Andy Warhol enters the dustbin of history

The Netherlands has seemed to confirm that political union is not always a time of peace and artistic bounty in quite the way that, say, the artists of the Restoration in England might have you believe. A report out this week confirmed that, during the restoration of Uden town hall last year – part of its incorporation into the neighbouring municipality of Landerd to form the Maashorst municipality – 46 artworks from the public art collection mysteriously disappeared. In preparation for the restoration work, the art collection was distributed variously to local museums, returned to the artists or placed in other municipal buildings, but some pieces were apparently stored in wheelie bins in the basement of the town hall. The municipality has now confirmed that, when it comes to the missing works, ‘It’s most likely that [they] were accidentally taken away with the trash’.

In fairness, the Netherlands has form with this sort of thing. Alexandre Lavet’s All the Good Times We Spent Together (1988), which looks suspiciously like a couple of beer cans, was thrown away by a staff member after being installed in a lift in LAM museum in the Dutch town of Lisse. The work was recovered, however, and subsequently placed in a more traditional place – on a plinth.

What seems to have most caught the attention of the Dutch in this latest case is that, unfortunately, one of the discarded works was a print of Queen Beatrix by Andy Warhol. No stranger to celebrity, Warhol produced a series of prints titled Reigning Queens in 1985. Rakewell need not remind you that the series also included the UK’s own monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. But for the artist, this might not have been such a terrible crime. In fact, Warhol once produced an entire film called Trash (1970) – though that was not really about garbage disposal. ‘Just because people throw it out and don’t have any use for it, doesn’t mean it’s garbage,’ he once said. No doubt the market, and the Dutch, would agree with him.