“Ican show you my latest acquisition, which I’m very proud of,” says Paul Maréchal, the world’s foremost collector of what snobs might refer to as Warhol ephemera – copies of illustrations, brochures, posters and album covers commissioned by companies and clients. Maréchal is adamant that they are “works of art”. He whips out his phone and shows me a photo of a poster for Mademoiselle, a defunct Condé Nast publication (“The Magazine for Smart Young Women”). It’s a red, white and blue map of the US, hand-drawn, with potatoes in Idaho, film reel and grapes in California and a Statue of Liberty in New York.
Maréchal’s eyes bulge with enthusiasm as he describes how he found it for sale at a little auction house in Connecticut. “I’ve known only three examples of this poster. Two of them are in a private collection in Texas,” he explains. It was a snip at $4,000 (£3,000), and will shoot up in value once he adds it to the catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s commercial work that he has spent the past two decades compiling.
A dapper French Canadian in his early 50s, Maréchal, whose day job is curating art for a corporation in his native Montreal, owns more than 700 such pieces. They include Christmas cards for Tiffany, copies of Interview magazine – which filed for bankruptcy this month after a nearly 50-year run – and a medical booklet on rheumatoid arthritis featuring an ink drawing of a gnarled hand. At the Picasso Museum in Málaga, where we meet, a large Warhol retrospective features more than 150 items from his collection, the largest group ever to go on public display.
Maréchal started collecting in 1996. At the time, he says, Warhol’s reputation was in a kind of limbo. “Art historians and collectors didn’t know much what to do with his work – was he just a society portrait painter, an artist who created two or three famous artworks, but the rest was uninteresting? So in the early years, I could buy anything, I had no competition.” That soon changed, however, after Maréchal began to publish records of what he had acquired, building a market in his wake.
His first find was a copy of The Painter, an album by Paul Anka. “It’s not the rarest, but it struck me.” He found himself thinking of Warhol’s notorious sleeve for Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, with its bulging crotch and real-life workable zipper, and the peelable banana on the Velvet Underground’s debut. “It just sparked a question in my mind: how many record covers did Warhol create?” He called the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “They came up with a list of 23.” But because Warhol didn’t keep track of commissions, they couldn’t say for sure. By 2015, Maréchal had discovered a further 42. It was a labour of love, and involved flipping through tens of thousands of LPs in record shops (“It’s easier now there’s the internet”).
The Málaga exhibition – subtitled Mechanical Art, an allusion to Warhol’s obsession with repetition and reproduction – presents silk-screen icons alongside the lesser-known commercial material. The Jackies are here, next to a Liz Taylor, some Maos and some Marilyns (10 of the latter, loaned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, haven’t been seen in public since 1968).
In the flesh, these are powerful, disturbing images, for all their familiarity. You are momentarily dazzled by the glamour before you remember that Jackie (Kennedy) was bereaved, Taylor had pneumonia and Marilyn Monroe was painted after her overdose. Marilyn (Reversal) in funereal black, a print made from a photographic negative, recalls the Turin shroud. In an adjacent section, the lurid Electric Chair and Car Crash paintings remove any doubt; Warhol was as interested in the American way of death as he was fascinated by the minutiae of life, the soup cans and the Brillo pad boxes.
