Andy Warhol (;
['']Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'' is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as ''The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition''. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,0 ...
''
"Warhol"
born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the
pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century.
His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and
celebrity culture
Celebrity culture is a high-volume exposure to celebrities' personal lives on a global scale. It is inherently tied to consumer interests where celebrities transform their fame to become product brands.
Whereas a culture can usually be physically ...
that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Some of his best-known works include the
silkscreen
Screen printing is a printing technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink (or dye) onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. A blade or squeegee is moved across the screen in a "flood stroke" ...
paintings ''
Campbell's Soup Cans
''Campbell's Soup Cans'' (sometimes referred to as ''32 Campbell's Soup Cans'') is a Visual arts, work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by the American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuri ...
'' (1962) and ''
Marilyn Diptych
The ''Marilyn Diptych'' (1962) is a silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol depicting Marilyn Monroe. The monumental work is one of the artist's most noted of the movie star.
The painting consists of 50 images. Each image o ...
'' (1962), the experimental film ''
Chelsea Girls
''Chelsea Girls'' is a 1966 American experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films (both feature-length and short). I ...
'' (1966), the multimedia events known as the ''
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable'', sometimes simply called ''Plastic Inevitable'' or ''EPI'', was a series of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk events organized by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by th ...
'' (1966–67), and the
erotic film
Sexual content has been found in films since the early days of the industry, and the presentation of aspects of sexuality in film, especially human sexuality, has been controversial since the development of the medium. Films which display or sugges ...
''
Blue Movie
''Blue Movie'' (also known as ''Fuck'' and ''F,k'') is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States ...
'' (1969) that started the "
Golden Age of Porn
The term "Golden Age of Porn", or "porno chic", refers to a 15-year period (1969–1984) in commercial American pornography, in which sexually explicit films experienced positive attention from mainstream cinemas, movie critics, and the genera ...
".
Born and raised in
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...
in a family of
Rusyn immigrants, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a
commercial illustrator in the 1950s. After exhibiting his work in
art galleries
An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long ...
, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist in the 1960s. His New York studio,
The Factory
The Factory was Andy Warhol's art studio in Manhattan, New York City, which had four locations between 1963 and 1987. The Factory became famous for its parties in the 1960s. It was the hip hangout spot for artists, musicians, celebrities, and ...
, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals,
drag queen
A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses Drag (entertainment), drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate Femininity, female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have ...
s, playwrights,
bohemian
Bohemian or Bohemians may refer to:
*Anything of or relating to Bohemia
Culture and arts
* Bohemianism, an unconventional lifestyle, originally practised by 19th–20th century European and American artists and writers.
* Bohemian style, a ...
street people,
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood ...
celebrities and wealthy patrons.
He directed and produced several
underground film
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Notable examples include
John Waters' ''Pink Flamingos'',
David Lynch's ''Eraserhead'',
Andy Warhol's ''Blue Movie'',
Rosa von Praunheim's ''Tal ...
s starring a collection of personalities known as
Warhol superstars
Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by the pop artist Andy Warhol during the 1960s and 1970s. These personalities hung out at Warhol's studio, the Factory, appeared in his films, and accompanied him to his New ...
, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression "
15 minutes of fame
15 minutes of fame is short-lived media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was inspired by a quotation misattributed to Andy Warhol: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Attributed to ...
." Warhol managed and produced the
experimental rock
Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, wit ...
band
the Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground were an American Rock music, rock band formed in New York City in 1964. Its classic lineup consisted of singer and guitarist Lou Reed, Welsh multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and percussionis ...
. Warhol expressed his
queer identity
''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are non-heterosexual or non-cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against LGBTQ people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to r ...
through many of his works at a time when homosexuality was
actively suppressed in the United States.
After surviving
an assassination attempt by
radical feminist
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other ...
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist known for her attempt to murder the artist Andy Warhol in 1968.
Solanas appeared in the Warhol film '' I, a Man'' (1967) and self-published the '' SCU ...
in June 1968, Warhol focused on transforming The Factory into a business enterprise. He founded ''
Interview
An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers.Merriam Webster DictionaryInterview Dictionary definition, Retrieved February 16, 2016 In common parlance, the word "interview" re ...
'' magazine and authored numerous books, including ''
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again)'' is a 1975 book by the American artist Andy Warhol. It was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
The book is an assemblage of vignettes about love, beauty, fame, work, sex, tim ...
'' (1975) and ''
Popism'' (1980). He also hosted the television series ''Fashion'' (1979–80), ''Andy Warhol's TV'' (1980–83), and ''
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes'' (1985–87). Warhol died of
cardiac arrhythmia
Arrhythmias, also known as cardiac arrhythmias, are irregularities in the heartbeat, including when it is too fast or too slow. Essentially, this is anything but normal sinus rhythm. A resting heart rate that is too fast – above 100 beat ...
, aged 58, after gallbladder surgery in February 1987.
Warhol has been described as the "
bellwether
A bellwether is a leader or an indicator of trends.[bellwether]
" ''Cambridge Dictionary''. Re ...
of the
art market
The art market is the marketplace of buyers and sellers trading commodities, services, and works of art.
The art market follows an economic model that considers more than supply and demand; it is a market where art is bought and sold for values ...
", with several of his works ranking among the
most expensive paintings ever sold.
In 2013, ''
Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)
''Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)'' is a 1963 serigraph by the American artist Andy Warhol. In November 2013, it sold for $105 million (£65.5m) at NYC auction, setting a new highest price for a work by Warhol.
History
''Silver Car Crash (D ...
'' (1963) sold for $105 million, setting a record for the artist. In 2022, ''
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn'' (1964) sold for $195 million, which is the highest price paid at auction for a work by an American artist. Warhol has been the subject of numerous
retrospective
A retrospective (from Latin ', "look back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works that were produced, in the past. As a noun, ''retrospective'' has specific meanings in software development, popular culture, and the arts. ...
exhibitions
An exhibition, in the most general sense, is an organized presentation and display of a selection of items. In practice, exhibitions usually occur within a cultural or educational setting such as a museum, art gallery, park, library, exhibition ...
, books, and documentary films.
The Andy Warhol Museum
The Andy Warhol Museum is located on the North Shore (Pittsburgh), North Shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent co ...
in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
Early life and education
Warhol was born on August 6, 1928, in
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...
, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth child of Ondrej Warhola (Americanized as Andrew Warhola Sr.; 1889–1942) and
Julia Warhola
Julia Warhola (born Juliana Justina Zavaczki; November 20, 1891November 22, 1972) was the mother of the American artist Andy Warhol. She was an artist in her own right as a calligrapher, embroiderer, and illustrator.
Biography
Early life an ...
(, 1891–1972). His parents were working-class
Rusyn emigrants from Mikó,
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
(now
Miková
Miková (; ) is a village and municipality in Stropkov District in the Prešov Region of north-eastern Slovakia.
History
In history, historical records the village was first mentioned in 1390. It was known as ''Mikova'' until 1899.
The village i ...
in northeast
Slovakia
Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...
).
In 1912, Warhol's father emigrated to the United States and found work in a coal mine.
His wife joined him nine years later in 1921. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the
Oakland
Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...
neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
They were
Ruthenian Catholic and attended
St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Warhol had two older brothers, Paul (1922–2014) and
John
John is a common English name and surname:
* John (given name)
* John (surname)
John may also refer to:
New Testament
Works
* Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John
* First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John
* Second E ...
(1925–2010), as well as an older sister, Maria (1912; died in infancy).
Warhol's nephew
James Warhola
James Warhola (born March 16, 1955) is an American artist who has illustrated more than two dozen children's picture books since 1987.
Early life
A native of Smock, a coal-mining region in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, he is the ...
, became a successful children's book illustrator.
At the age of eight, Warhol had a
streptococcal infection
''Streptococcus'' is a genus of gram-positive spherical bacteria that belongs to the family Streptococcaceae, within the order Lactobacillales (lactic acid bacteria), in the phylum Bacillota. Cell division in streptococci occurs along a single ...
that led to
scarlet fever
Scarlet fever, also known as scarlatina, is an infectious disease caused by ''Streptococcus pyogenes'', a Group A streptococcus (GAS). It most commonly affects children between five and 15 years of age. The signs and symptoms include a sore ...
. Because there were no antibiotics to treat the illness it progressed to
rheumatic fever
Rheumatic fever (RF) is an inflammation#Disorders, inflammatory disease that can involve the heart, joints, skin, and brain. The disease typically develops two to four weeks after a Streptococcal pharyngitis, streptococcal throat infection. Si ...
and ultimately the neurological condition
Sydenham's chorea
Sydenham's chorea, also known as rheumatic chorea, is a disorder characterized by Chorea, rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet. Sydenham's chorea is an autoimmune disease that results from childhood ...
, sometimes referred to as St. Vitus' Dance. At times he was confined to bed and made to remain home from school. He would spend these days drawing, creating scrapbooks from Hollywood magazines, and cutting out images from
comic book
A comic book, comic-magazine, or simply comic is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panel (comics), panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by descriptive prose and wri ...
s that his mother bought him.
He also enjoyed using the family's Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera, and after noticing his passion for photography, his father and brothers built a
darkroom
A darkroom is used to process photographic film, make Photographic printing, prints and carry out other associated tasks. It is a room that can be made completely dark to allow the processing of light-sensitive photographic materials, including ...
in the basement for him.

When Warhol started art classes at
Holmes School in 1937, his art teacher saw his potential and got him admitted to Saturday drawing lessons at the
Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1942, his father died after drinking contaminated water from a coal mine in West Virginia.
Warhol excelled in school and won a
Scholastic Art and Writing Award.
After graduating from
Schenley High School
Schenley High School, located in the North Oakland neighborhood at the edge of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a historic building opened in 1916 that was a part of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. The Schenley High School build ...
in 1945, he enrolled at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
in Pittsburgh, where he studied
commercial art
Commercial art is the art of creative services, referring to art created for commercial purposes, primarily advertising. Commercial art uses a variety of platforms (magazines, websites, apps, television, etc.) for viewers with the intent of promo ...
. During his time there, Warhol joined the campus Modern Dance Club and Beaux Arts Society. He also served as art director of the student art magazine, ''Cano'', illustrating a cover in 1948 and a full-page interior illustration in 1949.
These are believed to be his first two published artworks.
Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949.
Career
1940s
Warhol moved to New York City with $200 a week after graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in June 1949. He was accompanied by his classmate
Philip Pearlstein. They lived in a six-floor walk-up
tenement
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, E ...
apartment on St. Mark's Place near
Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park is a public park in the Alphabet City portion of East Village, Manhattan, New York City. The square-shaped park, bounded on the north by East 10th Street, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by East 7th Street, and o ...
.
Warhol went to see Tina Fredericks, the art director of ''
Glamour'' magazine, on his second day in New York. He had met Fredericks on his brief visit to New York the year prior. His career as a commercial artist began when she commissioned him to draw shoes for an advertisement after purchasing a small $10 drawing of an orchestra for herself.
[ Benstock, Shari and Suzanne Ferriss (editors). ''Footnotes: On Shoes''; Rutgers University Press; February 1, 2001; ; pp. 44–48.]
1950s
Gallerist
Alexander Iolas
Alexander Iolas (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας) (March 26, 1908 – June 8, 1987) was an Egyptian-born Greek-American art gallerist and significant collector of classical and modern art works, who advanced the careers of René Magritte, ...
is credited with discovering Warhol.
He organized his first solo exhibition, ''Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote'', at the
Hugo Gallery in New York in 1952.
In 1955, Warhol began designing advertisements for shoe manufacturer Israel Miller. He developed his "blotted line" technique, applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet, which was akin to a
printmaking
Printmaking is the process of creating work of art, artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand proces ...
process on the most rudimentary scale. His use of tracing paper and ink allowed him to repeat the basic image and also to create endless variations on the theme.
American photographer John Coplans recalled that "nobody drew shoes the way Andy did. He somehow gave each shoe a temperament of its own, a sort of sly,
Toulouse-Lautrec
''Comte'' Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901), known as Toulouse-Lautrec (), was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful an ...
kind of sophistication, but the shape and the style came through accurately and the buckle was always in the right place. The kids in the apartment
hich Andy shared in New York – note by Coplansnoticed that the
vamps on Andy's shoe drawings kept getting longer and longer but
sraelMiller didn't mind. Miller loved them."
In 1956, Warhol was included in a group exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
in New York. That year, he traveled around the world with his friend, production designer
Charles Lisanby, studying art and culture in several countries.
While in
Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto ( or ; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan's largest and most populous island of Honshu. , the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it the ninth-most pop ...
, Warhol drew a stylized portrait of business tycoon
Madame Helena Rubinstein.
