Until recently, a movie editing company in Los Angeles proudly displayed what they thought were nine original Andy Warhol silk-screen prints. Now, as it turns out, the originals had been stolen and replaced with fakes. How does that happen? We were wondering the same thing.
The pieces totaled $350,000 in value, according to the Los Angeles Times. Six pieces were from the same collection, titled Ten Jews of the Twentieth Century. Created in 1980, they total a value of $150,000 and feature images of Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, George Gershwin, Sarah Bernhardt, Gertude Stein and Sigmund Freud. But even more valuable were the three pieces from Warhol's 1983 Endangered Species collection, which are worth about $200,000 combined. The works are titled Siberian Tiger, Bighorn Ram and Bald Eagle.
It took the owners a while to realize that the originals were no longer hanging on their walls—and actually they didn't even catch it on their own. One of the owners noticed two prints were sagging and so he took them into a high-end frame shop to have them inspected. The expert noticed that not only were some of the lines blurred, the replacements were missing signatures and edition numbers.
The Times states that considering the condition of the fakes, the original prints were most likely stolen in the last three years. But there is also suspicion that one of the stolen prints, Bald Eagle, was sold at an auction back in 2011. The name of the movie editing company that owned the prints has been redacted from the affidavit.