How a Moorestown collector saved, secured a loan, and built an Andy Warhol collection worth millions

The moment Gregory McCoy laid his eyes on Andy Warhol art at a South Jersey gallery some 35 years ago, his life became linked with the famous artist’s legacy.

The Moorestown, N.J., resident was captivated by a simple dollar sign screen print Warhol made in the early ‘80s, after he transitioned from commercial designs to pop-art pioneer. The small piece was going for $7,000.

“The first thing I said to myself was I wish I had made that,” said McCoy, 64, then a 30-year-old graphic designer.

Up until that day, McCoy had only seen Warhol’s famous pieces like the soup cans and Marilyn Monroes. The dollar sign caught his eye because it looked like something from his world of advertising, but turned into expensive art. The simple brilliance of it was captivating.

Although it seemed impossible on his salary then, McCoy resolved to start his own Warhol collection.

“Today I could never do what I did 30 years ago, when I could walk into a gallery and buy a small piece for a thousand dollars,” said McCoy, whose art finds are the subject of the recently published book Out of Sight: An Art Collector, a Discovery, and Andy Warhol, which was inspired by an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. “Today some of those same works are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Back then, it was possible for a graphic artist of modest means to save for three years, secure a modest bank loan, and kick-start a collection. In the mid-90s, when McCoy did just that, the lasting impact of Warhol’s work and fame was still questionable. Some three decades later, Warhol’s creations rank among the most valued, demonstrated by Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, which set a record for the most expensive work by an American artist when it fetched $195 million in May 2022 at a Christie’s auction.

But investment value was never McCoy’s driving force. For him, it was fueled by passion.

“I’m a collector in the sense that I enjoy the find and being able to share it with people,” said McCoy. “I’ve focused on pieces I liked, and also on things I could afford.”

It was slow going at first. While patiently stashing away his salary for art, McCoy kept the dream alive by hanging color copies of pieces he loved on his walls. The first real piece he bought was a sheet of Warhol-designed cow wallpaper. Then, three years in, he made a big leap with the purchase of Double Mona Lisa, a large black and white print featuring duplicate reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. Although selling pieces he loves is hard, he said, parting ways with this one made sense about a decade later.

“I bought it in the mid-1990s for $3,000 and held onto it until The Da Vinci Code, the movie, came out in 2006,” he said. “It was sold at Christie’s for $192,000. It’s how I made that leap into the paintings.”

In the years that followed, McCoy made up for lost time.

To date, he only owns three Warhol paintings: a red dollar sign, a yellow hamburger, and a gold one that states “Be a Somebody with a Body.” He also has a variety of Warhol prints, including a blue dollar sign.

A large part of the collection is ephemera, or everyday objects signed by Warhol, such as a Campbell’s soup can, a Brillo soap pads box, and a (very stale) dinner roll.

While such things were more affordable, making them attractive to buy, McCoy said he finds them intriguing in their own right — a mark of Warhol’s marketing genius.

What ultimately led to the show at Penn is his collection of 323 large screen prints of Marilyn Monroe. McCoy discovered the first four through a Swedish art dealer in 2009 and then devoted the next dozen years to tracking down more, purchasing them and trying to learn more about them. But there are still unanswered questions.

While it is clear the pieces are associated with a Warhol print owned by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet — famed for hosting Europe’s first major Warhol exhibit in 1968 — the 323 prints were never displayed. It was only 50 years later, when McCoy started contacting Swedish art professionals, that they were all found and reunited in his collection.

When McCoy approached Penn Libraries about displaying the work, David McKnight, then-director of the rare book and manuscript library, recalled being both intrigued and unsettled about curating a Warhol exhibit in which the very authorship of the art was questionable.

“We do not know for a fact that Andy Warhol condoned the production of this series,” said McKnight. “Then again, that was the ethos of the time. Pop art itself was a rip-off of commercial art, and elevated it in an ironic way … overall it was fair to examine the collection within the chain of events that occurred from 1965 to the present at Penn.”

About 1965: McKnight was referring to an event held at Penn’s then newly established Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) — Warhol’s first-ever solo museum exhibit — that sealed both Warhol and the ICA’s reputations.

“There were about 2,000 to 3,000 students who showed up that night,” McKnight said. “He was mobbed like the Beatles. He had to escape through the roof.”

Warhol has enjoyed way more than the 15 minutes of fame he predicted everyone in the world would experience. The Philadelphia Art Museum currently has 490 of the artist’s works in its collection, including Brillo boxes like McCoy’s, while the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts owns 171 screen prints and photographs, said McKnight.

One of the driving reasons for displaying McCoy’s collection, McKnight added, was in the hopes it would lead to more answers.

“While further study is required, nevertheless these amazing screen prints produced in 1968 beg for understanding,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I really admire Gregory as a collector.”

An earlier version of the article misstated the decade in which Warhol made the dollar sign screen print. He created the print in the 1980s.