Stuart Pivar

Stuart Pivar appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as a collector with wide-ranging knowledge and strong enthusiasms, whose eye for objects could lead from skepticism about antiques to a six-figure auction purchase. The episodes portray him through Warhol’s amused, sometimes disapproving observations: intellectually engaging, eccentric in his habits, and capable of becoming physically agitated when an object captured his interest.

Character and Social Circle

At dinner with Warhol and Barbara Guggenheim, Pivar is described as knowing a great deal about art, music, and history. Warhol’s account sets this admiration beside his puzzlement about Pivar’s personal life. He wonders why Pivar, despite Barbara’s love and intelligence, appears to seek other women, and why he left his family to live alone. These are Warhol’s questions and impressions, not an independent account of Pivar’s motives.

Barbara’s explanation, as Warhol relates it, gives their relationship a particular shape: she liked Pivar because his absorption in his own pursuits made it feel almost as though she were not with anyone. The diary does not resolve the tension between her devotion and Warhol’s perception of Pivar’s distance. Instead, it preserves the contrast between Pivar’s impressive conversation and the self-contained quality that Warhol and Barbara associate with him.

Pivar also figures in Warhol’s changing friendships. When Peter Wise called, Warhol suspected he wanted a job with Pivar. The call revived an older grievance: Warhol had been close friends with Wise for six years, but felt hurt when Wise trusted Kent Klineman’s account over his. Warhol says Wise later checked with Fred and found that Warhol had been right, but that confirmation did not erase his anger at having been doubted. Pivar is not shown causing the dispute; his possible employment of Wise is the circumstance that brings the lingering breach back into view.

Collecting and the Problem of Authenticity

At an accessories show at the Javits Center, Warhol was distressed to find a crate of balls resembling ones he had recently bought from an antiques-flea-market acquaintance, who had presented them as one-of-a-kind. Pivar proposed a pointed way for Warhol to retaliate: tell the seller that a horse bought from her for $12 had later sold for $10,000 as the prototype for the fakes. The diary presents this as Pivar’s suggested story, not as a sale that actually occurred.

The episode connects Pivar’s practical wit to Warhol’s broader mistrust of antique claims. Warhol explains that he stopped buying American Primitive because objects could be painted, buried for a day, and sold as old. He turned instead to Art Deco, whose labels and published documentation seemed to offer firmer grounds for identification. Pivar’s proposed comeback turns that uncertainty into a joke: if provenance can be fabricated, the supposed expert can be answered with an even more audacious tale.

Pivar’s own collecting tastes recur in quieter scenes. He loved old clothes, liked to smell them, and habitually bought old hats that he then lost. On a Sunday visit to a flea market, he drove Warhol from church in a large black limousine and went looking for books. Warhol describes a bookseller who had acquired someone’s library and brought one of forty boxes to the market each week, drawing a line of customers by nine in the morning. Among Warhol’s purchases was a 1962 Museum of Modern Art catalog for a de Menils exhibition, from before he knew them. Pivar’s presence links these small pursuits to a shared world of searching, buying, and assigning value to objects.

The Platinum Flute Auction

In October 1986, Pivar called Warhol about a platinum flute coming up for auction at Christie’s and tried to interest him in a gold one. Warhol joined Pivar and Sam at the sale. The silver flute went for $4,400; Warhol bid on the gold instrument but stopped at $22,000, and it sold for $40,000. Pivar had decided not to exceed $120,000 for the platinum flute, estimated at $40,000, but as the bids climbed he kept his paddle raised. Warhol recalls feeling Pivar shake beside him as the price rose. The winning bid was $170,000, or about $200,000 after tax and commission.

The purchase briefly left Pivar unable to speak. The people in the room assumed Warhol had bought the flute and rushed to give him their cards and copies of Flutist magazine. Asked by reporters why he wanted it, Warhol offered different comic explanations: that its World’s Fair emblem suited his collection of plastic knives and forks, or that he meant to melt it down. Pivar, still shaken, could not correct the mistaken attribution, so Warhol led him out. The performance of public interest thus fell to Warhol while the buyer stood beside him, overwhelmed by the price he had just authorized.

The flute came with a story of disputed inheritance: a man had left it to his mistress, but after his death his family could not believe he had had a mistress, and the instrument was held up for ten years. Warhol identified it as American. That history made the flute more than a costly instrument in the diary: its auction value arrived attached to an account of family disbelief and delayed possession, while its sudden sale transformed Pivar’s private desire into a public spectacle.

Regret and Continuing Habits

By the end of November, the excitement had given way to practical anxiety. Pivar still had not paid for the flute, and Christie’s was calling him every day. He hid when he and Warhol went there, and regretted buying it because he could not tell what he would receive if he tried to resell it. The diary leaves the purchase unresolved at that point: the record moves from the triumphant hammer price to an unpaid bill, daily calls, and doubt about the object’s future market.

Pivar continued to accompany Warhol to sales. At Sotheby’s, they attended a crowded Americana auction where Jamie Wyeth was present. On another visit to a flea market, Pivar’s familiar appetite for old objects was expressed not through a spectacular bid but through browsing books and collecting hats. Together, these entries show a recurring contrast: Pivar could pursue an object with extraordinary intensity, as with the platinum flute, yet his collecting life also consisted of modest, repeated searches among books, clothes, and antiques. The diary offers no final judgment on him; it records the fascination, comedy, uncertainty, and cost that gathered around his pursuits.