Rubens Published a Rate Card

Andy Warhol moved into a loft at 231 East 47th Street in January 1964 and had Billy Name line the whole interior in silver foil and paint, including the elevator. He called it the Factory. He meant it.

He said the corresponding thing out loud to Gene Swenson in ARTnews in November 1963:

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

Gerard Malanga was hired in 1963 at a dollar twenty-five an hour to pull silkscreens, because he had screened fabric for a necktie designer. He stayed seven years. In his own words: "The first was the Elizabeth Taylor portrait. Ethel Scull 36 Times, Elvis Presley, Death and Disasters — we put out a lot of stuff, just the two of us."

Three hundred and forty-five years earlier a painter in Antwerp wrote a letter that says the quiet part of all this with a precision nobody has matched since.

Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Feast of Acheloüs, about 1615. Oil on wood, 108 × 163.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 45.141. Open Access, CC0. The Met's own line: Rubens designed and painted the figures and Brueghel painted everything else.

Five accounts of who actually made it

1. Rubens itemises his own hands, and prices them

On 28 April 1618 Rubens wrote to the English ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton offering paintings in exchange for Carleton's antique marbles, and enclosed a list. For each picture he states how much of it he painted.

Table 1. From the list enclosed with the letter of 28 April 1618, as printed in W. Noël Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, London 1859.

Look at the two extremes. The most expensive item, at 1200, was begun by a pupil. The cheapest, at 300, is entirely autograph. Price tracked size multiplied by degree of retouching, not the number of hands. Anyone who tells you workshop participation simply made a Rubens cheaper has not read the list.

2. What he said when pressed

Carleton pushed back, and Rubens answered on 12 May:

Y. E. must not think that the others are mere copies, but so well retouched by my hand that with difficulty they would be distinguished from originals, notwithstanding which they are put down at a much lower price.

And on why he would rather pay in pictures than cash:

they cost me nothing, as every one is more prodigal of the fruits which they grow in their own garden, than of those that they buy in the market.

3. The buyer launders the attribution in four months

This is the best thing in the whole archive and it is in a footnote.

Carleton took eight of the pictures, including item 6 — the pupil-begun hunt — and item 9, the Susanna a scholar painted. He had insisted he wanted only autograph work.

In his own resale inventory of 1 September 1618, the same two pictures are relisted as:

6. An Arab Hunt on horseback, and Lions. The whole by Rubens.

9. A Susanna. By Rubens.

Four months. The painter's careful labelling survives exactly as long as it takes the picture to change hands.

4. The Factory's authorship problem is not the one people think

There is a persistent claim that Warhol signed things he never touched. I looked for a documented case and could not find one, and the usual exhibit does not support it.

The Stockholm Brillo Boxes are a posthumous matter. The February 1968 Moderna Museet show used cardboard cartons. In 1990, three years after Warhol died, the former director Pontus Hultén commissioned 105 wooden boxes and they were presented as 1968 originals. A Swedish newspaper exposed it in 2007; the Authentication Board reclassified more than a hundred boxes as copies in 2010.

That is a story about a museum director, not about Warhol's hand. Meanwhile Malanga's own account has the two of them pulling screens together.

5. What the guild did and did not record

About twenty pupils or assistants of Rubens have been identified, with varying evidence. The number is uncertain for a specific institutional reason: as court painter, Rubens was not required to register pupils with the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. Only Willem Panneels and Justus van Egmont appear in the guild records as assistants, and Jacob Moerman as a pupil.

Van Dyck is not among them. He trained under Hendrick van Balen and worked in Rubens's studio as a collaborator, which is a different relationship, and the confident sentence "Van Dyck was Rubens's assistant on [named painting]" is almost never documented.

Snyders and Brueghel were independent masters. Rubens names Snyders in the price list by name — "the Eagle done by Snyders" — and the Met puts Brueghel on the label. Peer collaboration and workshop labour are two different things and the letter keeps them apart.

What I take from it

Warhol's move was to make the division of labour the subject. Call it a factory, put the assistants on camera, let everyone see the screens being pulled, and the question of who made it becomes part of the work.

Rubens's move was the opposite and, I think, more radical: disclose the division of labour in writing, in the invoice, and price it. He is the only artist I know of who published a rate card for his own participation.

Neither survived contact with the resale market. Carleton relabelled two pictures in four months. The Warhol Authentication Board closed in 2012 after around ten million dollars in defence costs.

If you work with other people, the letter is the thing to copy. Not the silver walls.