Pietro Psaier Biography
Pietro Psaier (1936 – 26 December 2004) is said to have been an Italian painter, whose real existence was however questioned in 2008. It is claimed that Psaier was born in Italy, near Rome and began working in the 1950s designing cars for Enzo Ferrari. In the sixties he moved to Madrid and then New York where, working as a waiter at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, he met the artist Andy Warhol (who nicknamed him "Peter the Italian"): the two became such good friends that Psaier frequented often "The Factory", Warhol's studio. During the seventies, Psaier worked on commission on behalf of famous music and cinema stars, producing works for, among others, Keith Moon, Oliver Reed, Michael Caine. In 1974, again according to hagiography, he became the second youngest artist awarded by the Italian American Institute in New York. In the mid-eighties Psaier, to escape creditors, undertook a journey to Tibet and Nepal, continuing to work. His long wanderings finally took him to Sri Lanka, where his house by the ocean was dramatically destroyed by the terrible tsunami of 26 December 2004. His body was never found again. Doubts about his real existence: In September 2008, the auction house Nicholson's canceled a sale of his paintings following increasingly insistent rumors that they doubted whether Pietro Psaier really existed. The first doubts, published by the website warohlstars.org, have become magnified together with the impossibility of confirming many pieces of information in the official biography. For example, Vincent Fremont, Warhol's collaborator since 1969, stated that he had not met Pietro Psaier: «I was always with Andy and I made the payments to the collaborators. I don't remember any Psaier and there is no mention of him in Warhol's diaries. If he had existed and attended the Factory, I couldn't have missed meeting him." On the contrary, Carlos Langelaan Alvarez - Psaier's self-styled friend and psychiatrist - declared to a Nicholson emissary in Spain that he had treated Psaier between 1979 and 1992: «He was a complete artist, with some drug problems. In 1983 he introduced me to Warhol, who had come to see his works at the Fernando Vijande gallery in Madrid." Despite this, works attributed to Psaier continue to be sporadically exhibited at public events and private galleries. In 2012, for example, they were exhibited in a traveling exhibition together with Andy Warhol's works in Follonica and Porto Santo Stefano.
