A previously lost Andy Warhol portrait of Blondie singer Debbie Harry from 1985 has surfaced in rural Delaware. The artwork, along with a signed disk containing 10 digital image files, is set for sale. However, details of the sale have yet to be announced, Page Six reported.
The recently rediscovered portrait has spent nearly four decades in the home of Jeff Bruette, a digital technician for Commodore who introduced Warhol to the Amiga computer. The Pop artist was briefly a brand ambassador for the now-defunct tech company. Created during a promotion for the Commodore Amiga computer at New York’s Lincoln Center, the portrait is a close-up shot of Harry digitally manipulated and colored by Warhol. The piece was part of a live demonstration, during which Warhol created several images on the Amiga.
According to Harry’s memoir, only two copies of the computer-generated portrait exist, and she owns one of them. Accompanying the portrait, eight images on an Amiga disk were crafted by Warhol during the promotion, and the final image was created during the production of the MTV show “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.”
Other than the portrait of Harry, Warhol created several other digital images, including some of a Campbell’s soup can and a rendition of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485–86), according to the Andy Warhol Museum. Though he planned to distribute the images at the time, his plans never materialized.
Though the sale price remains to be seen, these pioneering digital works could be worth millions. For instance, in 2021, a series of five NFTs featuring restored Warhol Amiga images fetched $3.38 million at a Christie’s auction.
