Warhol’s biggest fan

Jose Mugrabi can’t get enough of Andy Warhol, says Kelly Crow in The Wall Street Journal. The 68-year-old former textiles merchant from Bogotá, Colombia, currently owns more of the late artist’s original paintings and sculptures than anyone in the world—three times more than any other private collector, in fact. He’s got so many that he frequently loses count. “Esty!” he’ll shout to his assistant. “Warhols, how many do I have?” Upon hearing the reply—800—he muses quietly, “So many.” Mugrabi bought his first Warhols—a quartet of paintings based on da Vinci’s The Last Supper—for $37,000 apiece four months after the artist died, in 1987. But he didn’t break into big-time collecting until the next year, when he paid a then-record $3.96 million for Warhol’s 1962 orange Marilyn Monroe (Twenty Times). He didn’t want to pay that much, but his 18-year-old son, Alberto, was sitting next to him at the auction and kept yanking his arm up. Mugrabi awoke that night with pains in his stomach, asking his wife, “What the hell have I done?” But since then, he’s grown to love Warhol. “Every empire has its influences, and I realized Andy was the authentic American. Five hundred years from now, people will see his art and recognize American culture in an instant. He was the only artist who absorbed it all.”

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