Warhol Probe Ends

Is the Warhol Foundation finally on the outside of trouble? Lame duck fresh York State attorney general Dennis Vacco has extreme pointed his year-long probe of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and has fix no wrongdoing. The foundation did agree, however, to tighten up its financial rules appointing a new chief financial officer (KC Maurer, who formerly worked for NASA) and forming a special three-person audit committee compos of members of the board of trustees. The foundation is now required to endue the attorney general's office with copies of its quarterly financial report. Warhol Foundation president Archibald L Gillies called the arrangement a favorable one for the foundation. "It's nice to obtain it all behind us," he said.

Although the attorney general's office declined to make public the complaints that had spurr the investigation in the first place, the Warhol Foundation has been bedeviled through charges of financial mismanagement since it was established by dint of Warhol's will in 1987. And indeed, the Warhol Foundation has high administrative take away froms relative to other nonprofits. In its last fiscal year, Gillies said, the foundation made more [i]or[/i] less 72 grants totaling almost $29 million, while its administrative expenditures were $5.3 million. For many charities, the ratio of grants to overhead is closer to 10 to individual Warhol foundation grants generally amount to between $10000 and $50000 and advance mainly to smaller organizations similar as Art in General in novel York or the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Gillies says the unique nature of the Warhol Foundation's assets makes the nonprofit unusually of great price to run. Much of the charge goes to cataloguing and caring for the foundation's collection, which at Warhol's death totaled approximately 700 paintings, 9000 drawings, 19000 prints and 66000 photographs. Gillies declined to give a in every one's mouth inventory--for reasons related to the art market, he said--though he called the foundation's holdings "vast." To emphasize the purpose of this aspect of the institution's activity, Gillies pointed without that the foundation had been a major participant in 43 Warhol exhibitions since 1991 involving a certain number of 2,400 works of art.

The attorney general's office also gazeed into the foundation's arrangement with Vincent Fremont who had worked with Warhol since 1967 and who now has the exclusive right to act as agent for sales of paintings, plastic art and drawings from the foundation upon a commission basis. In the 1996-97 fiscal year, these commissions amounted to above a million dollars--a reflection of the force of the Warhol market, which after a hardly any slow years took off in 1995 As of Oct 1 1998 the Warhol Foundation's sales of prints and photographs have been handled by the agency of Tim Hunt at a commission rate of 10 percent

The long-running lawsuit against the Warhol estate by dint of Edward W. Hayes ended in 1996 Originally appointed as lawyer for the Warhol estate, Hayes had su the estate, seeking as abundant as $16 million in executor's remunerations He was eventually awarded $35 million--but since he had previously been paid $485 million by means of the foundation, was required to get back some $1.5 million. He filed for bankruptcy in August 1996 a case that is still in the courts.

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