In 1956, Warhol began to sketch ornate footwear as a hobby. He designed whimsical shoes that were embellished with
gold leaf
upA gold nugget of 5 mm (0.2 in) in diameter (bottom) can be expanded through hammering into a gold foil of about 0.5 m2 (5.4 sq ft). The Japan.html" ;"title="Toi gold mine museum, Japan">Toi gold mine museum, Japan.
Gold leaf is gold that has ...
, and each represented a famous figure such as
Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics ...
,
Kate Smith
Kathryn Elizabeth Smith (May 1, 1907 – June 17, 1986) was an American contralto. Referred to as The First Lady of Radio, Smith became well known for her renditions of "God Bless America" and "When the Moon Comes over the Mountain". She began ...
,
James Dean
James Byron Dean (February 8, 1931September 30, 1955) was an American actor. He became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, despite a career that lasted only five years. His impact on cinema and popular culture was p ...
,
Julie Andrews
Dame Julie Andrews (born Julia Elizabeth Wells; 1 October 1935) is an English actress, singer, and author. She has garnered numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over eight decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Fi ...
,
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as Cultural impact of Elvis Presley, one of the most significant cultural figures of the ...
, and
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Zsa Zsa Gabor ( , ; born Sári Gábor ; February 6, 1917 – December 18, 2016) was a Hungarian Americans, Hungarian-American socialite and actress. Her sisters were socialites and actresses Eva Gabor and Magda Gabor.
Gabor competed in the ...
.
They sold for $50 to $225 apiece when they were exhibited at the
Bodley Gallery
The Bodley Gallery was an art gallery in New York City, from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. The Bodley specialized in contemporary art, contemporary and modern art. David Mann was director of the gallery during its heyday and Mr. and Mrs. ...
in New York in 1957.
To attract attention to himself as an artist, Warhol printed books of his illustrations such as ''
25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy'' (1957), which he would distribute to people, in an attempt to generate work.
He would often use his mother Julia Warhol's
calligraphy
Calligraphy () is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instruments. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an e ...
to accompany his illustrations.
Warhol habitually used the expedient of tracing photographs projected with an
epidiascope. Using prints by
Edward Wallowitch Edward Wallowitch (May 5, 1932 – March 25, 1981) was an American art photographer who at age 17 had three prints in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the youngest photographer to be so honored, and who collaborated with Andy ...
, who Warhol later called his "first boyfriend", the photographs would undergo a subtle transformation during Warhol's often cursory tracing of contours and
hatching
Hatching () is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing (or painting or scribing) closely spaced parallel lines. When lines are placed at an angle to one another, it is called cross-hatching. Hatching is als ...
of shadows. Warhol used Wallowitch's photograph ''Young Man Smoking a Cigarette'' () for a 1958 design for a book cover he submitted to
Simon and Schuster
Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...
for the Walter Ross pulp novel ''The Immortal'', and later used others for his series of paintings.
With the rapid expansion of the
record industry
The music industry are individuals and organizations that earn money by writing songs and musical compositions, creating and selling recorded music and sheet music, presenting concerts, as well as the organizations that aid, train, represent a ...
,
RCA Records
RCA Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation. It is one of Sony Music's four flagship labels, alongside Columbia Records (its former longtime rival), Arista Records and Epic R ...
hired Warhol to design album covers and promotional materials. Warhol was also working with high-end advertising clients such as
Tiffany & Co. by the late 1950s.
1960s

At a time when traditional artists did not buy the work of other artists, Warhol collected them. In order to survive, gallery artists typically did commercial work, such as window displays, and avoided using their real names because it was frowned upon. In contrast, Warhol gained recognition as a commercial artist, which caused tension with other artists.
This period was a key moment in the development of his persona. Some have suggested that his frequent refusal to comment on his work, to speak about himself (confining himself in interviews to responses like "Um, no" and "Um, yes", and often allowing others to speak for him)—and even the evolution of his pop style—can be traced to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the inner circles of the New York art world.
In 1960, Warhol purchased a townhouse at 1342
Lexington Avenue
Lexington Avenue, often colloquially abbreviated as "Lex", is an avenue on the East Side (Manhattan), East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The avenue carries southbound one-way traffic from East 131st Street (Manhattan), 131st Street to Gra ...
in the
Carnegie Hill
Carnegie Hill is a neighborhood within the Upper East Side, in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Its boundaries are 86th Street on the south, Fifth Avenue (Central Park) on the west, with a northern boundary at 98th Street that contin ...
neighborhood of Manhattan, which he also used as his art studio.
In April 1961, Warhol's pop paintings were exhibited for the first time in the window display of the
Bonwit Teller
Bonwit Teller & Co. was an American luxury department store in New York City, founded by Paul Bonwit in 1895 at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street, and later a chain of department stores.
In 1897, Edmund D. Teller was admitted to the partnership a ...
department store on
Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue is a major thoroughfare in the borough (New York City), borough of Manhattan in New York City. The avenue runs south from 143rd Street (Manhattan), West 143rd Street in Harlem to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The se ...
. Five paintings based on
comic strip
A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...
s and newspaper ads served as the backdrop for mannequins wearing spring dresses: ''Saturday's Popeye'', ''Little King'', ''Superman'', ''Before and After'', and ''Advertisement''.
In 1962, Warhol was taught
silkscreen
Screen printing is a printing technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink (or dye) onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. A blade or squeegee is moved across the screen in a "flood stroke" ...
printmaking techniques by
Max Arthur Cohn
Max Arthur Cohn (1903–1998) was an English-born American artist. His family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old.
Cohn was one of the artists employed by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great ...
at his graphic arts business in Manhattan. Warhol is often considered to be a pioneer in silkscreen printmaking and his techniques became more elaborate throughout his career. In his book ''
Popism'', Warhol writes: "When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something".
In May 1962, Warhol was featured in an article in ''
Time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' with his painting ''Big Campbell's Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable)'' (1962), which initiated his most sustained motif, the
Campbell's
The Campbell's Company (doing business as Campbell's and formerly known as the Campbell Soup Company) is an American company, most closely associated with its flagship canned soup products. The classic red-and-white can design used by many Campb ...
soup can. That painting became Warhol's first to be shown in a museum when it was exhibited at the
Wadsworth Atheneum
The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionism, Impressionist paintings, Hudson Riv ...
in Hartford in July 1962. On July 9, 1962, Warhol's exhibition opened at the
Ferus Gallery
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. In 1958, it was relocated across the street to ...
in Los Angeles with ''
Campbell's Soup Cans
''Campbell's Soup Cans'' (sometimes referred to as ''32 Campbell's Soup Cans'') is a Visual arts, work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by the American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuri ...
'', marking his
West Coast debut of
pop art.
In November 1962, Warhol had an exhibition at Eleanor Ward's
Stable Gallery
The Stable Gallery, originally located on West 58th Street in New York City, was founded in 1953 by Eleanor Ward. The Stable Gallery hosted early solo New York exhibitions for artists including Marisol Escobar, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol.
His ...
in New York. The exhibit included the works ''
Gold Marilyn'', eight of the classic ''Marilyn'' series also named ''Flavor Marilyns'', ''
Marilyn Diptych
The ''Marilyn Diptych'' (1962) is a silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol depicting Marilyn Monroe. The monumental work is one of the artist's most noted of the movie star.
The painting consists of 50 images. Each image o ...
'', ''100 Soup Cans'', ''100 Coke Bottles'', and ''100 Dollar Bills''. ''Gold Marilyn'' was bought by the architect
Philip Johnson
Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect who designed modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 ...
and donated to the Museum of Modern Art.
In December 1962, New York City's Museum of Modern Art hosted a
symposium
In Ancient Greece, the symposium (, ''sympósion'', from συμπίνειν, ''sympínein'', 'to drink together') was the part of a banquet that took place after the meal, when drinking for pleasure was accompanied by music, dancing, recitals, o ...
on pop art, during which artists such as Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were appalled by Warhol's open acceptance of market culture, which set the tone for his reception.
In 1963, Warhol formed
The Druds, a short-lived
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
noise band
Noise is sound, chiefly unwanted, unintentional, or harmful sound considered unpleasant, loud, or disruptive to mental or hearing faculties. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibratio ...
that included notable figures from the New York
minimal art
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or conc ...
and proto-
conceptual art scenes, including
Larry Poons
Lawrence M. "Larry" Poons (born October 1, 1937) is an American abstract painter. Poons was born in Tokyo; he studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, with the intent of becoming a professional musician. Afte ...
,
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
,
Walter De Maria
Walter Joseph De MariaRoberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 ''New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Yor ...
,
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and ...
,
Claes Oldenberg, and
Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras (; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter.
Early life and education
Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece on September 14, 1936. He studied at Rutgers University and b ...
.
In January 1963, Warhol rented his first studio—an old firehouse at 159 East 87th Street—where he created his ''Elvis'' series, which included ''
Eight Elvises
''Eight Elvises'' is a 1963 silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol of Elvis Presley. In 2008, it was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for $100 million to a private buyer, which at the time was the most valuable work by Andy Warhol. ...
'' (1963) and ''
Triple Elvis
''Triple Elvis'' is a 1963 painting of Elvis Presley by the American artist Andy Warhol. The photographic image of Elvis used by Warhol as a basis for this work, taken from a publicity still from the movie '' Flaming Star'', has become iconic ...
'' (1963).
These portraits, along with a series of
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was an English and American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 19 ...
portraits, were shown at his second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
Later that year, Warhol relocated his studio to East 47th Street, which would turn into
The Factory
The Factory was Andy Warhol's art studio in Manhattan, New York City, which had four locations between 1963 and 1987. The Factory became famous for its parties in the 1960s. It was the hip hangout spot for artists, musicians, celebrities, and ...
.
The Factory became a popular gathering spot for a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities.
Warhol had his second exhibition at the Stable Gallery in the spring of 1964, which featured sculptures of commercial boxes stacked and scattered throughout the space to resemble a warehouse. For the exhibition, Warhol custom ordered wooden boxes and silkscreened graphics onto them. The sculptures—''
Brillo
Brillo is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaning dishes, and made from steel wool filled with soap. The concept was patented in 1913, at a time when aluminium pots and pans were replacing cast iron in the kitchen; the new cookware b ...
Box'', ''
Del Monte Peach Box'', ''
Heinz Tomato Ketchup
Heinz Tomato Ketchup is a brand of ketchup manufactured by the H. J. Heinz Company, a division of the Kraft Heinz Company.
History
It was first marketed as " catsup" in 1876. In 1907, manufacturing reached 12 million bottles and it was exp ...
Box'', ''
Kellogg's Cornflakes Box'', ''Campbell's Tomato Juice Box'' and ''
Mott's Apple Juice Box''—sold for $200 to $400 depending on the size of the box.
A pivotal event was ''The American Supermarket'' exhibition at Paul Bianchini's
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side, sometimes abbreviated UES, is a neighborhood in the boroughs of New York City, borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded approximately by 96th Street (Manhattan), 96th Street to the north, the East River to the e ...
gallery in late 1964.
The show was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it—from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc.—was created by prominent pop artists of the time, among them sculptor
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...
, Mary Inman and
Bob Watts.
Warhol designed a $12 paper shopping bag—plain white with a red Campbell's soup can.
His painting of a can of a Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for three for $18, $6.50 each.
The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is.
Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity and these collaborations would remain a defining and controversial aspect of his working methods throughout his career. One of Warhol's most important collaborators during this period was
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.
Malanga worked with pop artist Andy Warhol from 1963 to 1970. The New York Times referred to him as "Andy Warhol's most import ...
who assisted him with the production of silkscreens and films at The Factory, Warhol's studio that was covered in
aluminium foil
Aluminium foil (or aluminum foil in American English; occasionally called tin foil) is aluminium prepared in thin metal leaves. The foil is pliable and can be readily bent or wrapped around objects. Thin foils are fragile and are sometimes ...
and painted silver by
Billy Name
William George Linich (February 22, 1940 – July 18, 2016), known professionally as Billy Name, was an American photographer, filmmaker, and lighting designer. He was the archivist of The Factory from 1964 to 1970. His brief romance and subseq ...
.
In November 1964, Warhol's first ''Flowers'' series exhibited at the
Leo Castelli Gallery
Leo Castelli ( Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements which Castelli sh ...
in New York. In May 1965, his second ''Flowers'' series, which had more sizes and color variation that the previous, was shown at
Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. During this trip Warhol announced that he was retiring from painting to focus on film.

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of
bohemian
Bohemian or Bohemians may refer to:
*Anything of or relating to Bohemia
Culture and arts
* Bohemianism, an unconventional lifestyle, originally practised by 19th–20th century European and American artists and writers.
* Bohemian style, a ...
and
counterculture
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Ho ...
eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "
superstars
A superstar is a widely acclaimed celebrity.
Superstar or superstars may also refer to:
People
* "Superstar" Krishna (1943–2022), Indian film actor, director and producer in Telugu cinema
* "Superstar" Mahesh Babu (born 1975), Indian actor
* ...
