The portrait was created by the pop art icon in the mid-1980s using a Commodore Amiga computer.
ADVERTISEMENTA long-lost Andy Warhol portrait of iconic Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry has resurfaced in rural Delaware, US, along with a signed disk containing 10 digital image files by the pop art star.
Warhol created these artworks using an early Amiga 1000 home computer as part of a promotional event for the now-defunct tech company Commodore at New York’s Lincoln Center, where he served as a brand ambassador.
While Harry has previously mentioned that she believes there are two version of the portrait of her, one of which she owns, the whereabouts of the second portrait had remained unknown.
The recently rediscovered second portrait spent nearly four decades in the home of Jeff Bruette, a digital technician for Commodore who introduced Warhol to the Amiga computer.
Now, Bruette is putting the artwork, as well as the original signed Amiga disk, up for private sale, with a reported opening asking price of $26 million (€23.6m).
In her 2019 memoir, "Face It," Harry recounts how the portrait came to be: “Andy called and asked me to model for a portrait he was going to create live, at Lincoln Center, as a promotion for the Commodore Amiga computer. It was a pretty amazing event.”
She continued, “they had a full orchestra and a large board set up with a bunch of technicians in lab coats. The techs programmed away with all the Warhol colors, as Andy designed and painted my portrait. I hammed it up some for the cameras, turning toward Andy, running my hand through my hair, and asking in a suggestive Marilyn voice, ‘Are you ready to paint me?’ Andy was pretty hilarious in his usual flat-affect way, as he sparred with the Commodore host.”
Harry first crossed paths with Warhol while she was working as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City, a well-known nightclub and gathering place for up-and-coming artists in New York City at the time.
Throughout their careers, the two megastars formed a close friendship and frequently collaborated. One of Warhol's most iconic portraits of Harry was featured on Blondie's 2014 Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux album cover.
In her memoir, Harry remarked, “His curiosity was endless. He was also extremely supportive of new artists. Chris (Stein) and I adored Andy. And to find out that he was a fan of ours was heavenly.”
