Most families have a coffee table in their living room. Lisanne Skyler’s folks had a Brillo Box.
It wasn’t really a box, but an Andy Warhol sculpture, one of about 110 the pop artist made in 1964. Skyler’s father bought his — emblazoned “3¢ off” — in 1969 from Soho’s OK Harris Gallery for $1,000. Warhol signed it as part of the deal.
Encased in Lucite, the box sat in the family’s Yorkville apartment for two years, until her dad traded it for a drawing by another artist.
Forty years later, the Brillo Box went on the block at Christie’s, fetching more than $3 million. The Skyler family missed out on making a killing, but at least Lisanne made a film.
“Brillo Box (3¢ off)” is the story of the Warhol that got away. Airing on HBO on Monday, the day after what would have been the artist/provocateur’s 89th birthday, it’s part family history, part art-world economics. Its 48-year-old filmmaker says the documentary was largely inspired by a photo of herself as an infant, lying atop a work of art.
“The box was a character in our family album,” Skyler tells The Post. “The film grew out of a fascination with that period of my parents’ life, and what an amazing thing it was that they collected all this art.”
They started collecting in the late ’60s, when her father, Martin Skyler, was an NYC assistant district attorney and his wife, Rita, a stay-at-home mom. What they lacked in money, they made up for in their passion for art and the city. Both were from out of town but moved to Manhattan as soon as they married.
“I think that was my mom’s stipulation,” Skyler says of Rita, who looks and sounds like Patti Smith-turned-Jewish housewife. “Weekends, we’d all be marching around galleries and museums.”
Their tiny living room was always filled with art — not only Warhol’s, but works by Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. The parents seemed particularly smitten by photo-realism, which puzzled their three kids: “After seeing all those van Goghs in museums, I’d look at these paintings on our walls and think, ‘Why is this picture of a truck art?’”
Two years after he bought Warhol’s box, Martin Skyler exchanged it for something else: a drawing by Peter Young, an artist he’d met and liked. Later, he traded that, too.
Along the way, his wheeling and dealing helped the family afford a bigger apartment. In time, though, the couple separated — “for a number of factors,” their daughter says, “not all of them related to how they saw art.”
And that Brillo Box? Ad exec Charles Saatchi bought it in 1988 for $32,200; it was sold to a private collector for $43,700 in 1993; and resold for the same price in 1995 to Gagosian Gallery’s Robert Shapazian. Following Shapazian’s death, it sold at Christie’s to an unnamed collector in 2010 for just over $3 million.
The film doesn’t say so, but in 2014, it sold to yet another anonymous buyer — for $1.8 million.
“It goes to show you,” Skyler says. “Collect what you love, because the art market is hard to predict.”
Or at the very least, take a photo.