Moderna Museet's Warhol Brillo Boxes Are Fake

Six wooden Brillo boxes in the collection of a Swedish museum are fakes that were made in 1990, three years after Warhol died, the New York Times reported (via the Associated Press) on Saturday. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm said it had investigated the six Brillo boxes, donated in 1995 by its former director, Pontus Hultén, after a Swedish newspaper claimed that they were copies. In a letter to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board in New York, the museum director, Lars Nittve, confirmed the claims. “These boxes are not authorized by the artist and should be removed from the official list of Andy Warhol Brillo boxes,” Nittve wrote. The Swedish paper Expressen reported in June that Hultén, who was director of the museum in the 1960s and the Pompidou Center in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, had Swedish carpenters build 105 copies of the box for an exhibition in Russia in 1990. Expressen claimed that Hultén, who died last year, sold a number of the copies with certificates falsely stating that they were made for a Warhol exhibition in Stockholm in 1968.

[via artforum.com]

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