It began in 1990. Stolper and Wilson were visiting Christie’s auction house to view a painting by Patrick Caulfield. Stolper is now a successful art dealer and Wilson was until recently a senior curator at Tate Britain, but then they were young men on tight budgets and Caulfield was wildly out of reach. Before they left empty-handed, though, they half-heartedly checked out a sale of rock and pop memorabilia, and the pit tab caught their eye. “We thought wow, we can afford it, it speaks to us in terms of a visual language and it’s steeped in 20th century cultural history,” Stolper recalls. “We understood early on what we wanted to collect and how to do it. We were at the right time to make a really important collection, and that rarely happens. You couldn’t put this collection together now.” The Sex Pistols were unlike any other band because from the start they were about art as lived by Andrew Wilson Most of the items in the Stolper Wilson collection cost just tens or hundreds of pounds to acquire. In the 1990s, expensive desirables like signed records and guitars didn’t interest them, while the things they did – posters, flyers, letters – didn’t excite punk collectors. In fact, there is no music in the collection at all. “The Sex Pistols were like no other band, no other situation, because from the beginning it was about art as life was lived,” says Wilson. “Yes, it was music, but it was also about a way of being in the world.” The two friends visited auction houses and memorabilia dealers while scouring record store walls for old Blu-Tacked bills. Once word got out, characters from the band’s inner circle began to come forward with items for sale. “I’d come home with papers and my wife would say, ‘What did you buy?’ Stolper recalls with a laugh. “And I’d say, ‘This is really important. It’s the first Pistols press release!’”. Comic Appearance… Artwork from the Stolper-Wilson Collection. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian Although Stolper and Wilson could never be mistaken for aging punks, they were fans at the time. Wilson, who was 14 in 1976, remembers buying God Save the Queen the week it was released. Stolper, who was 11, lived in Sloane Square, not far from the Sex boutique, owned by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. “I was walking up and down Kings Road and seeing all the punks. I was so young I didn’t understand his politics, but I got the culture because I was right there.” By 1996, the collection was large enough to merit an exhibition, entitled “I Groaned With Pain” … Sex, Seditionaries and the Sex Pistols, at the Eagle Gallery, above a pub in Clerkwenwell. Stolper and Wilson chose stark white frames on white walls to signal that this is art, not rock. Guests included several of the New British artists, who were often compared to punks then, though less so now. “Every contemporary artist I know came to this show,” says Stolper. “Everybody our age was fully aware of visual imagery.” Damien Hirst even named a four-sided medicine cabinet after Sex Pistols songs. McLaren also came and was overwhelmed by this monument to his youthful endeavours. He had moved on so quickly after the Sex Pistols ended in explosive rage in 1978 that he had never considered editing this period of his life. “It was a very ephemeral culture,” says Wilson. “Those things weren’t worth as much then as they are now.” Words of truth… A note from Malcolm McLaren. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian The collectors sat down with him for a long chat. “Didn’t we care to ask what Sid was really like?” says Stolper. “We wanted to ask, where did this come from? We ended the interview with a great question: ‘So, Malcolm, did you think it was art?’ There was a long silence, and then he said, “In a way, it was bigger than art.” If Pistol, Danny Boyle’s recent TV series, was the story of a rock band, then this collection is the story of an idea: a collaborative multimedia artwork in which Reid and McLaren, who met at Croydon art school, were at least equally important. as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. “Everybody brought their own unique visions, and the Sex Pistols was the vessel into which everybody threw everything,” says Stolper. Many of the images, ostensibly created to promote concerts and records, hold up as works of art in their own right. You could see them without having heard a single note of the Sex Pistols’ music and know that they represented a fundamentally important moment in British youth culture. “It’s all in service of something else,” says Wilson, “and figuring out what that something else is is the interesting part of it.” An artifact from the Stolper-Wilson Collection. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian The two men circle the room, proudly explaining the stories behind their favorite objects. The collection defamiliarizes famous images by transforming them as the product of high-speed, low-budget experimentation. Two flyers for shows at the 100 Club in 1976, just 10 weeks apart, show how Helen Wellington-Lloyd’s original logo led to Reid’s ransom collage. Reid’s tattered exercise book, Lion Brand, depicts the final days of the project, with sketched ideas for the brutally cynical 1980 compilation album “Flogging a Dead Horse” and scrawled reminders to chase the money McLaren owed. The pink lyric sheets for Vicious’ first band, Flowers of Romance, reveal surprisingly delicate writing, each time dotted with a flamboyant globe. The huge poster for the band’s first and only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, is the copy that Vicious pinned to the wall of his room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York before his death in 1979. It bears still the stains from when he cleaned the heroin syringes. Silly thing: a poster painted with Sid Vicious’s blood. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian As for McLaren, his determination to place the band in a long tradition of English mavericks and wild boys is strongly expressed in his hand-drawn poster for their final UK gig, on Christmas Day 1977. ‘This true and dirty history CONTINUES THROUGHOUT 200 years of adolescent anarchy,’ he wrote alongside a George Cruikshank illustration of Dickens’ sea urchins. McLaren and Reid’s shared love of situationism led to a poster for the Belgian tourism industry being turned into an ad for their scathing single Holidays in the Sun. “You’re taking something familiar and presenting it in a way that changes your attitude toward the world you live in,” says Wilson. “Everything was about not necessarily a denial but a reversal.” Perhaps the funniest element of the collection is the press kit put together by Warner Bros Records for the US release of Never Mind the Bollocks, with the T-shirt inside out and the comics telling the band’s story. The Sex Pistols’ corporate parody of the outsider aesthetic heralded all subsequent ersatz appropriations of punk signifiers, from advertising to boutique hotel rooms. “The images are constantly being refreshed,” says Stolper. “If there’s a new young pop star and he’s the ‘rebel’, there’s going to be a punk attitude. It revolutionizes with numbers. This is the litmus test of all of them.” The Queen of Punk… Elizabeth II is a recurring image in the collection. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian Stolper and Wilson considered their work complete by 2004, after obtaining the original lyrics to Holidays in the Sun, No Feelings and Submission. That year they held two more exhibitions, at the Hospital Gallery in Covent Garden and Urbis in Manchester. In the spirit of punk, they felt it was getting too big and commercial, so they never did another one. “The audience at the Eagle was an art audience, and the audience at the Hospital was everybody,” says Wilson. They did, however, lend items to museums around the world. The work of looking after the collection and traveling to oversee the installation is one reason they chose to sell it. Having made the difficult decision to break it up, they now talk about it like proud parents watching their children fly the nest. “I have to live another life now,” Wilson says. “The arc of the collection inevitably leads to dispersion—that sense of putting it out into the world so other people can have the fun we had.” So this is their last chance to see the entire collection and reflect on the story it tells about the Sex Pistols and their own lives. “When I was a kid music seemed very important,” says Wilson. “I’m having quite a hard time hearing some of the music now. But this” – he sweeps his hand across the room – “I still find it endlessly fascinating and enriching. It’s more than just music. And it’s not just the illustration. It’s absolute art.”
