Peter Brant

Peter Brant occupies two distinct but connected parts of Andy Warhol’s world: the publishing history of Interview and the changing art market for Warhol’s work. First, Andy bought him out to take full control of the magazine; later, Brant’s sales and purchases of paintings became recurring measures of how Warhol’s art was being valued. The diary follows that shift through auctions, a retrospective, expensive new acquisitions, and the paintings displayed throughout Brant’s country house.

Interview and an earlier business connection

In 1975, Andy bought out Peter Brant, described as a newsprint manufacturer and art collector, and became Interview’s full owner and publisher. Fred Hughes assumed the title of president. The change brought Andy more directly into the magazine’s daily operations: he began checking art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging conference-room lunches to pitch Interview to advertisers. The account therefore places Brant at an important point in the magazine’s transition, even though it gives little detail about his work there before the buyout.

Interview soon became more than a publishing concern for Andy. Its growing circulation and glamorous, self-mocking style drew celebrities who wanted to appear in it, while fresh faces came regularly to the office. The magazine supplied a new reason for people to seek Andy out after making commercially exhibitable films had become prohibitively expensive. His frequent promise shifted from offering a part in a movie to offering a place in the magazine. Brant’s former connection to the enterprise thus sits at the beginning of a period when Interview helped sustain Andy’s social and professional reach.

The 1978 sales of Warhol paintings

By May 1978, Brant was associated with a major sale of Warhol paintings. The works scheduled for auction included a large Electric Chair, a large Soup Can, a large Disaster, a large Mao, and a small Soup Can. At a later party, Leo Castelli told Andy that Brant had sold all of his paintings and appeared very happy about having done so. Castelli also reported that the de Menils had bought all the paintings at the auction: François bought a Soup Can for 95, Mrs. de Menil a Disaster for 100, and Philippa a Funeral for 75. The diary records those figures without specifying their units.

The sale mattered to Andy not only as a transaction but as a change in the market surrounding his work. Soon afterward, at a press event for his retrospective at the Kunst Museum in Zurich, Andy signed Soup Cans and portfolios for about two hours. He found it difficult to face his earlier work, which seemed old to him, and noted that Brant had not sent his pictures. The juxtaposition is telling: Warhol’s past work was being presented and circulated publicly, while the paintings associated with Brant’s collection had passed into other hands.

A collector returns to art

Brant’s departure from that group of Warhol paintings did not mark a lasting retreat from collecting. In November 1983, Andy heard that Brant had bought Antiques magazine, apparently for Sandy to run, and considered it a good idea and a good magazine. The acquisition linked Brant once more to publishing, now through a different title and an arrangement involving Sandy.

By May 1985, Brant was again buying contemporary art. Andy heard that he had acquired a James Rosenquist and judged the artist’s work undervalued. He speculated that a major exhibition could follow and raise Rosenquist’s prices, contrasting those works with David Salle paintings that were already selling for as much as Rosenquists. The entry presents collecting as bound up with expectations about exhibitions and future prices, not simply the possession of individual works.

A year earlier, David Whitney had told Andy that Brant had paid $40,000 for a Jasper Johns print. Andy’s astonishment at the price—especially that it was for a print—makes the purchase another marker of the scale of Brant’s collecting. At Brant’s Greenwich estate that summer, Andy saw a new Jasper Johns painting that Brant had reportedly bought for $500,000. Andy thought it did not look like a Johns and compared its appearance to an illustration. The two purchases, a costly print and a much more expensive painting, show how closely the diary watches the sums attached to art while also distinguishing price from Andy’s own judgment of a work.

The Greenwich estate and its social world

Andy’s first visit to the Brants’ large estate in Greenwich came in July 1984. The setting made an immediate impression: rolling hills, white columns, and a house decorated by Jed Johnson. The gathering included many polo players, reflecting Brant’s continuing interest in polo and horses. Andy felt underdressed after Sandy had told him casual clothing would be all right, particularly when he saw Jed there. The occasion’s social ease was therefore edged with his discomfort at having misjudged its dress and company.

Art was not confined to a collection room. Andy noted that the Brants had one of his paintings in every room. He also recognized a couch copied from one in his own house; the Brants had paid $2,000 for their version, while he said they could have obtained the original from the Roosevelt estate for $85,000. The domestic scene placed Warhol’s work among the furnishings and purchases of a wealthy household, where art, design, and social display shared the same rooms. The contrast between the copied couch and the Warhol paintings also shows Andy evaluating objects through both their market value and their relation to originals.

Brant in Andy’s wider circles

Brant appears intermittently among the guests at large social occasions. He and Sandy were included in the crowded list of people at a 1978 party that Andy described as leaving the hosts at rock bottom after guests were angered by problems with the invitations. In 1984, Andy also anticipated a dinner at the Newhouses’ where Brant and Sandy would be present and a Natalie portrait might be bought by Si Newhouse. Andy worried that the Brants might try to sell him one of their own Warhols instead, or might encourage a high price for the Natalie portrait to increase the value of their holdings. These were Andy’s suspicions about what might happen, not confirmed actions by the Brants.

Brant was also among the guests at a Washington gathering aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia. The diary records his presence with Sandy among a familiar social crowd, but offers no specific exchange between him and Andy there. Taken together, these brief appearances establish the setting in which Brant’s collecting and publishing operated: a network where art owners, artists, editors, and wealthy patrons repeatedly encountered one another. His significance in the record rests less on a narrated personal intimacy than on the concrete transactions and institutions that brought him back into view.