A long-lost Andy Warhol portrait of Blondie singer Debbie Harry from 1985 that has been hanging in rural Delaware, is going up for sale, we hear, for potential millions.
The Harry portrait — and a signed disk of 10 Warhol images — was created on an early home computer when Warhol was an ambassador for a now-defunct tech outfit.
Nearly 40 years ago, the famous artist signed on as a brand ambassador to early tech company Commodore and created a portrait of the “Heart of Glass” singer on an Amiga 1000 home computer as part of a promo at Lincoln Center.
According to the Warhol Museum, the artist later made digital creations on the computer of a Campbell’s soup can, flowers and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Warhol planned to distribute the images as artworks, he told Amiga World [magazine] at the time, but never did, the museum says.
However, Harry has mentioned that at least two printed copies her Warhol portrait exist.
She recalled in her 2019 memoir, “Face it,” “Andy called and asked me to model for a portrait he was going to create live, at Lincoln Center, as a promotion for the Commodore Amiga computer. It was a pretty amazing event.”
She wrote, “They had a full orchestra and a large board set up with a bunch of technicians in lab coats. The techs programmed away with all the Warhol colors, as Andy designed and painted my portrait. I hammed it up some for the cameras, turning toward Andy, running my hand through my hair, and asking in a suggestive Marilyn voice, ‘Are you ready to paint me?’ Andy was pretty hilarious in his usual flat-affect way, as he sparred with the Commodore host.”
According to Harry, “I think there are only two copies of this computer-generated Warhol in existence and I have one of them.”
Turns out the other image has been hanging in the home of a former Commodore technician for nearly 40 years.
A source explained to Page Six of the other Harry portrait, “The second — which has just surfaced after being out of the public eye for nearly four decades — was gifted by Warhol to Commodore’s digital technician Jeff Bruette, who had taught the artist how to use the then cutting-edge computer to create the portrait.”
Bruette now plans to sell off the Harry work, as well as the original Amiga disk — holding 10 digital image files — that’s signed by the artist.
Eight of the Warhol-created images were made during the artist’s Amiga World interview, we’re told, plus an experimental image that was made during the production of the MTV show, “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.”
Sources tell us that there have been offers by leading galleries and auction houses — including Carlton Fine Arts and Guernsey’s — to host an exhibition and sell the collection.
But Bruette’s putting up the lot as a private sale, we hear.
The price is undisclosed, but a series of five NFTs of the Amiga images that were restored from obsolete floppy disks in 2014 were sold off by Christie’s for $3.38 million.
Bruette explained in a statement of his work with Warhol: “It’s been almost 40 years since I worked with Warhol — it was a life-changing assignment. For just as long, any time someone has seen the portrait of Debbie hanging on my wall, or learned that I was ‘that guy who worked with Andy,’ especially after the recent explosion of NFTs and digital art, anyone who’s heard the story has been completely riveted.”
“From rural Delaware, where I live, to Hollywood… Even people who knew Andy made the portrait have only ever seen a photograph of it in a magazine or online,” said the techie. “I thought it was time the world got to interact with this extraordinary artwork the way it was meant to be experienced.”
He said of the decision to sell after all these years: “And 40 years ago, I was 40 years younger! Parting with this collection now gives me the chance to help find it the right home. And, to be honest, could make retirement just a little bit more comfortable.”
We’ve also reached out to the Andy Warhol Foundation to comment on the discovery.
Our source hypothesized that there’s actually a third Harry print out there, but that, “the third work of Harry is still at large or has been destroyed.”
Commodore eventually shut down in 1994.