", including
Baby Jane Holzer,
Brigid Berlin
Brigid Emmett Berlin (September 6, 1939 – July 17, 2020), also known as Brigid Polk, was an American artist and Warhol superstar.
Life and career
Early years
Berlin was born on September 6, 1939, in Manhattan in New York City. She was the ...
,
Ondine,
Edie Sedgwick
Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post (April 20, 1943 – November 16, 1971) was an American actress, model and socialite who was one of Andy Warhol's superstars, starring in several of his short films during the 1960s.Watson, Steven (2003), "Factory Ma ...
,
Ingrid Superstar,
Nico
Christa Päffgen (; 16 October 1938 – 18 July 1988), known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer, songwriter, actress, and model.
Nico had roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's '' La Dolce Vita'' (1960) and Andy Warhol's ...
,
International Velvet,
Mary Woronov
Mary Woronov (born December 8, 1943) is an American actress, writer, and Figurative art, figurative painter. She is primarily known as a cult film star because of her work with Andy Warhol and her roles in Roger Corman's cult films. Woronov has ...
,
Viva,
Ultra Violet,
Joe Dallesandro
Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro III (born December 31, 1948) is an American actor and Warhol superstar. He was a sex symbol of gay subculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and of several American underground films before going mainstream.
Dallesandro star ...
,
Candy Darling
Candy Darling (November 24, 1944 – March 21, 1974) was an American actress, best known as a Warhol superstar.
She was a pioneer for transgender visibility, inspiring songs by the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed. Her performances Andy Warhol's f ...
,
Holly Woodlawn
Holly Woodlawn (October 26, 1946 – December 6, 2015) was an American actress and Warhol superstar who appeared in the films '' Trash'' (1970) and '' Women in Revolt'' (1971). She is also known as the Holly in Lou Reed's hit glam rock song " Wal ...
,
Jackie Curtis
Jackie Curtis (born John Curtis Holder Jr.; February 19, 1947 – May 15, 1985) was an American underground actor, singer, and playwright best known as a Warhol superstars, Warhol superstar. Primarily a stage actor in New York City, Curtis per ...
and
Jane Forth. These people participated in the Factory films, and some—like Berlin—remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and filmmaker
Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this time. Less well known was his support and collaboration with several teenagers during this era, who would achieve prominence later in life, including writer
David Dalton, photographer
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include ''Uncommon Places'' (1982) and ''American Surfaces ...
, and artist
Bibbe Hansen
Bibbe Hansen is an American performance artist, musician and actress.
Family
Hansen's parents were Bohemian Jewish poet Audrey Ostlin Hansen and Fluxus artist Al Hansen, a participant in the Andy Warhol Factory. Her stepfather was Jimmy Shapiro ...
(mother of pop musician
Beck
Beck David Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970), known mononymously as Beck, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his Experimental music, experimental and Lo-fi mus ...
).
The experimental rock group
the Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground were an American Rock music, rock band formed in New York City in 1964. Its classic lineup consisted of singer and guitarist Lou Reed, Welsh multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and percussionis ...
was taken on by Warhol around the end of 1965. In his capacity as their manager, he included them as a key component of his ''
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable'', sometimes simply called ''Plastic Inevitable'' or ''EPI'', was a series of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk events organized by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by th ...
'' multimedia performances in 1966 and 1967, and he funded their debut album, ''
The Velvet Underground & Nico
''The Velvet Underground & Nico'' is the debut studio album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground and the German singer Nico. Released by Verve Records in March 1967, the album underperformed in sales and polarized critics upon releas ...
'' (1967).
Warhol made a conscious decision to oppose conventional painting, stating that he no longer believed in painting. In response to art dealer
Ivan Karp
Ivan C. Karp (June 4, 1926 – June 28, 2012) was an American art dealer, gallerist and author instrumental in the emergence of pop art and the development of Manhattan's SoHo gallery district in the 1960s.
Ivan Karp was born in the Bronx and gr ...
's suggestion to paint cows, Warhol produced ''
Cow Wallpaper,'' which covered the walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery during his April 1966 exhibition.
In 1967, Warhol established
Factory Additions for his printmaking and publishing enterprise.
To duplicate prints for a wide audience, Factory Additions published multiple portfolios of ten images each in editions of 250. These were then printed using professional screen printers.
Warhol intended to present the film ''
Chelsea Girls
''Chelsea Girls'' is a 1966 American experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films (both feature-length and short). I ...
'' (1966) at the
1967 Cannes Film Festival, but it wasn't shown because "the festival authorities explained that the film was too long, there were technical problems."
To finance his film productions Warhol began going on college lecture tours, where he screened some of his underground films and answered audience questions.
Actor
Allen Midgette was sent by Warhol to impersonate him during a West Coast college tour in October 1967.
Warhol reimbursed the four institutions where he did not appear and returned to the campuses in 1968.
In February 1968, Warhol's first solo museum exhibition was mounted at the
Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened Moderna Museet Malmö in Malmö.
History
The museum opened in Stockh ...
in Stockholm.
1968 assassination attempt
On June 3, 1968,
radical feminist
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other ...
writer
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist known for her attempt to murder the artist Andy Warhol in 1968.
Solanas appeared in the Warhol film '' I, a Man'' (1967) and self-published the '' SCU ...
shot Warhol and
Mario Amaya
Mario Amaya (October 6, 1933 – June 29, 1986) was an American art critic, museum director and magazine editor, and (1972–1976) director of the New York Cultural Center and (1976–1979) the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. He ...
, art critic and curator, at The Factory.
Solanas had been a marginal figure in the Factory scene before the shooting. She authored the ''
SCUM Manifesto
''SCUM Manifesto'' is a self-published manifesto by American radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Published in 1967, it argues that men have ruined the world, and that it is up to women to fix it. To achieve this goal, it suggests the formation of ...
'',
a
separatist feminist tract that advocated the elimination of men; and appeared in the Warhol film ''
I, a Man
''I, a Man'' is a 1967 American erotic drama film written, directed and filmed by Andy Warhol. It debuted at the Hudson Theatre in New York City on August 25, 1967. The film depicts the main character, played by Tom Baker, in a series of sexual ...
'' (1967).
[Jobey, Liz, "Solanas and Son," ''The Guardian'' (Manchester, England), August 24, 1996, p, T10 and following.] Amaya received only minor injuries and was released from the hospital later the same day. Warhol was seriously wounded by the attack and barely survived: he remained in hospital for nearly two months.
Solanas turned herself in to the police a few hours after the attack and said that Warhol "had too much control over my life."
She was subsequently diagnosed with
paranoid schizophrenia
Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, hearing voices), delusions, disorganized thinking and behavior, and flat or inappropriate affect. Symptoms develop gradually and typically begin ...
and eventually sentenced to three years in prison.
Jed Johnson, an assistant who was at the Factory during the shooting,
visited Warhol daily during his hospitalization, and the two developed an
intimate relationship
An intimate relationship is an interpersonal relationship that involves emotional or physical closeness between people and may include sexual intimacy and feelings of romance or love. Intimate relationships are interdependent, and the member ...
. Johnson moved in with Warhol shortly after he was discharged from the hospital to help him recuperate and take care of his ailing mother, Julia Warhola.
The assassination attempt had a profound effect on Warhol's life and art.
He had physical effects for the rest of his life, including being required to wear a surgical
corset
A corset /ˈkɔːrsɪt/ is a support garment worn to constrict the torso into the desired shape and Posture correction, posture. They are traditionally constructed out of fabric with boning made of Baleen, whalebone or steel, a stiff panel in th ...
.
The Factory became more regulated, and Warhol focused on making it a business enterprise. He credited his collaborator
Paul Morrissey
Paul Joseph Morrissey (February 23, 1938 – October 28, 2024) was an American film director, known for his early association with Andy Warhol. His most famous films include ''Flesh (1968 film), Flesh'' (1968), ''Trash (1970 film), Trash'' (197 ...
with transforming the Factory into a "regular office."
Post-shooting
In August 1968, Warhol made an appearance in court after Phillip "Fufu" Van Scoy Smith, an investor in a canceled film adaptation of the
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Nicholls (; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855), commonly known as Charlotte Brontë (, commonly ), was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë family, Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novel ...
novel ''
Jane Eyre
''Jane Eyre'' ( ; originally published as ''Jane Eyre: An Autobiography'') is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The firs ...
'', sued him for $80,000. A legal battle ensued for 2 years, ending after the backer failed to show up in court.
In September 1968, Warhol and Ultra Violet attended a party to celebrate the completion of the film ''
Midnight Cowboy
''Midnight Cowboy'' is a 1969 American drama film directed by John Schlesinger, adapted by Waldo Salt from the 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, with supporting roles played by Sylvia Miles, J ...
''.
In the film, there is a party scene featuring members of the Factory that was filmed during Warhol's hospitalization.
Warhol hosted a party at the Factory for
Nico
Christa Päffgen (; 16 October 1938 – 18 July 1988), known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer, songwriter, actress, and model.
Nico had roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's '' La Dolce Vita'' (1960) and Andy Warhol's ...
's album ''
The Marble Index
''The Marble Index'' is the second studio album by the German musician Nico, released in November 1968 on Elektra Records. The avant-garde sound introduced in the album—a stark contrast with her folk pop debut, '' Chelsea Girl'' (1967)—was t ...
'' in September 1968. Warhol, Viva and Ultra Violet appeared on the cover of the November 10, 1968, issue of ''
The New York Times Magazine
''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. The magazi ...
''.
In 1969, Warhol and his entourage traveled to Los Angeles to discuss a prospective movie deal with
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Trade name, doing business as Columbia Pictures, is an American film Production company, production and Film distributor, distribution company that is the flagship unit of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group ...
. Warhol, who has always had an interest in photography, used a
Polaroid camera
Polaroid may refer to:
* Polaroid Corporation, an American company known for its instant film and cameras
* Polaroid camera, a brand of instant camera formerly produced by Polaroid Corporation
* Polaroid film, instant film, and photographs
* Polaro ...
to document his recuperation after the shooting. In 1969, some of his photographs were published in ''
Esquire
Esquire (, ; abbreviated Esq.) is usually a courtesy title. In the United Kingdom, ''esquire'' historically was a title of respect accorded to men of higher social rank, particularly members of the landed gentry above the rank of gentleman ...
'' magazine. He would become well known for always carrying his Polaroid camera to chronicle his encounters. Eventually, he used instant photography as the basis for his silkscreen portraits when he resumed painting in the 1970s.
Warhol and British journalist
John Wilcock
John Wilcock (4 August 1927 – 13 September 2018) was a British journalist known for his work in the underground press, as well as his travel guide books.
The first news editor of the New York ''Village Voice'', Wilcock shook up staid publish ...
founded ''
Interview
An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers.Merriam Webster DictionaryInterview Dictionary definition, Retrieved February 16, 2016 In common parlance, the word "interview" re ...
'' magazine in the fall of 1969. The magazine was initially published as ''inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal''. It was revamped a few years later and came to represent Warhol's social life and fascination with celebrity.
In 1969, Warhol received an invitation to curate an exhibition using items from the permanent collection of the
RISD Museum
The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877. It is the 20th-largest art m ...
in Providence. In October 1969, the exhibition ''Raid the Icebox'' opened at
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres.
Rice University comp ...
's Institute for the Arts in Houston.
In 1970, the show traveled to the
Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans before arriving at the RISD Museum.
1970s

Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the early 1970s were much quieter years, as he became more entrepreneurial. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy and a meticulous observer. Art critic
Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of
Union Square". His fashion evolved from what Warhol called his "leather look" to his "
Brooks Brothers
Brooks Brothers Inc. is an American clothing brand founded in 1818 which is the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the United States. Originally a family business, it is currently owned as a joint venture between Authentic Brands G ...
look," which included a Brooks Brothers shirt and tie, DeNoyer blazer, and
Levi
Levi ( ; ) was, according to the Book of Genesis, the third of the six sons of Jacob and Leah (Jacob's third son), and the founder of the Israelites, Israelite Tribe of Levi (the Levites, including the Kohanim) and the great-grandfather of Aaron ...
jeans.
As Warhol continued to forge into filmmaking, he had established himself as "one of the most celebrated and well-known pop art figures to emerge from the sixties." The
Pasadena Art Museum
The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum located in Pasadena, California. It was previously known as the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum and displays numerous sculptures on its grounds.
Overview
The Norton Simon collections ...
in
Pasadena
Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial d ...
organized a major
retrospective
A retrospective (from Latin ', "look back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works that were produced, in the past. As a noun, ''retrospective'' has specific meanings in software development, popular culture, and the arts. ...
of his work in 1970. The show traveled to the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art art gallery, museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side, Chicago, Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is on ...
;
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris;
Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...
, London; and
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
, New York. The Whitney exhibition in 1971 distinctly featured Warhol's ''
Cow Wallpaper'' (1966) as the backdrop for his paintings.
