As the school year draws to a close, graduating senior Martha Sutherland eyes the works of her CMU classmates. Paintings occupy easels and take up the free space along the wall. One in particular catches her eye. It’s an older couple sharing a bed—an ordinary moment captured in dramatic detail.
The painting was for a class project called “Head and Hands,” and Sutherland admires her classmate’s painting so much that she buys it from him for $30.
Some 65 years later, she remembers the transaction. “He always needed money. He was dirt poor. So I bought it from him. It certainly never occurred to me that he’d change the face of art as we know it, but he was good. He was fearless when it came to experimenting,” says Sutherland (A’49) of her classmate, Andy Warhol (A’49).
From 1949 to 1951, the painting traveled with her from Boston to Europe, eventually landing in Fayetteville, Ark., where she and her architect husband made their home. The couple would go on to teach at the University of Arkansas and kept the painting out of the limelight. For the ensuing decades, the work hung in the master bedroom, the name of the artist shared with only a few family members.
Sutherland, not a youngster anymore, decided the time had come to find a place where the painting would be secure and people could enjoy it. Her treasure—whose value was appraised by Sotherby’s for an undisclosed amount—now has a new home: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in Bentonville, Ark. The museum was founded by Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.
The painting went on public display for the first time last December, along with Warhol’s “Coca-Cola (3)” painting, which the museum recently bought at Christie’s for $57.2 million.
