The custodians of Andy Warhol’s estate have been accused of deliber- ately driving up the value of the Pop artist’s work by limiting the supply of Warhols on the market.

The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is being sued in New York for allegedly denying the authenticity of “as many works as possible so as to induce artificial scarcity in the market for Warhol works”.

The aim, the lawsuit claims, was to maintain and increase the value over the past 20 years of the foundation’s substantial holdings of Warhol’s work.

Warhol’s famous images have been powering the art market boom, with Green Car Crash selling for an artist’s record of $71.7 million (£35 million) at Christie’s in New York in May. The class action lawsuit was brought by Joe Simon-Whelan, an American film-maker who lives in London. He is seeking $20 million in damages.

He owns a silkscreen similar to a Warhol self-portrait used on a US postage stamp. He has dubbed the silkscreen “Double Denied” because its authenticity has twice been denied by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Mr Simon-Whelan accuses the foundation, created after the artist’s death in 1987, of engaging in a “20-year scheme of fraud, collusion and manipulation” to drive up the price of its own Warhols. The Warhol foundation has said that it could not comment because it had not yet been served with legal papers. But Vincent Fremont, the exclusive sales agent of the Warhol estate, rejected the charges as “shocking nonsense”.

Mr Simon-Whelan brought his silkscreen from an art dealer in 1989 for $195,000. According to the lawsuit, the picture had been authenticated years earlier by Mr Fremont and Fred Hughes, executor of the Warhol estate, who wrote on its lower left edge: “I certify that this is an original painting by Andy Warhol completed by him in 1964.”

Mr Simon-Whelan tried to sell the silkscreen in 2001 for $2 million. He submitted it to the board but the picture came back with “denied” stamped in red ink on the back, which bled through the canvas.

Mr Simon-Whelan resubmitted it in 2003 but was refused, despite letters of support from Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s friend and film-maker, and Billy Name, the chief photographer at Warhol’s Factory, and a transcript of Warhol reminiscing about making the piece. The authentification board said some background features were printed, not handpainted, and the “density of the half-tone” had flaws.

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