In May 1971, Warhol's theater production, ''
Andy Warhol's Pork'', opened at the
La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. In August 1971, it was brought to the
Roundhouse in London.
In late 1971, Warhol and his business partner Paul Morrissey purchased
Eothen, an oceanfront estate in
Montauk, New York
Montauk ( ) is a Hamlet (New York), hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in East Hampton, New York, East Hampton and Suffolk County, New York, on the eastern end of the South Shore (Long Island), South Shore of Long Island. As of the 2020 Un ...
on
Long Island
Long Island is a densely populated continental island in southeastern New York (state), New York state, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. It constitutes a significant share of the New York metropolitan area in both population and land are ...
. They began renting the main house on the property in 1972.
Lee Radziwill
Caroline Lee Radziwill (; March 3, 1933 – February 15, 2019), previously known as Lee Canfield and Lee Ross, was an American socialite, public relations executive, and interior designer. She was the younger sister of former First Lady of the ...
,
Jackie Kennedy
Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis ( ; July 28, 1929 – May 19, 1994) was an American writer, book editor, and socialite who served as the first lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, as the wife of President John F. Kennedy. A popular f ...
,
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for over six decades, they are one of the most popular, influential, and enduring bands of the Album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pione ...
,
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was an English and American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 19 ...
,
Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics ...
, and
Halston
Roy Halston Frowick (April 23, 1932 – March 26, 1990), known mononymously as Halston, was an American fashion designer, who rose to international fame in the 1970s.
Halston's minimalist, clean designs, which were often made of cashmere or ...
were among the estate's notable guests.

Warhol is credited with both the cover concept and photography for
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for over six decades, they are one of the most popular, influential, and enduring bands of the Album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pione ...
' albums ''
Sticky Fingers
''Sticky Fingers'' is the ninth studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was released on 23 April 1971 on the Rolling Stones' new label, Rolling Stones Records.
The Rolling Stones had been contracted by Decca Records an ...
'' (1971).
He received a Grammy nomination for
Best Album Cover
The Grammy Award for Best Recording Package is one of a series of Grammy Awards
The Grammy Awards, stylized as GRAMMY, and often referred to as The Grammys, are awards presented by The Recording Academy of the United States to recognize out ...
at the
14th Annual Grammy Awards
The 14th Annual Grammy Awards were held March 14, 1972, and were broadcast live on television in the United States by ABC; the following year, they would move the telecasts to CBS, where they remain to this date. They recognized accomplishmen ...
in 1972.
In 1972, Warhol planned the Halston runway presentation at the
Coty Awards.
Although Warhol was considered to be
apolitical
Apoliticism is apathy or antipathy towards all political affiliations. A person may be described as apolitical if they are uninterested or uninvolved in politics. Being apolitical can also refer to situations in which people take an unbiased p ...
, he participated in an exhibition with the poster ''
Vote McGovern'' (1972) in effort to raise funds for
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012) was an American politician, diplomat, and historian who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator from South Dakota, and the Democratic Party (United States), Democ ...
's
1972 presidential campaign.
Warhol and his partner Jed Johnson got a dachshund puppy,
Archie Warhol, in November 1972.
Warhol doted on Archie and took him everywhere: to the studio, parties, restaurants, and on trips to Europe.
He created portraits of Johnson, Archie, and Amos—a second dachshund they got a few years later.
Warhol began traveling to Europe more frequently and developed a fondness for Paris. Warhol had an apartment that he shared with his business manager
Fred Hughes on the
Left Bank
In geography, a bank is the land alongside a body of water.
Different structures are referred to as ''banks'' in different fields of geography.
In limnology (the study of inland waters), a stream bank or river bank is the terrain alongsid ...
of Paris on Rue du Cherche-Midi.
In October 1972, Warhol's work was included in the inaugural show at the
Art Museum of South Texas in
Corpus Christi, Texas
Corpus Christi ( ; ) is a Gulf Coast of the United States, coastal city in the South Texas region of the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat and largest city of Nueces County, Texas, Nueces County with portions extending into Aransas County, T ...
. Between 1972 and 1973, Warhol created a series of portraits of Chinese Communist leader
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong pronounced ; traditionally Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Mao Tse-tung. (26December 18939September 1976) was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in ...
with funding from two New York galleries,
Knoedler & Co. and the Leo Castelli Gallery, as well as art collector
Peter Brant
Peter Mark Brant Sr. (born March 1, 1947) is an American industrialist and art collector. He is married to model Stephanie Seymour. He was also a magazine publisher until 2018 and a film producer.
Early life and education
Brant was raised i ...
.
In February 1974, some of the Mao portraits were installed at the
Musée Galliera
The Palais Galliera, also formally known as the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Fashion Museum), and formerly known as Musée Galliera, is a museum of fashion and fashion history located at 10, avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, ...
in Paris.
In 1974, Warhol and Johnson moved from his home on Lexington Avenue to a townhouse at 57 East 66th Street in Manhattan's
Lenox Hill
Lenox Hill () is a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It forms the lower (southern) section of the Upper East Side, east of Park Avenue in the 60s and 70s.
A significant portion of the neighborhood lies withi ...
neighborhood. By this time, Warhol's public presence had increased significantly due to his attendance at parties. In 1974, he said, "I try to go around so often so much and try to go to every party so that they'll be bored with me and stop writing about me."

Warhol designed the sets for the
Broadway
Broadway may refer to:
Theatre
* Broadway Theatre (disambiguation)
* Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
** Broadway (Manhattan), the street
** Broadway Theatre (53rd Stre ...
musical ''
Man on the Moon'' by
John Philips
John Philips (30 December 1676 – 15 February 1709) was an 18th-century English poet.
Early life and education
Philips was born at Bampton, Oxfordshire, the son of Rev. Stephen Philips, later archdeacon of Salop, and his wife Mary Wood. ...
of
the Mamas & the Papas
The Mamas & the Papas were an American folk rock vocal group that recorded and performed from 1965 to 1968, with a brief reunion in 1971. The group was a defining force in the music scene of the counterculture of the 1960s. Formed in New York C ...
, which opened in January 1975 at the
Little Theatre in New York.
In May 1975, Warhol attended
President Gerald Ford's state dinner in honor of the
Shah of Iran
The monarchs of Iran ruled for over two and a half millennia, beginning as early as the 7th century BC and enduring until the 20th century AD. The earliest Iranian king is generally considered to have been either Deioces of the Median dynasty () ...
,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980) was the last List of monarchs of Iran, Shah of Iran, ruling from 1941 to 1979. He succeeded his father Reza Shah and ruled the Imperial State of Iran until he was overthrown by the ...
, at the
White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...
. In September 1975, he went on an eight-city U.S. book tour for his book ''
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again)'', followed by stops in Italy, France, and England.
In 1976, Warhol and painter
Jamie Wyeth
James Browning Wyeth (born July 6, 1946) is an American Realism (arts), realist painter, son of Andrew Wyeth, and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, and is artistic heir to the Brandywine School traditio ...
were commissioned to paint each other's portraits by the Coe Kerr Gallery in Manhattan. In January 1977, Warhol traveled to Kuwait for the opening of his exhibition at the Dhaiat Abdulla Al Salem Gallery. In June 1977, Warhol was invited to a special reception honoring the "Inaugural Artists" who had contributed prints to the
Jimmy Carter presidential campaign. In 1977, Warhol was commissioned by art collector Richard Weisman to create ''
Athletes
An athlete is most commonly a person who competes in one or more sports involving physical strength, speed, power, or endurance. Sometimes, the word "athlete" is used to refer specifically to sport of athletics competitors, i.e. including trac ...
'', ten portraits consisting of the leading athletes of the day.
The opening of
Studio 54
Studio 54 is a Broadway theatre, Broadway theater and former nightclub at 254 West 54th Street (Manhattan), 54th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. Opened as the Gallo Opera House in 1927, it served ...
in 1977 ushered in a new era in New York City nightlife. Warhol would often socialize at Studio 54 and take note of the drug-fueled activities that his friends engaged in at parties. In 1977, Warhol began taking nude photographs of men in various poses and performing sexual acts—referred to as "landscapes"—for what became known as the ''Torsos'' and ''Sex Parts'' series. Most of the men were street hustlers and male prostitutes brought to the Factory by Halston's lover
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romanticism, Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.
His most famous works are the novels ''The Hunchbac ...
. This caused tension in Warhol's relationship with Johnson who did not approve of his friendship with Hugo. "When Studio 54 opened things changed with Andy. That was New York when it was at the height of its most decadent period, and I didn't take part. I never liked that scene, I was never comfortable. ... Andy was just wasting his time, and it was really upsetting. ... He just spent his time with the most ridiculous people," said Johnson.
In 1979, Warhol formed a publishing company, Andy Warhol Books, and released the book ''
Exposures'', which contained his photographs of famous friends and acquaintances. In November 1979, he embarked on a three-week book tour in the US.
According to former ''Interview'' editor
Bob Colacello
Bob Colacello (born May 8, 1947) is an American writer. He began his career writing for ''The'' ''Village Voice'' before becoming an editor for pop artist Andy Warhol's ''Interview'' magazine from 1970 to 1983. His roles at ''Interview'' included ...
, Warhol devoted much of his time to rounding up new, rich patrons for portrait commissions—including Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his wife Empress
Farah Pahlavi
Farah Pahlavi (; []; born 14 October 1938) is the former Queen and last Empress () of Pahlavi Iran and is the third wife and widow of the last List of monarchs of Iran, Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
She was born into a prosperous Ira ...
, his sister
Princess Ashraf Pahlavi
Ashraf ol-Molouk Pahlavi (, , 26 October 1919 – 7 January 2016) was the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran (Name of Iran, Persia), and a member of the Pahlavi dynasty. She was considered the "power behind her brother" ...
,
Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip Jagger (born 26 July 1943) is an English musician. He is known as the lead singer and one of the founder members of The Rolling Stones. Jagger has co-written most of the band's songs with lead guitarist Keith Richards; Jagge ...
,
Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli ( ; born March 12, 1946) is an American actress, singer, and dancer. Known for her commanding stage presence and powerful alto singing voice, Minnelli has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, ...
,
John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter, musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's ...
,
Diana Ross
Diana Ross (born Diane Ernestine Earle Ross March 26, 1944) is an American singer and actress. Known as the "Queen of Motown Records", she was the lead singer of the vocal group the Supremes, who became Motown#Major divisions, Motown's most suc ...
and
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot ( ; ; born 28 September 1934), often referred to by her initials B.B., is a French former actress, singer, and model as well as an animal rights activist. Famous for portraying characters with Hedonism, hedonistic life ...
. In November 1979, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the exhibition ''Andy Warhol: Portraits of the '70s'' to celebrate the "very commercial celebrity of the '70s, the decade of
''People'' magazine and
designer jeans."
Some critics disliked his exhibits of portraits of personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects.
1980s
Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success in the 1980s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the "
bull market
A market trend is a perceived tendency of the financial markets to move in a particular direction over time. Analysts classify these trends as ''secular'' for long time-frames, ''primary'' for medium time-frames, and ''secondary'' for short time ...
" of 1980s New York art:
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the neo-expressionism movement.
Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti ...
,
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings"—with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a ...
,
David Salle
David Salle (born September 28, 1952; last name pronounced "Sally") is an American Postmodern painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earned a B ...
and other so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as members of the Transavantgarde movement in Europe, including Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. Warhol also earned street credibility and graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy paid homage to him by painting an entire train with Campbell soup cans.His 1980 exhibition ''Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century'' at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan), Jewish Museum in Manhattan was panned by critics. Warhol—who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews—had described in his diary as "They're going to sell."
The New York Academy of Art was founded in part by Warhol. First established in 1980, the institute's mission was to "revive traditional methods of training artists."
According to fellow co-founder Stuart Pivar, "What happened was that Modernism got boring [for Warhol] ... But his overall game plan, what he really believed, was that the modern age was going away and that we were entering a Neoclassicism, neoclassical period."
In 1981, Warhol worked on a project with Peter Sellars and Lewis Allen (director), Lewis Allen that would create a traveling stage show called, ''A No Man Show'', with a life-sized animatronic robot in the exact image of Warhol. The ''Andy Warhol Robot'' would then be able to read Warhol's diaries as a theatrical production. Warhol was quoted as saying, "I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?"
Warhol also had an appreciation for intense Hollywood glamour. He once said: "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're so beautiful. Everything's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." Warhol occasionally walked the fashion runways and did product endorsements, represented by Zoli Agency and later Ford Models.
In 1983, Warhol was commissioned to create a poster for the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The poster was his contribution to the 1983 New York Art Expo.
Warhol created a series of endangered species silkscreen prints for his exhibition ''Warhol's Animals: Species at Risk'' at New York City's American Museum of Natural History in April 1983.
Warhol donated 10 of the 150 sets he made to wildlife organizations "so they could sell them to raise money."
