On the morning of the day the Queen dies, the art collectors Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson happen to be staring at a picture of her face. It’s a piece of card, smaller than a vinyl LP, which artist Jamie Reid produced for a concert by the Sex Pistols. He took the classic silver jubilee portrait of the Queen by Peter Grugeon, customised it with a safety pin through her lip, printed it on a union flag, and later hole-punched it for potential use as bunting on the band’s notorious Jubilee boat trip on 7 June 1977, although it was never used. This is the piece that seeded the world’s most extraordinary collection of visual iconography relating to punk rock’s most important band. Today it fills a room in the west London storage facility of Sotheby’s, prior to going up for auction next month.
It began in 1990. Stolper and Wilson were visiting Christie’s auction house to see a painting by Patrick Caulfield. Stolper is now a successful art dealer and Wilson was until recently a senior curator at Tate Britain, but back then they were young men with straitened budgets and the Caulfield was wildly unattainable. Before leaving empty-handed, though, they half-heartedly checked out a sale of rock and pop memorabilia, and the bunting card grabbed their attention.
