A portrait of Stalin owned by A A Gill with a red nose later added by Damien Hirst
Everything began with a cheeky, two-page article in December's first annual art issue of Vanity Fair. The popular travel-writing memoirist and restaurant critic, A A Gill, was on a mission to test the boundaries of what could and could not be sold at auction. Gill's girlfriend Nicola Formby, having recently moved in with him, told the ex-student of the Slade that his portrait of Stalin "with his benign, twinkly, trust-me-I'm-a-cuddly-paranoid-genocidal-despotic-thug-with-a-moustache-that-could-get-you-a-good-time-in-any-number-of-70s-saunas look" hanging above his desk had to go. Off Gill went to hock it at no less a venerable institution than Christie's, but was stopped dead in his efforts only to be told: "No, sir, we have a policy not to sell Stalin. Or Hitler."
In a stunt that would have undoubtedly charmed the pants off Borat (who possesses an uncanny resemblance to the young Stalin), Gill duped Christie's into prematurely agreeing to sell the portrait of Stalin if Damien Hirst painted a red nose on it. Little did the auction house know just how tiny Hirst's contribution would be. The writer and artist decided to donate any profits made from selling the picture after Hirst's intervention to the charity Comic Relief whose moniker is a red clown's nose. Gill claims the red spot was his idea, although it was Hirst's idea to leave the spot ambiguously off-centre from the deposed dictator's nose.
Neither a Hindu's rosy bindi nor Rudolph's cherry nose, the red spot functioned simultaneously as a 'sold' sticker, a bullet hole and a misappropriated symbol of the communist ideology in their colour of choice. For such a ubiquitous image of Stalin the propagandist, Hirst abstracted a single element, a flat red dot, from his ubiquitous canvases of colourful spots. In the ongoing struggle to be master of the auction universe, Sotheby's seized the chance to sell the doctored portrait after Christie's decided to retract their commitment to sell it in fear of potential bad press.
Everyone gathered for Sotheby's contemporary sale last Thursday was in on the joke including two staff members who happily donned red noses in the name of charity, while hoisting the work onto the auction block. Seated in the back row of the saleroom, I overheard a patient auction representative explain to one member of the press that, no, he couldn't position his camera in a particular location to shoot Gill's reaction in case he might knock over a vase by the cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry which was estimated to double its pre-sale figure of £25,000.
The opening bid for the red-nosed portrait of Stalin, whose pre-auction estimate was £8,000-£12,000, was £7,000, a slightly high place to start given the spot generating all the fuss was just three inches in diameter.
But in a frenzied week that witnessed the largest day sale in European auction in history perhaps this was in fact suspiciously low. Bacon's 1956 'Study for a Portrait II', allegedly being sold by Sophia Loren and expected to fetch upwards of £12 million (the opening bid of £9 million was itself a record for the artist), went for £14,020,000, a pint-sized Andy Warhol portrait of Mao in pastel colours fetched a cool £1 million, and Peter Doig's signature 1990/1991 'white canoe' painting fetched well over £5 million.
When the hammer came down for the red-nosed Stalin at twenty times the opening bid at a whopping final figure of £140,000, A A Gill flashed a toothy, red-faced grin. Earlier he admitted to me that he had purchased the original picture over twenty years ago in a sealed bid auction for no more than £300. After the sale the best-dressed gent in the crowd insisted, giggling profusely, "It's a very legitimate piece from Hirst."
Steve Pulimood
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is currently a PhD candidate at Oxford.
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