The Champagne Party Warhol Didn’t Live to See

“The running joke is who will be around and who won’t,” Andy Warhol wrote in his diary. He would have been 71, going on 72, if he had made it to the millennium party that inspired his work Committee 2000.

A version of the image he made in 1982 for the party was due to be sold in at Wright of Chicago on August 6, but it did not go under the hammer. The withdrawn lot had an estimate of $12,000 to $15,000.

The artwork depicts empty champagne glasses surrounded by the debris of party poppers and the name of photographic paper company Agfa-Gevaert. It was made for fund-raising events organized by a group of artists and publishers in Munich. Called Committee 2000, its members included Joseph Beuys, who died in 1986, a year before Warhol.

Their plan for a New Year's Eve party was described by Warhol in his diary during a visit to the German city for his own show there in 1981. “It’s a club of 20 guys who got together and they’re going to buy 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon,” he wrote, explaining that they would put them in a sealed room until the year 2000 “and then open it up and drink it”.

Warhol's preparatory pencil drawing for the work sold for $25,400 at Sotheby’s in an online auction in 2025.

Last week, 11 Warhol lots did find buyers, and his sales totaled more than $98,000. They included another late work, a screenprint featuring Judy Garland. Blackglama from the Ads portfolio of 1985 sold at Wright for $35,840. Both are haunting in their own way.