315 Johns: Authentic Warhol or Fo Fo Fo Faux?

When is a Warhol not a Warhol? Apparently when a Factory boy makes it and Andy doesn't know about it.

The title, “315 Johns,” sounds less like the name of an artwork than a headline describing a prostitution bust. But in the second volume of the catalogue raisonné enumerating the works of Andy Warhol, it is listed as a 1967 Warhol creation: a series of silk-screens made from a photograph of the artist John Chamberlain and arranged in a heroic grid.

And in 2000, documents show, Mr. Chamberlain sold it for more than $3 million to an unnamed collector after securing a declaration from the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board that the piece was genuine.

But in a lawsuit now making its way through state court in Brooklyn, Gerard Malanga, a poet and photographer, angrily contends there are a few problems with this. For starters, he says, the work was not Mr. Chamberlain’s to sell; for another, it should never have sold for so much because Warhol, who died in 1987, not only did not make it, but was never even aware it existed.