Prior to the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, he teamed with 15 other artists, including David Hockney and Cy Twombly, and contributed a Speed Skater print to the Art and Sport collection. The Speed Skater was used for the official Sarajevo Winter Olympics poster.
In 1984, ''Vanity Fair (magazine), Vanity Fair'' commissioned Warhol to produce a portrait of Prince (musician), Prince, to accompany an article that celebrated the success of ''Purple Rain (album), Purple Rain'' and Purple Rain (film), its accompanying movie. Referencing the many celebrity portraits produced by Warhol across his career, ''Orange Prince (1984)'' was created using a similar composition to the Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn "Flavors" series from 1962, among some of Warhol's first celebrity portraits. Prince is depicted in a pop color palette commonly used by Warhol, in bright orange with highlights of bright green and blue. The facial features and hair are screen-printed in black over the orange background.
In September 1985, Warhol's joint exhibition with Basquiat, ''Paintings'', opened to negative reviews at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. That month, despite apprehension from Warhol, his silkscreen series ''Reigning Queens'' was shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In the ''The Andy Warhol Diaries, Andy Warhol Diaries'', Warhol noted: "They were supposed to be only for Europe—nobody here cares about royalty and it'll be another bad review."
In January 1987, Warhol traveled to Milan for the opening of his last exhibition, ''Last Supper'', at the Palazzo delle Stelline. The next month, Warhol modeled with jazz musician Miles Davis for Koshin Satoh's fashion show at the Tunnel (New York nightclub), Tunnel in New York City on February 17, 1987.
Death
Warhol was initially diagnosed with a gallstone in 1973, but he adamantly rejected surgery because he feared hospitals. When he was insistent about avoiding surgery, his internist Denton Cox attempted to obtain an experimental medication from Japan.
The artist also sought guidance from a chiropractor and nutritionist, who suggested that he wear a small crystal.
Dehydrated and unable to eat, Warhol was in excruciating pain by February 1987.
Warhol was admitted to New York Hospital in Manhattan on February 20, and he underwent gallbladder surgery on February 21.
His surgeon Bjorn Thorbjarnarson found his gallbladder "on the verge of perforating" and in danger of "spilling the infection into (Warhol's) belly."
Warhol was awake and able to walk about, make phone calls, and watch television when both of his doctors visited him following the four-hour operation.
His private nurse, Min Cho, saw his growing pallor at 4:30 the following morning, but she did not call the hospital's cardiac-arrest team until 5:45 a.m., when he was "unresponsive" and turning blue.
He was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m. from sudden Arrhythmia, cardiac arrhythmia.
Warhol's brothers took his body back to Pittsburgh, where an open-casket Wake (ceremony), wake was held at the Thomas P. Kunsak Funeral Home. The solid bronze casket had gold-plated rails and white upholstery. Warhol was dressed in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, and a platinum wig. He was laid out holding a small prayer book and a red rose. The funeral liturgy was held at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church (Pittsburgh), Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church on Pittsburgh's North Shore (Pittsburgh), North Side on February 26, 1987. Monsignor Peter Tay delivered the eulogy. After the liturgy, the casket, covered with white roses and Asparagus aethiopicus, asparagus ferns, was driven to St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, a south suburb of Pittsburgh, where Warhol was buried near his parents. The priest said a brief prayer at the graveside and sprinkled holy water on the casket. Before the casket was lowered, Warhol's close friend and Interview staffer Paige Powell placed copies of the February and March issues and a bottle of Beautiful Eau de Parfum by The Estée Lauder Companies, Estée Lauder into his grave.
A memorial service for Warhol was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral (Midtown Manhattan), St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on April 1, 1987. It was attended by over 2,000 people, including Warhol collaborators and numerous celebrities such as Raquel Welch, Debbie Harry,
Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli ( ; born March 12, 1946) is an American actress, singer, and dancer. Known for her commanding stage presence and powerful alto singing voice, Minnelli has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, ...
, Claus von Bülow, and Calvin Klein, among others.
Eulogies were given by John Richardson (art historian), John Richardson and Yoko Ono.
Following the memorial, there was a luncheon at the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub beneath the Paramount Hotel.
Wrongful death lawsuit
In April 1987, the New York State Department of Health, New York State Health Department released a report that Warhol was given inadequate care by New York Hospital from the time he was admitted until the hours before his death.
These included not performing the appropriate work-up tests prior to surgery, giving Warhol antibiotics to which he may have experienced an allergic response, causing him to become overhydrated, and repeatedly failing to take accurate notes on his chart.
There were no issues with the procedure itself, according to the report.
In response, the hospital dismissed the private nurse who had been employed to care for Warhol and penalized the staff nurse who had been tasked with overseeing her.
However, the hospital claimed that the nursing deficiencies were not significant enough to cause Warhol's death.
In December 1991, Warhol's family sued the hospital in the New York Supreme Court for inadequate care, before judge Ira Gammerman, saying that the arrhythmia was caused by improper care and water intoxication. The malpractice case was quickly settled out of court; Warhol's family received an undisclosed sum of money.
Prior to his surgery, doctors expected Warhol to survive, though a re-evaluation of the case about thirty years after his death showed many indications that Warhol's surgery was in fact riskier than originally thought.
It was widely reported at the time that Warhol had died of a "routine" surgery, though when considering factors such as his age, a Family history (medicine), family history of gallbladder problems, his previous gunshot wound, and his medical state in the weeks leading up to the procedure, the potential risk of death following the surgery appeared to have been significant.
Art works
Paintings
By the beginning of the 1960s, pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning.
From these beginnings, he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the handmade from the artistic process. Warhol was an early adopter of the
silkscreen
Screen printing is a printing technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink (or dye) onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. A blade or squeegee is moved across the screen in a "flood stroke" ...
printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. His later drawings were traced from slide projections. Warhol had several assistants through the years, including
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.
Malanga worked with pop artist Andy Warhol from 1963 to 1970. The New York Times referred to him as "Andy Warhol's most import ...
, Ronnie Cutrone, and George Condo, who produced his silkscreen multiples, following his directions to make different versions and variations.
Warhol's first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bonwit Teller's window display. For his first major exhibition in 1962, Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell's soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for 20 years. Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects such as dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe,
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as Cultural impact of Elvis Presley, one of the most significant cultural figures of the ...
and
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was an English and American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 19 ...
, as well as newspaper headlines. His work became popular and controversial. Warhol had this to say about Coca-Cola:
In 1962, Warhol created his famous ''Marilyn'' series. The Flavor Marilyns were selected from a group of fourteen canvases in the sub-series, each measuring 20" x 16". Some of the canvases were named after various candy Life Savers flavors, including ''Cherry Marilyn'', ''Lemon Marilyn'' and ''Licorice Marilyn''. The others are identified by their background colors.
Warhol produced both comic and serious works; his subject could be a soup can or an electric chair. Warhol used the same techniques—silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors—whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes and disasters, as in the 1962–63 ''Death and Disaster'' series.
In the 1970s, Warhol evolved into a commercial artist, painting mostly commissioned portraits of celebrities.
In 1979, Warhol was commissioned to paint a BMW M1 Group 4 (racing), Group 4 racing version for the fourth installment of the BMW Art Car project.
He was initially asked to paint a BMW 320i in 1978, but the car model was changed and it didn't qualify for the race that year. Warhol was the first artist to paint directly onto the automobile himself instead of letting technicians transfer a scale-model design to the car.
Reportedly, it took him only 23 minutes to paint the entire car. Racecar drivers Hervé Poulain, Manfred Winkelhock and Marcel Mignot drove the car at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Some of Warhol's work, as well as his own personality, has been described as being Keatonesque. Warhol revelled in the role of "monosyllabic oddity," playing dumb to the media. He sometimes refused to explain his work. He suggested that all one needs to know about his work is "already there 'on the surface.'" Interior designer Jed Johnson, Warhol's partner who decorated his home, stated that Warhol objected to hanging his own artwork on his walls because it was "too corny" to put up your own work.
"He felt an artist should keep neutral expression on his face when he showed his work to other people, that to betray pleasure or displeasure was, again 'corny.' I'd watch him at many museum and gallery openings of his shows, and he followed that policy consistently," said Johnson.
His Rorschach inkblots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (wallpaper with a cow Motif (visual arts), motif) and oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works—and their means of production—mirrored the atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory". Former ''Interview'' editor Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings":
Warhol's 1982 portrait of Basquiat, ''Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982 painting), Jean-Michel Basquiat'', is a silkscreen over an oxidized copper "piss painting". After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, etc., Warhol returned to painting with a brush in hand. In 1983, Warhol began collaborating with Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. Warhol and Basquiat created a series of more than 50 large collaborative works between 1984 and 1985. Despite criticism when these were first shown, Warhol called some of them "masterpieces", and they were influential for his later work.
In 1984, Warhol was commissioned by collector and gallerist
Alexander Iolas
Alexander Iolas (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας) (March 26, 1908 – June 8, 1987) was an Egyptian-born Greek-American art gallerist and significant collector of classical and modern art works, who advanced the careers of René Magritte, ...
to produce work based on Leonardo da Vinci's ''The Last Supper (Leonardo), The Last Supper'' for an exhibition at the old refectory of the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, opposite from the Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan), Santa Maria delle Grazie where Leonardo da Vinci's mural can be seen. Warhol exceeded the demands of the commission and produced nearly 100 variations on the theme, mostly silkscreens and paintings, and among them a collaborative sculpture with Basquiat, the ''Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)''. The Milan exhibition that opened in January 1987 with a set of 22 silk-screens, was the last exhibition for both the artist and the gallerist. The series of ''The Last Supper'' was seen by some as "arguably his greatest",
but by others as "wishy-washy, religiose" and "spiritless". It is the largest series of religious-themed works by any American artist.
Artist Maurizio Cattelan describes that it is difficult to separate daily encounters from the art of Andy Warhol: "That's probably the greatest thing about Warhol: the way he penetrated and summarized our world, to the point that distinguishing between him and our everyday life is basically impossible, and in any case useless." Warhol was an inspiration for Cattelan's magazine and photography compilations, such as ''Permanent Food, Charley'', and ''Toilet Paper''.
In the period just before his death, Warhol was working on ''Cars (painting), Cars'', a series of paintings for Mercedes-Benz.
Drawings
Despite being most known for his work in printmaking, particularly silkscreen, Warhol was also a very skilled illustrator and draughtsman. His early drawings on paper provide a feeling of ease and immediacy since they have similarities to both blind contour and continuous line drawing techniques. Warhol pioneered the blotted line technique, which combined aspects of printmaking and graphite drawing on paper, while he was working in commercial advertising. The drawings from his last years demonstrate the skill and technique that have been refined over the course of his illustrious career.
Art market
In 1970, screens and film matrixes that had been used to produce original Warhol works in the 1960s were taken to Europe for the production of Warhol screenprints under the name "Sunday B Morning". Warhol signed and numbered one edition of 250 before subsequent unauthorized unsigned versions were produced.
The unauthorized works were the result of a falling out between Warhol and some of his New York City studio employees who went to Brussels where they produced work stamped with "Sunday B Morning" and "Add Your Own Signature Here". Since the works began as a collaboration, Warhol facilitated exact duplication by providing the photo negatives and precise color codes. Some of the unauthorized productions bore the markings "This is not by me, Andy Warhol".
The most famous unauthorized reproductions are 1967 Marilyn Monroe portfolio screenprints. These "Sunday B Morning" Marilyn Monroe prints were among those still under production as of 2013. Art galleries and dealers also market Sunday B Morning reprint versions of several other screenprint works including ''Flowers'', ''Campbell's Soup I'', ''Campbell's Soup Cans II'',''Gold Marilyn Monroe'' Mao and Dollare bill prints. Although the original Sunday B Morning versions had black stamps on the back, by the 1980s, they switched to blue.
In 1970, Warhol's painting ''Campbell's Soup Can With Peeling Label'' (1962) sold for $60,000 at an auction by Parke-Bernet Galleries.
At the time it was the high price ever paid at a public auction for a work by a living American artist.
In the 1970s, the price of a commissioned portrait by Warhol was $25,000, two for $40,000.
The value of Andy Warhol's work has been on an endless upward trajectory since his death in 1987. In 2014, his works accumulated $569 million at auction, which accounted for more than a sixth of the global art market. However, there have been some dips. According to art dealer Dominique Lévy: "The Warhol trade moves something like a seesaw being pulled uphill: it rises and falls, but each new high and low is above the last one."
She attributes this to the consistent influx of new collectors intrigued by Warhol. "At different moments, you've had different groups of collectors entering the Warhol market, and that resulted in peaks in demand, then satisfaction and a slow down," before the process repeats another demographic or the next generation.
In 1998, ''Orange Marilyn'' (1964), a depiction of Marilyn Monroe, sold for $17.3 million, which at the time set a new record as the highest price paid for a Warhol artwork. In 2007, one of Warhol's 1963 paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, ''Liz (Colored Liz)'', which was owned by actor Hugh Grant, sold for $23.7 million at Christie's.
