Jack Nicklaus Warhol Painting Is Top Draw At Christie’s Auction

Golf legend Jack Nicklaus is accustomed to topping leaderboards, but it’s not too often that the Golden Bear’s likeness gets top billing at a fine art sale put on by a major auction house. Lot No. 9, a 40 by 40 inch Nicklaus Warhol, estimated to fetch between $300,000 – $500,000, is the marquee work up for grabs at Christie’s First Open | Online auction which closes on Friday May 15th.

Nicklaus had already won 14 majors when he posed for Andy Warhol in 1977. This was the year he became the first tour player to reach the $3 million mark in career earnings after winning the Memorial, the tournament he founded. Many of the biggest sports stars of the day were included in Warhol’s Athlete series: there’s Muhammad Ali, Tom Seaver, Pelé, Chris Evert, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the now infamous O.J. Simpson.  All the participating athletes were paid $15,000, a handsome sum at the time, to sit for the famous artist. Typically, people would pay through the roof to have their portrait done by Andy Warhol so this was an inversion of the usual practice. Warhol would shoot each athlete with his Polaroid Big Shot camera and the resulting photographs were later transferred to silkscreens to make paintings. The project was spearheaded by a young financier named Richard Weisman who was a buddy of Warhol’s and collaborated with the artist’s business manager Fred Hughes to get the project off the ground.

The photo session took place in a motel that Jack owned in Columbus, Ohio. According to Andy’s diary and Weisman’s own account there was some memorable banter between the pair that led to the curious smirk on Nicklaus’s face we see in the front facing portrait. Warhol wasn’t at all a sports fan and when he implored Nicklaus to move his “stick” a little to the left Jack apparently was taken aback: “The what? Excuse me, this is not a stick, this is a club.” He then turned to Weisman and asked, “does this guy know what he’s doing?” More Polaroids were taken—69 in total, an apropos tally for a shoot with a pro golfer—and near the end, the awkwardness between artist and athlete subsided. While Nicklaus apparently wasn’t pleased with the initial shots, he eventually settled down and quipped, “well, you know what you want — you don’t tell me how to tee off,” and then by serendipity came a shot the golfer dug.

The entire Athletes series was part of Warhol’s conceptual business art practice explains art critic Blake Gopnick, author of a new Warhol biography. “Warhol declared as a kind of crazy performative practice, that doing business would be his new artform and he meant that largely tongue and cheek.  Only a few of his projects ever made money.”

“Even though the athlete series was a business proposition, one of the funny things about it is they sold terribly in their own day,” explains Gopnik.

“The overlap between rich people interested in athletes and rich people interested in art is very, very slight. The kind of people who want to have great works by Andy Warhol aren’t necessarily the kind of people who want have an image of a famous athlete on their wall.”

But the lucky few in that intersection of a Venn diagram where sports and art fandom overlap who purchased them, made a very sound investment. Ten years after they were released, a 40 by 40 inch Nicklaus Warhol went for $11,000 including the buyer’s auction premium at a November 4, 1987 auction. Fast forward to Christie’s London Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening sale this past February and a Warhol Nicklaus, this one also 40 by 40 inches in scale, went gavel down for £323,250 or $400,000 U.S. dollars.

As much as they’ve appreciated over the years, some connoisseurs may still avoid this series altogether as they are derivative of Warhol’s earlier, more important work.

“In these paintings he’s revisiting a style he came up with 15 years earlier. They don’t represent anything innovative, they’re a rehashing of his pop style which he left behind,” explains Gopnik.

“They are more important as sports memorabilia than as works by Andy Warhol. A major Warhol does not go for $300,000-$500,000, it goes for $30 million to $50 million so that gives you some idea that these aren’t taken terribly seriously.”

While the Nicklaus piece may not titillate high end art collectors, the paintings from Warhol’s Athletes series certainly would hold an exalted status in the collection of a discerning sports art enthusiast looking to add some serious pop to the walls of their man cave or she shed.

The provenance on this particular Nicklaus Warhol up for auction Friday is also as impeccable as it can get. According to Warhol’s catalog raisonné, the artist painted 57 ten-inch portraits of Nicklaus within a month of the debut exhibition of his Athletes series at Coe Kerr Gallery in New York.  32 of those were assembled into multi-panel grids of sixteen and the pair of resulting canvases were acquired by the Athlete series progenitor Richard Weisman. This auction is for one of these works from the late Weisman’s personal collection.

Thin Market Perception

Whether the eventual buyer will be an art collector on the lookout for a sub-seven-figure Warhol painting or an avid golf fan looking for that prized piece is anybody’s guess.

“This is as thin a market as there is for any Warhol painting,” says Don Thompson, an economist and Emeritus Nabisco Brands Professor of Marketing and Strategy at the Schulich School of Business and the author of The Supermodel and the Brillo Box.

“Warhol’s portraits of women sell for five times what the men do. There are very few male portraits that sell for high prices,” he says, adding also that a “real collector” wants the entire set, though Thompson does allow that the Muhammad Ali  portrait (which recently garnered a £4.2 million hammer price) is an exception.

But according to Noah Davis, the Christie’s specialist who is the head of the First Open Sale, while Ali is the series reigning champ, the golf great is right up there.

“Ali is definitively at the top and then O.J. because he is so notorious is really close too, but then Jack Nicklaus is probably the most sought after, right below that.”

While a well-heeled golf fan or country club would seem like a more motivated bidder for this particular auction, rather than a pure Warhol collector who collects the artist in depth, Davis thinks it really could go either way. 

“It’s probably going to be a Warhol fan just by the nature of our business. That’s the audience that we are really familiar with and those are the people that we are contacting.  When we go out to sell this, we don’t have that kind of institutional knowledge, that Rolodex of people who are fanatical about collecting Jack Nicklaus memorabilia,” he says.

“But that doesn’t mean that is who is going to buy this painting,” continues Davis. “It very well could end up being four or five rabid golf fans who we’ve never worked with before. You can’t predict that kind of thing.”