Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Amy Winehouse Blood Painting Up for Auction

An art piece made by the late singer Amy Winehouse — using her own blood — will be auctioned off at the Cob Gallery in London. The self-portrait, titled “Ladylike,” is part of a collection by Pete Doherty, called “On Blood,” which was on view at the gallery earlier this year.

Doherty, known primarily as co-frontman for The Libertines, as well as for his membership in indie band Babyshambles, is also a visual artist. It has been reported that he was very close with Winehouse, and that he invited her to create an artwork with him. “Amy was on the phone to her dad when she did that [painting]. She said, ‘Dad, I’m with Pete and he’s making me draw with my blood!’ He didn’t like me much, her dad,” Doherty told The Independent in February. The Shmooze can’t imagine why.

“Ladylike” was not on sale during Doherty’s 10-day exhibition at the Cob Gallery, because of the “personal nature” of the piece. But it is now up for auction and is expected to bring in far in excess of the $15,000 that each of Doherty’s paintings is expected to fetch. According to the gallery’s catalogue, Winehouse’s piece is expected to sell somewhere between $80,000 and $129,000. Knowing how many of Winehouse’s fans desperately miss her since her death from accidental alcohol poisoning last summer, it wouldn’t be surprising if her blood was worth even more than that.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.