In 2007, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson sold Warhol's ''Turquoise Marilyn'' (1964) to financier Steven A. Cohen for $80 million. In May 2007, ''Green Car Crash'' (1963) sold for $71.1 million and ''Lemon Marilyn'' (1962) sold for $28 million at Christie's post-war and contemporary art auction. In 2007, ''Large Campbell's Soup Can'' (1964) was sold at a Sotheby's auction to a South American collector for 7.4 million. In November 2009, ''200 One Dollar Bills'' (1962) at Sotheby's for $43.8 million.
In 2008, ''
Eight Elvises
''Eight Elvises'' is a 1963 silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol of Elvis Presley. In 2008, it was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for $100 million to a private buyer, which at the time was the most valuable work by Andy Warhol. ...
'' (1963) was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for $100 million to a private buyer. The work depicts Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose. It was first exhibited in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol made 22 versions of the ''Elvis'' portraits, eleven of which are held in museums.
In May 2012, ''Double Elvis (Ferus Type)'' sold at auction at Sotheby's for $37 million. In November 2014, ''
Triple Elvis
''Triple Elvis'' is a 1963 painting of Elvis Presley by the American artist Andy Warhol. The photographic image of Elvis used by Warhol as a basis for this work, taken from a publicity still from the movie '' Flaming Star'', has become iconic ...
(Ferus Type)'' sold for $81.9 million at Christie's.
In May 2010, a purple self-portrait of Warhol from 1986 that was owned by fashion designer Tom Ford sold for $32.6 million at Sotheby's. In November 2010, ''Men in Her Life (Painting), Men in Her Life'' (1962), based on Elizabeth Taylor, sold for $63.4 million at Phillips de Pury and ''Coca-Cola (4)'' (1962) sold for $35.3 million at Sotheby's. In May 2011, Warhol's first self-portrait from 1963 to 1964 sold for $38.4 million and a red self-portrait from 1986 sold for $27.5 million at Christie's. In May 2011, ''Liz No. 5 (Early Colored Liz)'' sold for $26.9 million at Phillips.
In November 2013, Warhol's rarely seen 1963 diptych, ''
Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)
''Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)'' is a 1963 serigraph by the American artist Andy Warhol. In November 2013, it sold for $105 million (£65.5m) at NYC auction, setting a new highest price for a work by Warhol.
History
''Silver Car Crash (D ...
'', sold at Sotheby's for $105.4 million, a new record for the artist.
In November 2013, ''Coca-Cola (3)'' (1962) sold for $57.3 million at Christie's. In May 2014, ''White Marilyn'' (1962) sold for $41 million at Christie's. In November 2014, ''Four Marlons'' (1964), which depicts Marlon Brando, sold for $69.6 million at Christie's. In May 2015, ''Silver Liz (diptych)'', painted in 1963, sold for $28 million and ''Colored Mona Lisa'' (1963) sold for $56.2 million at Christie's. In May 2017, Warhol's 1962 painting ''Big Campbell's Soup Can With Can Opener (Vegetable)'' sold for $27.5 million at Christie's. In 2017, billionaire hedge-fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin, Ken Griffin purchased ''Orange Marilyn'' privately for around $200 million. In March 2022, ''Silver Liz (Ferus Type)'' sold for 2.3 billion yen ($18.9 million) at Shinwa Auction, which set a new record for the highest bid ever at auction in Japan. In May 2022, ''
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn'' (1964) sold for $195 million at Christie's, becoming the most expensive American artwork sold at auction.
Collectors
Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art, Emily and Burton Tremaine were among Warhol's early collectors and influential supporters. Among the over 15 artworks purchased, ''Marilyn Diptych'' (now at Tate Modern, London) and ''A boy for Meg'' (now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC), were purchased directly out of Warhol's studio in 1962. One Christmas, Warhol left a small ''Head of Marilyn Monroe'' by the Tremaine's door at their New York apartment in gratitude for their support and encouragement.
Robert Scull and Ethel Scull were among the first people to support Warhol's artwork.
''Ethel Scull 36 Times'' (1963), which is presently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, was Warhol's first commissioned portrait.
Image:Exploding Plastic Inevitable.png, ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable' (show) - the Velvet Underground & Nico'', 1966, poster
Image:The Souper Dress, American paper dress, 1967.jpg, ''The Souper Dress'', 1967, screen-printed paper dress based on Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans
Image:Warhol7.JPG, ''BMW Group - 4 M1'', 1979, painted car
Works
Warhol was a fan of "Business Art", as he stated in his book ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again''. "I went into business art. I wanted to be an art business man or a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art," he said. His transformation into a mere business artist was a point of criticism.
In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol's superficiality and commerciality as "the most brilliant mirror of our times", contending that "Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s."
In addition to his paintings and drawings, Warhol directed and produced films, managed the Velvet Underground, and authored numerous books, as well as producing works in such diverse media as audio, photography, sculpture, theater, fashion and performance art. His ability to blur the lines between art, commerce, and everyday life was central to his creative philosophy.
Filmography
Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
called ''Trio for Strings'' and subsequently created his famous series of static films. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the premiere, claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by that performance. Between 1963 and 1968, Warhol made more than 600
underground film
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Notable examples include
John Waters' ''Pink Flamingos'',
David Lynch's ''Eraserhead'',
Andy Warhol's ''Blue Movie'',
Rosa von Praunheim's ''Tal ...
s, including short black-and-white "Screen Tests, screen test" portraits of Factory visitors.
Many of his films premiered at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre in Greenwich Village and 55th Street Playhouse in Midtown Manhattan.
His early experimental films were silent observations of very typical daily life. ''Sleep (1964 film), Sleep'' (1964) monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. ''Kiss (1964 film), Kiss'' (1964) shows couples kissing.
The film ''Eat (film), Eat'' (1964) consists of an artist Robert Indiana eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.
The 35-minute film ''Blow Job (1964 film), Blow Job'' (1964) is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from poet Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to prove this.
For these efforts, Mekas presented Warhol with the Independent Film Award of 1964, "the underground's answer to Academy Awards, Oscar."
''Newsday''
's Mike McGrady hailed Warhol as "the Cecil B. DeMille of the Off-Hollywood movie makers."
''Batman Dracula'' is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics.
It was screened only at his art exhibits. A fan of the ''Batman'' series, Warhol's movie was an "homage" and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. The film was until recently thought to have been lost, until scenes from the picture were shown at some length in the 2006 documentary ''Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis''.
Warhol's 1965 film ''Empire (1964 film), Empire'' is an eight-hour view of the Empire State Building, and shortly after he released ''Vinyl (1965 film), Vinyl'' (1965), an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel ''A Clockwork Orange (novel), A Clockwork Orange''. Other films record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico and Jackie Curtis. The underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film ''Camp''.
Warhol's most popular and critically successful film was ''
Chelsea Girls
''Chelsea Girls'' is a 1966 American experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films (both feature-length and short). I ...
'' (1966). It was the first underground film of the 1960s to reach widespread popularity and capture the attention of notable film critics.
The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm-films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silkscreen works of the early 1960s.
The 1969 film ''
Blue Movie
''Blue Movie'' (also known as ''Fuck'' and ''F,k'') is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States ...
''—in which Warhol superstars Viva and Louis Waldon make love in bed—was Warhol's last film as director.
It is a seminal film in the
Golden Age of Porn
The term "Golden Age of Porn", or "porno chic", refers to a 15-year period (1969–1984) in commercial American pornography, in which sexually explicit films experienced positive attention from mainstream cinemas, movie critics, and the genera ...
, and at the time it was controversial for its frank approach to a sexual encounter.
''Blue Movie'' was publicly screened in New York City in 2005, for the first time in more than 30 years.
In the wake of the 1968 shooting, Warhol's assistant director,
Paul Morrissey
Paul Joseph Morrissey (February 23, 1938 – October 28, 2024) was an American film director, known for his early association with Andy Warhol. His most famous films include ''Flesh (1968 film), Flesh'' (1968), ''Trash (1970 film), Trash'' (197 ...
, took over most of the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation film, exploitation fare with ''Flesh (1968 film), Flesh'' (1968), ''Trash (1970 film), Trash'' (1970) and ''Heat (1972 film), Heat'' (1972). All of these films, including the later ''Andy Warhol's Dracula'' (1973) and ''Andy Warhol's Frankenstein'' (1974), were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. Joe Dallesandro starred in these latter films, which are now considered cult classics. The last Warhol-produced film, ''Andy Warhol's Bad, Bad,'' starred Carroll Baker and was made without either Morrissey or Dallesandro.
It was directed by Warhol's boyfriend Jed Johnson, who had assisted Morrissey on several films.
Most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. With assistance from Warhol in 1984, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art began to restore his films, which are occasionally shown at museums and film festivals.
In 2022, the Andy Warhol Museum announced the launch of The Warhol TV, a streaming platform that allows users to watch free museum content and to rent a selection of Warhol's films from its collection.
Music
In 1965, Warhol adopted the band
the Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground were an American Rock music, rock band formed in New York City in 1964. Its classic lineup consisted of singer and guitarist Lou Reed, Welsh multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and percussionis ...
, making them a crucial element of the ''
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable'', sometimes simply called ''Plastic Inevitable'' or ''EPI'', was a series of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk events organized by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by th ...
'' multimedia performance art show. Warhol, with Paul Morrissey, acted as the band's manager, introducing them to Nico (who would perform with the band at Warhol's request). While managing the Velvet Underground, Andy would have them dressed in all black to perform in front of movies that he was also presenting. In 1966, he "produced" their first album ''
The Velvet Underground & Nico
''The Velvet Underground & Nico'' is the debut studio album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground and the German singer Nico. Released by Verve Records in March 1967, the album underperformed in sales and polarized critics upon releas ...
'', as well as providing its album art. His actual participation in the album's production amounted to simply paying for the studio time.
After the band's first album, Warhol and band leader Lou Reed started to disagree more about the direction the band should take, and Warhol was fired in 1967.
In 1989, Reed and John Cale reunited for the first time since 1972 to write, perform, record and release the concept album ''Songs for Drella'', as a tribute to Warhol. In October 2019, an audio tape of publicly unknown music by Reed, based on Warhol's 1975 book, ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again'', was reported to have been discovered in an archive at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Warhol designed many album covers for various artists beginning during his days as an illustrator in the 1950s. The album covers he designed include for ''I'm Still Swinging'' (1955) by Joe Newman (trumpeter), The Joe Newman Octet, ''Blue Lights, Vols. 1 & 2'' (1958) by Kenny Burrell, ''This Is John Wallowitch!!!'' (1964) by John Wallowitch, ''
Sticky Fingers
''Sticky Fingers'' is the ninth studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was released on 23 April 1971 on the Rolling Stones' new label, Rolling Stones Records.
The Rolling Stones had been contracted by Decca Records an ...
'' (1971) and ''Love You Live'' (1977) by
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for over six decades, they are one of the most popular, influential, and enduring bands of the Album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pione ...
, ''The Academy in Peril'' (1972) by John Cale, ''Silk Electric'' (1982) by
Diana Ross
Diana Ross (born Diane Ernestine Earle Ross March 26, 1944) is an American singer and actress. Known as the "Queen of Motown Records", she was the lead singer of the vocal group the Supremes, who became Motown#Major divisions, Motown's most suc ...
, and ''Aretha (1986 album), Aretha'' (1986) by Aretha Franklin.
In 1984, Warhol co-directed the music video "Hello Again (The Cars song), Hello Again" by the Cars, and he appeared in the video as a bartender. In 1986, Warhol co-directed the music video "Misfit (Curiosity Killed the Cat song), Misfit" by Curiosity Killed the Cat and he made a cameo in video.
Books and print

Beginning in the 1950s, Warhol produced several unbound portfolios of his work. In 1957, his bound book ''
25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy'' was printed by Seymour Berlin.
Berlin also printed some of Warhol's other self-published books, including ''Gold Book'' and ''Wild Raspberries.'' Warhol's book ''A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu'' marked his "transition from commercial to gallery artist".
[Smith, John W., Pamela Allara, and Andy Warhol. ''Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting''. Pittsburgh, PA: Andy Warhol Museum, 2002, p. 46. .] (The title is a play on words by Warhol on the title of French author Marcel Proust's ''À la recherche du temps perdu''.)
In an effort to generate work, the majority of these books were printed in order to be given out to people to draw attention to his illustrations.
After gaining fame, Warhol "wrote" several books that were commercially published:
* ''A, a novel'' (1968, ) is a literal transcription—containing spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumbling—of audio recordings of
Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.
* ''
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again)'' is a 1975 book by the American artist Andy Warhol. It was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
The book is an assemblage of vignettes about love, beauty, fame, work, sex, tim ...
(From A to B & Back Again)'' (1975, )—according to Pat Hackett's introduction to ''The Andy Warhol Diaries'', Pat Hackett (writer), Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her.
