Andy Warhol, Dom Pérignon, and the club that wanted to buy 2,000 bottles for New Year's Eve 2000

Tuesday, August 23, 1977. “Dinner to interview Diahnne Abbott was at Quo Vadis. Picked up Catherine. Bob started asking Diahnne (laughter), in different ways, how it felt to be colored. ’Are you really black? How do you feel about your skin? Do you like to dance?” Then he focused on what it felt like to be black and to sleep with Bobby De Niro. Then I think she must have given Bob some coke: he went to the bathroom and came back like a zombie. [...] Then Diahnne invited us to her apartment. It was a very peculiar situation, it was as if it all meant that she was really accepting us, or something like that. She had clothes everywhere, she was buying clothes upon clothes. She was looking for a new apartment, and I suggested Park Avenue, but she responded by saying that she had an image to defend. She served Dom Pérignon, showed us pictures of the children. Then she made the limousine leave, in bad taste, and we had to take a cab home. When we passed by Studio 54, Bob started yelling ’Let me out, let me out’ ($5 cab fare)." Reporting the anecdote is Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, 1928 - New York, 1987), who notes it in his Diaries, the great American artist’s most intimate writings. The October issue of Interview magazine would feature an image of Diahnne Abbott, an actress particularly in vogue in the mid-1970s, on its cover. From 1976 to 1988 she was married to Robert De Niro.

The August 23, 1977 piece is one of two within the Diaries in which Andy Warhol mentions the famous Dom Pérignon champagne. The second time is on March 8, 1981, the father of Pop Art is in Munich: "I went to the gallery where there was an exhibition of the shiny Shoes, and I had to do an interview and some photos for a German newspaper, then we had to go back to the hotel to be picked up by the people from ’2.000’-it’s a club of twenty guys who got together to buy 2,000 bottles of Dom Pérignon that they’re going to put in a sealed room until the year 2000, and then they’re going to open them and drink them, and so they keep making jokes about who’s going to be there and who’s not going to be there... ". It is well known that Andy Warhol had a passion for Dom Pérignon, one of the drinks that was all the rage at New York’s Studio 54, the legendary nightclub (now a theater) frequented by the international jet set, and known for being one of the first nightclubs to introduce selection at the door based on the appearance of customers. “The key to Studio 54’s success,” Andy Warhol once said, “is that it’s a dictatorship at the entrance and a democracy on the dance floor”: in fact, it seems that the club’s bouncers also selected on what we would now call an “inclusive” basis, making sure that there were well-calibrated percentages of gays, lesbians, and trans people.

Liters of Dom Pérignon flowed in this and other places frequented by Andy Warhol. A historic champagne brand, it is now owned by Moët & Chandon and is produced in �pernay, a small town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants located in the Champagne-Ardenne region, and tradition has it that the name is derived from that of the monk Pierre Pérignon (Sainte-Menehould, 1639 Hautvillers, 1715), who legend has it that he was the inventor of champagne itself: there were in fact vineyards in the grounds of his abbey that he personally tended, perhaps to the point of having discovered the method of producing the famous sparkling wine, the champenois method. Dom Pérignon, made from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines of which only the best fruit is selected, is one of the most prized champagnes in the world (if not the most prestigious ever), and a bottle needs at least eight years to be put on the market: so long, in fact, is the elaboration process to allow the wine to achieve perfect balance. The prices of the bottles range from the cheapest products, which are around two hundred euros, to the most refined ones that cost a few thousand.

Are there works that testify to Andy Warhol’s passion for Dom Pérignon? The answer is affirmative and points back to the “two thousand” story of 1981. Indeed, at that time the American artist created a series of prints entitled Committee 2000 whose protagonists are a number of goblets, some full and some lying down. The best-known of these prints, which pays homage to the bizarre idea of his friends who wanted to buy two thousand bottles of Dom Pérignon, is made with bright colors: cobalt blue, purple, lemon yellow, all highly saturated and arranged on exaggerated, overlapping contours to give the viewer a sense of movement (but also the impression of how he sees those who have laid down a little too many glasses of Dom Pérignon). A print that also conveys a sense of the excesses and glamorous atmosphere of Studio 54 and the other clubs that Andy Warhol and his friends frequented. Also preserved are some Polaroids from 1982, also titled Committee 2000, in which the glasses are seen arranged in the same way as we see them in the prints, and with the same sequins, on the table, that appear in the silkscreens. The idea behind the Committee 2000 photographs and prints, we read in the catalog of a 2013 Christie’s auction where two of these polaroids passed through (sold for $8,125), was to “raise money for Committee 2000,” described by Andy Warhol as the famous club of twenty people who wanted to buy the two thousand bottles of Dom Pérignon. And given the cost of each bottle, it is easy to see how the undertaking was definitely challenging. In short: art for a good cause!

Interestingly, Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921 - Düsseldorf, 1986) was also part of the group, and even the German artist did not shy away from the task: in 1981 he made a print entitled Countdown 2000, a large calendar with individually printed dates from 1980 until the fateful New Year’s Eve 2000, and where we see the inscription “Correct for Committee 2000.” Unfortunately, neither Andy Warhol nor Joseph Beuys survived long enough to know the outcome of the challenge, having passed away in 1987 and 1986, respectively. Nor, however, have we been able to learn whether the committee succeeded in the difficult undertaking.

In any case, the Dom Pérignon brand, knowing Andy Warhol’s passion for its champagne, thought to pay tribute to the artist in 2010, with a collector’s edition of its Vintage 2002 bottles, made from the vine produced from grapes harvested eight years earlier (according to experts, moreover, the 2002 vintage was one of the best vintages since Dom Pérignon has been produced, that is, since 1936). The house thus created a limited-edition Andy Warhol Tribute Collection by revisiting the classic Swiss shield-shaped labels with the typical colors of Andy Warhol’s prints (six shades: blue, red, lilac, purple, emerald green and yellow). The bottles were sold individually or in multi-packs, and even today they are collector’s items that can be found, not without effort, at auctions or in some specialty stores (the cost of a bottle of Vintage 2002 Andy Warhol is around 700 euros). And according to experts, the Andy Warhol-themed one is perhaps the most prized of the French maison ’s limited editions. Which since 2010 has begun regularly collaborating with artists to create limited-edition bottles.

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