Back in the days before computers and email, artists and art dealers met and talked. Like buyers and sellers, we negotiated face to face; except when the artist had reached rock-star status. In the 1980’s there was Andy, and everyone else. Most art dealers have an Andy Warhol story. I myself have a few, but the best one I remember almost didn’t happen.

It began in 1984 when I was a Vice President of Martin Lawrence Limited Editions, the publishing company which then owned and operated some 20 Martin Lawrence Galleries. My cousin Marty Blinder, President and founder of the company, had been courting a relationship with Andy Warhol for a couple of years. It had begun with the purchase of little paintings of Dollar Signs; and then limited edition Warhol serigraphs for our rapidly expanding retail chain, followed by the purchase of a large group of small Warhol paintings; little treasures.

Gradually, over a period of many months, Marty managed to peel back most of the layers of Warhol agents, managers and go-betweens until finally, in June of 1986, he was granted an audience with the icon himself. Ostensibly, the purpose of the audience was to discuss a one-on-one interview, and a proposal to produce a new series of Campbell’s Soup Box paintings. These paintings were to be reminiscent, but an updated version of his famous Campbell Soup Cans.

Campbell’s Soup Cans to Campbell’s Soup Boxes would bring Andy’s art and fame full circle, back to its fantastic beginnings. From there, it would be on to the enormous American boomer generation, through the fastest growing shopping mall Art Gallery chain in the nation. With 100 paintings of 100 different Campbell’s Soup Boxes, Martin Lawrence Galleries was going to make America’s already best known artist a “household name”, in homes all across the U.S.A. Remarkably, Warhol loved the whole idea. So did we.

They met at the Factory where Warhol showed Marty his new paintings. They were silkscreened on canvas, stretched and laid on the floor. About sixty different varieties of Campbell’s Soup Boxes. It was brilliant; a perfectly positioned marketing idea.

Picture the cover of TIME Magazine. It was possible. The Soup Box would fit perfectly in that rectangular format with the red letters framing an inset picture of Andy hugging my bear shaped cousin Marty.

Andy and his disciples took swashes of color and with a quick stroke here and there, in a couple of colors of acrylic paint strategically placed, they made each one into a unique original Warhol painting, each one instantly worth about $ 16,000 when sold in our Galleries. A tidy sum, especially to a Company that had just gone public.

On the back of each canvas Warhol signed his name in black. Warhol did not sign the front of his paintings because he did not want his signature to become part of the image. Martin Lawrence would order over sixty paintings in small, medium and large sizes. Two gigantic 60 x 60” paintings were also created as part of an “Edition of Original Paintings” by Andy Warhol. One a 60 x 60” Tomato Soup Box was for Marty’s personal collection. Eventually he installed it behind the desk in his Los Angeles Office.

During the interview that day, which actually took place on the floor at his studio on 32nd Street in Manhattan, Andy chattered and Marty mostly listened. Marty gave me the recording to transcribe, but not much of the conversation they recorded on tape, for hours, was useable.
I swear most of what was said during a period that stretched agonizingly over several hours, made no sense, had little to do with the questions Marty or his associate Michael Kohn had asked, and often sounded like drug-and-alcohol induced ramblings of Ozzy Osborne.

It consisted of hours of spewed, unintelligible psychobabble; and very little that a serious Warhola-phile could call valuable insight or information. I knew my cousin didn’t do drugs, so listening to the tape a few days later in L.A., the scariest news came when I learned that Andy was also stone-cold sober during the entire interview.