The late pioneering dealer Thomas Ammann, who had sold Warhol’s art during his lifetime, gathered an archive of papers and materials linked to Warhol’s legacy and donated it to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York.
The archive’s beginnings, which contain images and other pieces related to the artist’s career, stretch back to the late 1970s and began when Zurich-based Ammann, who passed away in 1993, started gathering memorabilia about the pop artist. Ammann established himself as a reputable dealer who specialized in selling modern and impressionist art, though he occasionally also offered contemporary art for sale.
The Warhol Foundation, which is now the sole custodian of the Warhol catalog raisonné, will use the current gift given by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation to aid in the compilation of the sixth volume of the project, which will be published in the spring of 2024. It will be devoted to Warhol’s paintings and sculptures from 1978 to 1980.
The current editor of the catalog raisonné, Neil Printz, stated in a statement that “this volume will not only document the very years when Thomas Ammann and Andy Warhol began to work together, but it will also feature Warhol’s striking portraits of Ammann, painted in early 1978, just as he ventured out on his own as an independent art dealer and initiated the catalog raisonné of Warhol’s work.” The Ammann Foundation, set up following Doris’s passing in 2021, has just started selling artwork the siblings hold to raise money for the causes it supports in medical research and education. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), a Warhol picture of Marilyn Monroe from 1964, made news worldwide in May when it broke the artist’s auction record by selling at Christie’s New York for $195 million.