The cassettes contained conversations with
Brigid Berlin
Brigid Emmett Berlin (September 6, 1939 – July 17, 2020), also known as Brigid Polk, was an American artist and Warhol superstar.
Life and career
Early years
Berlin was born on September 6, 1939, in Manhattan in New York City. She was the ...
and former ''Interview'' magazine editor
Bob Colacello
Bob Colacello (born May 8, 1947) is an American writer. He began his career writing for ''The'' ''Village Voice'' before becoming an editor for pop artist Andy Warhol's ''Interview'' magazine from 1970 to 1983. His roles at ''Interview'' included ...
.
* ''
Exposures'' (1979, ), authored by Warhol and Bob Colacello, is a book of Warhol's photographs of his famous friends with anecdotes.
* ''Popism: The Warhol Sixties, POPism: The Warhol '60s'' (1980, ), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett, is a retrospective view of the 1960s and the role of pop art.
* ''The Andy Warhol Diaries'' (1989, ), edited by Pat Hackett, is a diary dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone conversations.
Warhol started the diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.
Warhol created the fashion magazine ''Interview'' that is still published. The loopy title script on the cover is thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.
Warhol created covers for a number of magazines, including ''
Time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' and ''Vogue (magazine), Vogue''.
Other media
Although Andy Warhol is most known for his paintings and films, he authored works in many different media.

* Drawing: Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator, producing drawings in "blotted-ink" style for advertisements and magazine articles. Best known of these early works are his drawings of shoes. Some of his personal drawings were self-published in small booklets, such as ''Yum, Yum, Yum'' (about food), ''Ho, Ho, Ho'' (about Christmas) and ''Shoes, Shoes, Shoes''. His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably ''A Gold Book'', compiled of sensitive drawings of young men. ''A Gold Book'' is so named because of the
gold leaf
upA gold nugget of 5 mm (0.2 in) in diameter (bottom) can be expanded through hammering into a gold foil of about 0.5 m2 (5.4 sq ft). The Japan.html" ;"title="Toi gold mine museum, Japan">Toi gold mine museum, Japan.
Gold leaf is gold that has ...
that decorates its pages. In April 2012 a sketch of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee claimed to have been drawn by Andy Warhol was found at a Las Vegas garage sale. The image was said to have been drawn when Andy was nine or 10. Various authorities have challenged the image's authenticity.
* Sculpture: Warhol's most well-known sculptures are his
Brillo
Brillo is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaning dishes, and made from steel wool filled with soap. The concept was patented in 1913, at a time when aluminium pots and pans were replacing cast iron in the kitchen; the new cookware b ...
boxes—silkscreened ink on wood replicas of the large branded cardboard boxes used to hold 24 packages of Brillo soap pads. The original Brillo design was by commercial artist James Harvey (artist), James Harvey. Warhol's Brillo boxes were part of a series of "grocery carton" works that also included Heinz ketchup and Campbell's tomato juice boxes.
Other famous works include the ''Silver Clouds''—helium filled, silver mylar, pillow-shaped balloons. A ''Silver Cloud'' was included in the traveling exhibition ''Air Art'' (1968–1969) curated by Willoughby Sharp. ''Clouds'' was also adapted by Warhol for
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
choreographer Merce Cunningham's dance piece ''RainForest'' (1968).
* Audio: At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife". Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audio-work of Warhol's was his ''Invisible Sculpture'', a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.
* Time Capsules: In 1973, Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily life—correspondence, newspapers, souvenirs, childhood objects, even used plane tickets and food—which was sealed in plain cardboard boxes dubbed Time Capsules. By the time of his death, the collection grew to include 600, individually dated "capsules". The boxes are now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum.
* Television: In 1968, Warhol produced a TV commercial for Schrafft's Restaurants in New York City, for an ice cream dessert appropriately titled the "Underground Sundae". Warhol dreamed of a television special about a favorite subject of hisNothingthat he would call ''Nothing Special''.
Later in his career he created three television shows: ''Fashion'' (1979–80), ''Andy Warhol's TV'' (1980–1983), and the MTV series ''
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes'' (1985–87).
* Fashion: Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" Warhol himself has been described as a modern dandy, whose authority "rested more on presence than on words". His work in fashion includes department store window displays, illustrations for ''Vogue'' and ''Harper's Bazaar'', and a career as a model.
He was friends with prominent figures in the fashion industry, including former ''Vogue'' editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent (designer), Yves Saint Laurent,
Halston
Roy Halston Frowick (April 23, 1932 – March 26, 1990), known mononymously as Halston, was an American fashion designer, who rose to international fame in the 1970s.
Halston's minimalist, clean designs, which were often made of cashmere or ...
, and Calvin Klein.
In 1972, Warhol collaborated with Halston for the
Coty Awards.
In 1997, the Whitney Museum in New York mounted the exhibition ''The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion'', organized by the Andy Warhol Museum.
* Performance Art: Warhol and his friends staged theatrical multimedia happenings at parties and public venues, combining music, film, slide projections and even Gerard Malanga in an S&M outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 was the culmination of this area of his work.
* Theater: Warhol's play ''
Andy Warhol's Pork'', which opened at New York's La MaMa theater in May 1971 for a two-week run. It was brought to the Roundhouse in London for a longer run in August 1971. ''Pork'' was based on tape-recorded conversations between Brigid Berlin and And. Berlin would play Warhol tapes she had made of phone conversations between herself and her mother, socialite Honey Berlin. In 1974, Andy Warhol designed the sets for the musical ''
Man on the Moon''.
* Photography: To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid Corporation, Polaroid camera, List of Polaroid instant cameras, The Big Shot, that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an avid photographer and also used the Polaroid SX-70 as a portable camera. He took an enormous number of photographs of Factory visitors, friends, and celebrities; many of these have been acquired by Stanford University.
* Music: In 1963, Warhol founded
The Druds, a short-lived avant-garde noise music band that featured prominent members of the New York proto-conceptual art and minimal art community.
* Computer: Warhol used Amiga computers to generate digital art, including ''You Are the One (Andy Warhol), You Are the One'', which he helped design and build with Amiga, Inc. He also displayed the difference between slow fill and fast fill on live TV with Debbie Harry as a model.
Personal life
Sexuality
Warhol lived as a gay man before the gay liberation movement, but he often veiled his personal life in the press. In 1980, Warhol proclaimed that he was still a virgin. Former ''Interview'' editor Bob Colacello felt it was probably true and that what little sex he had was probably "a mixture of voyeurism and masturbation—to use [Warhol's] word ''abstract.''"
However, Warhol's assertion of virginity is contradicted by his hospital treatment in 1960 for Genital wart, condylomata, a sexually transmitted disease. His friend
Charles Lisanby, whom Warhol had Unrequited love, unrequited romantic feelings for, said Warhol told him sex was "messy and distasteful."
"He told me he'd had sex a few times, he had tried it and didn't really like it," said Lisanby. Furthermore, some of Warhol's friends from his early career claimed to have either witnessed Warhol having sex or heard him boasting about his sexual relations.
Due to Warhol's own admission that he was asexual, it has been assumed that all his relationships were platonic.
Warhol superstar Jay Johnson (model), Jay Johnson, whose twin brother was Warhol's longtime partner, stated, "He enjoyed the idea that he was considered a voyeur and that he was considered asexual. That was his mystique."
The Factory photographer
Billy Name
William George Linich (February 22, 1940 – July 18, 2016), known professionally as Billy Name, was an American photographer, filmmaker, and lighting designer. He was the archivist of The Factory from 1964 to 1970. His brief romance and subseq ...
was briefly Warhol's lover.
He said Warhol was "the essence of sexuality. It permeated everything. Andy exuded it, along with his great artistic creativity. Sexuality was part of the glamour—we expressed it like teenagers." "But his personality was so vulnerable that it became a defense to put up the blank front," said Name. Warhol's other lovers included aspiring filmmaker A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, Danny Williams and artist John Giorno. His most enduring romantic relationship was with
Jed Johnson, who nursed him back to health after he was shot.
Johnson collaborated with Warhol on films and went on to achieve fame as an interior designer. They "functioned as husband and husband, sharing a bed and a domestic life" for 12 years. Warhol's close friend Stuart Pivar said he "had no sex life after Jed." Paramount Pictures executive Jon Gould, ''Interview'' advertising director Paige Powell, and Factory assistant Sam Bolton were Warhol's last companions.
The impact of Warhol's homosexuality on his work and connection with the art industry has been extensively studied. Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works—portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor and films such as ''Blow Job'', ''My Hustler'' and ''Lonesome Cowboys''—draw from gay underground culture or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. Many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters, including the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre and 55th Street Playhouse, in the 1960s.
Early works that Warhol submitted to a fine art gallery the 1950s, homoerotic drawings of male nudes, were rejected for being too openly gay. In his book ''Popism'', the artist recalls a conversation with the filmmaker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty he had being accepted socially by the then-more-famous (but closeted) gay artists
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and ...
and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them. ... major painters try to look straight; you play up the swish—it's like an armour with you." In response, Warhol said: "I'd always had a lot of fun with that—just watching the expressions on people's faces. You'd have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish. I certainly wasn't a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme."
Religion
Warhol was a practicing
Ruthenian Catholic. He regularly volunteered at homeless shelters in New York City, particularly during the busier times of the year, and described himself as a religious person.
In 1966, his mother
Julia Warhola
Julia Warhola (born Juliana Justina Zavaczki; November 20, 1891November 22, 1972) was the mother of the American artist Andy Warhol. She was an artist in her own right as a calligrapher, embroiderer, and illustrator.
Biography
Early life an ...
told ''
Esquire
Esquire (, ; abbreviated Esq.) is usually a courtesy title. In the United Kingdom, ''esquire'' historically was a title of respect accorded to men of higher social rank, particularly members of the landed gentry above the rank of gentleman ...
'' magazine that he was a "good religious boy" and he attended one o'clock Mass in the Catholic Church, Mass at St. Paul's every Sunday.
The priest at Warhol's church, Church of St. Vincent Ferrer (New York), Saint Vincent Ferrer, said that the artist went there almost daily,
and although he was not observed taking Eucharist#Catholic, Communion or going to Sacrament of Penance (Catholic Church), Confession, he sat or knelt in the pews at the back.
The priest thought he was afraid of being recognized; Warhol said he was self-conscious about being seen in a Latin Catholic church crossing himself "in the Byzantine Rite, Orthodox way" (right to left instead of the reverse).
In 1980, Warhol met Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square.
Many of Warhol's later works depicted religious subjects, including two series, ''Details of Renaissance Paintings'' (1984) and ''The Last Supper (Warhol), The Last Supper'' (1986). Warhol made almost 100 variations on the theme of the Last Supper, which the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim felt "indicates an almost obsessive investment in the subject matter". In addition, a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate.
Warhol's art is noticeably influenced by the Eastern Christian tradition which was so evident in his places of worship.
Warhol's brother has described the artist as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because [it was] private". Despite the private nature of his faith, in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted it as devout: "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one Conversion to Christianity, conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for priesthood".
From November 2021 to June 2022, the Brooklyn Museum displayed the ''Andy Warhol: Revelation'' exhibition. The exhibition delved at the artist's enduring connection to his faith, which was often reflected in his artwork.
Collections
Warhol was an avid collector and a "Hoarding disorder, pack rat" who'd save everything.
As he was relocating his Manhattan studio in 1974, Warhol began assembling Time Capsules, a modular sculpture consisting of 610 containers, each holding an average of 800 items. The majority of the containers are standard cardboard boxes, with a large trunk and forty filing cabinet drawers.
This also includes the Time Capsules that Warhol created at home, which hold a plethora of personal memorabilia like letters, telephone messages, photographs, and his mother's possessions.
The Time Capsules were later transferred to the Andy Warhol Museum.
His collection of American items, ''Andy Warhol's Folk and Funk'', were exhibited at the Museum of American Folk Art in 1977, but few people knew the true extent of his collections until after his death. "Andy had the peasant's wisdom that if people (either the very rich or the very poor) knew that you had anything good, they'd probably try to take it away from you. So he hid what he had. It was inconspicuous consumption," said Warhol's partner Jed Johnson. Warhol would wear a diamond necklace under a black turtleneck, conceal his jewelry in Famous Amos cookie tins atop the canopy of his bed, and keep wads of money in his mattress.
Although Warhol did not drive, he owned a Mercedes and later a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. When he purchased the Rolls-Royce, Johnson was under strict orders to say he traded it for art.
Johnson organized his collections, and when Warhol realized he needed more room, Johnson found a townhouse on East 66th Street in 1974.
Johnson decorated the four-story townhouse, creating several ornate Neoclassicism, neoclassical period rooms.
While residing with Johnson, Warhol kept his promise to keep his shopping bags in the closets and top-floor storage rooms.
