Andy Warhol—Stuart Pivar

Andy Warhol—Stuart Pivar was an art-world friendship documented through dinners, collecting, gallery visits, and the public theater of auction bidding. Across these encounters, Warhol regarded Pivar as an informed and imaginative companion, while noticing a revealing contradiction: Pivar professed to prefer privacy but seemed disappointed when publicity passed him by.

A companion in art and social life

On May 16, 1986, after working until eight, Warhol was picked up by Thomas Ammann and went to dinner at Aurora on East 49th Street. Pivar and Barbara Guggenheim were also there. Warhol observed that the restaurant seemed filled with lamps—about sixty, by his estimate—and that Pivar liked the place, although the food arrived cold beneath its covers. The scene establishes the relationship in its ordinary register: a night out among people connected by art and collecting, with Warhol taking in not just the company but the objects and arrangements around them.

At dinner, Warhol tried to make sense of Pivar’s private life. He found it puzzling that Pivar was living alone after leaving his family and continued to worry about finding women, when Barbara appeared devoted to him and was, in Warhol’s assessment, intelligent and attractive. Warhol also described Pivar as absorbed in his own concerns. Barbara, as Warhol understood her account, valued precisely that quality: being with him could feel almost like being with no one, because his attention remained fixed on his interests. Yet this distance did not make Pivar uninteresting to Warhol. He admired the breadth of Pivar’s knowledge of art, music, and history, a form of intellectual curiosity that helped sustain their companionship.

Collecting, authenticity, and a proposed retaliation

A few days later, Warhol and Pivar went to an accessories show at the Javits Center, where Warhol distributed 250 copies of Interview. Warhol had recently bought a set of unusual balls from a woman he had befriended at an antiques flea market. She had presented them as one-of-a-kind objects and told him how she had obtained them. At the show, however, Warhol saw a whole crate of similar balls. The discovery left him feeling betrayed: what he had taken as a personal connection and a rare find now looked like a sales pitch for readily available goods.

Warhol placed the disappointment within a broader distrust of American Primitive collecting. In his view, an object could be painted, buried for a day, and sold as though age and authenticity were built into it. He said this was why he had turned to Art Deco, where labels and books offered more reliable ways to identify things. Pivar responded not by undoing the purchase but by inventing a way to get even. He proposed telling the seller that a horse he had bought from her for twelve dollars had later sold for ten thousand, supposedly as the prototype for the fakes. The diary records this as a proposed story, not as something Pivar actually did. Warhol praised the cleverness of the idea, and the exchange shows how the two could turn a grievance about uncertain provenance into a shared joke about the art of the counter-story.

Publicity and the private-person pose

On July 31, Warhol went with Pivar to the Robert Miller Gallery, formerly the site of the Andrew Crispo Gallery. The gallery offered Warhol extra space if it could show his sewn photographs. There, Warhol also encountered Steve Aronson, who was preparing a story about the gallery for Vanity Fair and had recently completed an article on Pivar for Architectural Digest.

Warhol had watched Pivar insist for weeks that he did not want publicity and preferred to remain a private person. But as Pivar spoke with Aronson, Warhol saw how much he wanted the attention. The distinction mattered to Warhol because it recurred: Pivar could present privacy as a preference while visibly anticipating recognition. The diary does not resolve the contradiction by choosing one version as the truth. Instead, it records Warhol’s close observation of the performance—the stated wish to stay out of view beside the excitement of being written about.

The flute auction and borrowed fame

The relationship’s most dramatic shared scene came at Christie’s on October 18. Pivar called Warhol about a platinum flute coming up for auction and tried to interest him in a gold one. Warhol met Pivar and Sam at the auction. A silver flute sold for $4,400; Warhol then bid on the gold flute, stopping at $22,000 when it continued toward a final price of $40,000. Pivar had decided that he would not exceed $120,000 for the platinum flute, which had been estimated at $40,000. Yet as the bidding climbed, he kept his paddle raised. Warhol could feel him shaking beside him, and Pivar seemed desperate to identify the other bidder. The platinum flute finally went to Pivar for $170,000; with tax and commission, the cost came to about $200,000.

Pivar was left in shock, but the room initially attributed the purchase to Warhol. People approached Warhol with business cards and copies of Flutist magazine, and reporters asked why he had bought the instrument. He offered different explanations, including that it carried a World’s Fair emblem for his collection of plastic utensils and that he intended to melt it down. Pivar was too stunned to correct the reporters, so Warhol led him out. The misattribution briefly made Warhol the public face of Pivar’s purchase, while the person who had paid for the flute remained silent. Warhol also learned that the rival bidder was a wealthy-looking man from New Hampshire; he suggested that Pivar invite him to one of his musical soirées and try to sell him something.

The flute itself came with a history: a man had left it to his mistress, but after his death his family could not accept that he had had one, and they held the instrument back for ten years. On October 20, Warhol noted that the purchase had reached the front page of USA Today under the headline Record Price Paid for Flute, without Pivar’s name. Warhol again remarked on Pivar’s mixed response to publicity: he acted as though he did not want it, yet seemed crushed when he was not identified. The sequence captures the friendship’s characteristic interplay—Warhol as witness and interpreter, Pivar as collector and reluctant-seeming subject, and an expensive object whose public story briefly eclipsed its owner.