, Andy was always taking photographs of everyone or making movies of everyone. He had a whole crowd of people around him all the time, and my girlfriend Cindy Lang was really connected into that group more than I ever was.”
The silkscreen could become the highest value work of art ever to sell in the state of Arizona, says Scott Larsen, the co-owner of Larsen Galley, which will be donating a portion of its commission to Cooper’s non-profit the Solid Rock Foundation.