However, once Johnson moved out in December 1980, the townhouse was overrun by Warhol's acquisitions. Warhol occupied a second-floor bedroom and basement kitchen when he died in February 1987; all other rooms, with the exception of the quarters for his Filipino servants, Nena and Aurora, were used for storage.
During the last few years of his life, Warhol was accompanied by chemist and art collector Stuart Pivar on daily shopping excursions. Pivar said they wanted "to see if we could come across a couple a masterpieces or some amusing junk."
According to Pivar, Warhol envisioned "Warhol Hall" on Madison Avenue, a massive gift shop with a museum where he would display a collection of sculptures he was assembling.
Pivar regarded Warhol as the quintessential connoisseur who navigated society through flea markets, antique stores, and Christie's and Sotheby's salerooms.
Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager and estate executor, also affirmed Warhol's idea for "Warhol Hall," adding that they had been thinking of setting up a flea market booth.
Warhol's enormous collection was auctioned at Sotheby's in 1988.
Dealers and collectors were drawn to the 3,436 lots that were sold, totaling almost 10,000 items.
A total of $25.3 million was accumulated during the 10-day sale.
His collections included American shop signs, Coca-Cola memorabilia, antique furniture, carousel horses, Navajo blanket rugs, 175 cookie jars, 313 watches, and 332 pieces of Fiesta (dinnerware), Fiesta Ware.
Warhol enjoyed purchasing artwork and he had a collection of 19th century sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye, Antonio Canova, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Among the paintings in his collection were George Bellows' ''Miss Bentham'' (1906), Man Ray's ''Peinture Feminin'' (1954), Roy Lichtenstein's ''Laughing Cat'' (1961), ''Mirror'' (1971), and ''Sailboats'' (1974), Jasper Johns' ''Screen Piece'' (1967), and Jean-Michel Basquiat's ''All Beef'' (1983).
He also had work by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Whiting Stock, Cy Twombly.
Warhol collected many books, with more than 1,200 titles in his collection. His collection, which reflects his eclectic taste and interests, included ''The Two Mrs. Grenvilles: A Novel'' by Dominick Dunne, ''Artists in Uniform'' by Max Eastman, ''D.V.'' by Diana Vreeland, ''Blood of a Poet'' by Jean Cocteau, ''Hidden Faces'' by Salvador Dalí, and ''The Dinah Shore Cookbook''.
Legacy

In 1991, the Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art was established in Medzilaborce, Slovakia by Warhol's family and the Ministry of Culture (Slovakia), Slovak Ministry of Culture. In 1996, it was renamed the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art.
In 1992, Warhol's estate donated 15-acres of land on his former property
Eothen to The Nature Conservancy. Now called The Andy Warhol Preserve, it is part of a 2,400-acre protected area in Montauk.
In 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh. It holds the largest collection of the artist's works in the world.
In 1998, Warhol's
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side, sometimes abbreviated UES, is a neighborhood in the boroughs of New York City, borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded approximately by 96th Street (Manhattan), 96th Street to the north, the East River to the e ...
townhouse at 57 E 66th Street in Manhattan was designated a cultural landmark by the Historical Landmarks Preservation Center to commemorate the 70th anniversary of his birthday.
In 2002, the US Postal Service issued an 18-cent stamp commemorating Warhol. Designed by Richard Sheaff of Scottsdale, Arizona, the stamp was unveiled at a ceremony at The Andy Warhol Museum and features Warhol's painting "Self-Portrait, 1964".
In 2005, the Seventh Street Bridge in Pittsburgh was renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge in his honor.
A chrome statue of Andy Warhol and his Polaroid camera was displayed at Union Square in New York City from March to October 2011.
The International Astronomical Union named a Warhol (crater), crater on the planet Mercury (planet), Mercury after Warhol in 2012.
In 2013, to honor the 85th anniversary of Warhol's birthday, The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled ''Figment'', a live feed of Warhol's gravesite.
In 2024, Warhol was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Double Cross of the Second Class by the Slovak Republic's ambassador to the U.S. on the 37th anniversary of his death, at the behest of Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová, "for promoting the Slovak Republic's good name abroad."
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Warhol's will dictated that his entire estate—with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members—would go to create a foundation dedicated to promoting the visual arts. Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby's 10 days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed $25.3 million.
In 1987, in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was formed. The foundation serves as the estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission "to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process" and is "focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature".
The Artists Rights Society is the US copyright representative for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for all Warhol works with the exception of Warhol film stills. The US copyright representative for Warhol film stills is the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Additionally, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has agreements in place for its image archive. All digital images of Warhol are exclusively managed by Branded Entertainment Network, Corbis, while all transparency images of Warhol are managed by Art Resource.
The Andy Warhol Foundation released its ''20th Anniversary Annual Report'' as a three-volume set in 2007: Vol. I, 1987–2007; Vol. II, Grants & Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program.
The Foundation is in the process of compiling its catalogue raisonné of paintings and sculptures in volumes covering blocks of years of the artist's career. Volumes IV and V were released in 2019. The subsequent volumes are still in the process of being compiled.
The Foundation remains one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the US.
Many of Warhol's works and possessions are on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The foundation donated more than 3,000 works of art to the museum.
In pop culture
Warhol founded ''Interview'', a stage for celebrities he "endorsed" and a business staffed by his friends. One might even say that he produced people (as in the Warholian "Superstar" and the Warholian portrait). Warhol endorsed products, appeared in commercials, and made frequent celebrity guest appearances on television shows and films.
Films

Warhol appeared in the films ''Dynamite Chicken'' (1971), ''The Driver's Seat (film), The Driver's Seat'' (1974), ''Cocaine Cowboys (1979 film), Cocaine Cowboys'' (1979) and ''Tootsie'' (1982).
After his death, Warhol was portrayed by Crispin Glover in Oliver Stone's film ''The Doors (film), The Doors'' (1991), by Jared Harris in Mary Harron's film ''I Shot Andy Warhol'' (1996), and by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel's film ''Basquiat (film), Basquiat'' (1996).
Warhol appeared as a character in Michael Daugherty's opera ''Jackie O (the opera), Jackie O'' (1997). Actor Mark Bringleson makes a brief Cameo appearance, cameo as Warhol in ''Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery'' (1997). Many films by avant-garde cineast Jonas Mekas have caught the moments of Warhol's life. Sean Gregory Sullivan depicted Warhol in the film ''54 (film), 54'' (1998). Guy Pearce portrayed Warhol in the film ''Factory Girl (2006 film), Factory Girl'' (2007) about Edie Sedgwick's life. Actor Greg Travis portrays Warhol in a brief scene from the film ''Watchmen (2009 film), Watchmen'' (2009). Comedian Conan O'Brien portrayed Warhol in the film ''Weird: The Al Yankovic Story'' (2022).
In the movie ''Highway to Hell (film), Highway to Hell'' a group of Andy Warhols are part of the ''Good Intentions Paving Company'' where good-intentioned souls are ground into road surface, pavement. In the film ''Men in Black 3'' (2012) Andy Warhol turns out to really be undercover MIB Agent W (played by Bill Hader). Warhol is throwing a party at The Factory in 1969, where he is encountered by MIB Agents K and J.
Andy Warhol (portrayed by Tom Meeten) is one of main characters of the 2012 British television show ''Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy''. The character is portrayed as having robot-like mannerisms. In the 2017 feature ''Billionaire Boys Club (2017 film), The Billionaire Boys Club'', Cary Elwes portrays Warhol in a film based on the true story about Ron Levin (portrayed by Kevin Spacey) a friend of Warhol's who was murdered in 1986. In September 2016, it was announced that Jared Leto would portray the title character in ''Warhol'', an upcoming American biographical film, biographical drama film produced by Michael De Luca and written by Terence Winter, based on the book ''Warhol: The Biography'' by Victor Bockris.
Documentaries
* ''Warhol'' (1973) is an ITV (TV network), ITV documentary by British photographer David Bailey. Initially banned by British courts for containing "indecent material," the film features candid interviews with the artist and his associates.
* ''Absolut Warhola'' (2001) was produced by Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, featuring Warhol's parents' family and hometown in Slovakia.
* ''Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film'' (2006) is a reverential, four-hour movie by Ric Burns that won a Peabody Award in 2006.
* ''Andy Warhol: Double Denied'' (2006) is a 52-minute movie by Ian Yentob about the difficulties authenticating Warhol's work.
* ''Andy Warhol's People Factory'' (2008), a three-part television documentary directed by Catherine Shorr, features interviews with several of Warhol's associates.
* ''The Andy Warhol Diaries (docuseries), The Andy Warhol Diaries'' (2022), a six-part docuseries directed by Andrew Rossi, was released on Netflix chronicling Warhol's life from the vantage point of his diaries.
Television
In 1965, Warhol and his muse Edie Sedgwick appeared on ''The Merv Griffin Show''. Warhol doesn't say much save for bashful gestures and whispering "yes" or "no," while Sedgwick mediates a conversation on how Pop Art is art without any sense of emotion.
In 1969, Warhol was commissioned by Braniff International to appear in two television commercials to promote the luxury airline's "When You Got It – Flaunt It" campaign. The campaign was created by the advertising agency Lois Holland Calloway, which was led by George Lois, creator of a famed series of Esquire Magazine, ''Esquire'' covers. The first commercial series involved the unlikely paring of Warhol and heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston who shared the fact that they both flew Braniff Airways. The odd commercial worked and Warhol was featured in another commercial entering a Braniff jet and being greeted by a Braniff hostess, while espousing their like for flying Braniff. The rights to Warhol's films for Braniff and his signed contracts are owned by a private trust and are administered by Braniff Airways Foundation in Dallas, Texas.
Warhol appeared on the BBC series Arena in a scene with writers William S. Burroughs and Victor Bockris in an episode that aired in January 1981. Warhol filmed a segment for the sketch comedy television show ''Saturday Night Live'', which aired in October 1981. In a 1981 Betamax, Sony Beta Tapes advertisement, Warhol featured beside a Marilyn image to showcase the tapes' capacity to record "brilliant color and delicate shading."
In 1983, he appeared in a commercial for TDK Videotape.
In 1985, Warhol appeared in a Diet Coke commercial.
He also had a guest appearance on the 200th episode of the television series ''The Love Boat'' wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley) her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey.
In 1986, Warhol appeared in an ad for the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment group.
Warhol appeared as a recurring character in TV series ''Vinyl (TV series), Vinyl'', played by John Cameron Mitchell. Warhol was portrayed by Evan Peters in the ''American Horror Story: Cult'' episode "Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins: Scumbag". The episode depicts the attempted assassination of Warhol by Valerie Solanas (Lena Dunham).
Music
Warhol strongly influenced the New wave music, new wave/punk rock band Devo, as well as David Bowie. Bowie recorded a song called "Andy Warhol (David Bowie song), Andy Warhol" for his 1971 album ''Hunky Dory''. Lou Reed wrote the song "Andy's Chest" in response to the attempted assassination of Warhol.
The song was originally recorded by the Velvet Underground in 1969, but it wasn't released until a version appeared on Reed's solo album ''Transformer (Lou Reed album), Transformer'' in 1972. The band Triumph (band), Triumph also wrote a song about Andy Warhol, "Stranger In A Strange Land" off their 1984 album ''Thunder Seven''.
Books
Many books have been written about Warhol.
Among the most significant books related to Warhol is the authorized biography ''Warhol'' (1989) by his friend, art critic David Bourdon.
Biographer Victor Bockris released The ''Life and Death of Andy Warhol'' (1989). The memoir ''Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up'' (1990) was written by Bob Colacello, the former executive editor of Warhol's ''Interview'' magazine. Culture critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum published the biography ''Andy Warhol'' (2001). Art critic Blake Gopnik, wrote the comprehensive biography ''Warhol (book), Warhol'' (2020).
Comic books
Warhol is featured as a character in the ''Miracleman'' series of comics. Nick Bertozzi's book ''Becoming Andy Warhol'', which was illustrated by Pierce Hargan, was released by Abrams ComicArts in 2016. In 2018, SelfMadeHero published the graphic novel ''Andy: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol'' by Dutch illustrator Typex (comics artist), Typex.
Video games
Warhol makes an appearance in the 2003 video game ''The Sims: Superstar'' as the photographer in Studio Town. Warhol (played by Jeff Grace) makes a cameo appearance in the 2022 video game ''Immortality (video game), Immortality''.
See also
* Counterculture of the 1960s
* ''Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith''
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
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* Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds (1996). ''Pop Out: Queer Warhol.'' Durham: Duke University Press.
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External links
Andy Warhol at the National Gallery of ArtWarhol Foundationin New York City
Andy Warhol Collection in Pittsburghspoken about by David Cronenberg
Warholstars Andy Warhol Films, Art and Superstars
Warhol & The ComputerTavi Gevinson and Abbi Jacobson discuss Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Canson ''A Piece of Work (podcast), A Piece of Work''
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