Andy Warhol

About

From Wikipedia:

Andy Warhol (/ˈwɔːrhɒl/; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame”.

In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. In June 1968, he was almost killed by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot him inside his studio. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58 in New York City.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum 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. Warhol has been described as the “bellwether of the art market”. Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. His works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, a 1963 serigraph titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million, which is the most expensive work of art sold at auction by an American artist.

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Paul McCartney met with Andy Warhol in 1966 when art dealer Robert Fraser brought Warhold and a group of his friends to Paul’s Cavendish home in London.

We watched Empire, which is something like three hours of one building, which is pretty tough going — it’s a good job we were into pot because we couldn’t have handled it otherwise! It was one of his very long films. It went on. In fact, if I had seen that coming I would have probably said to Robert, “Oh no, don’t let’s see that one. Have you got anything else?”

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

It was daring but it was laborious to watch. Very very boring. Endlessly boring. I must say it was not a great evening out. The people in the room being bored with you and Andy being enigmatic at the back of it all.

It was nice to have Andy there. He was a very shy, quiet guy. I got the impression he didn’t want to say too much in case it came out stupid. I hate to say it but it created an air of incredible mystery. He seemed like a nice bloke. I remember we had dinner at the Baghdad House in Fulham Road. The great attraction there was they let you smoke hash downstairs because it was Baghdad and everything, so we sat around a table and had yoghurt and honey and various Iraqi things.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

The Apple label was for the Beatles’ music. But there was an undercurrent where John met Yoko [then an experimental artist] and I hung out with Allen Ginsberg. Andy Warhol came to my house and showed his film Empire there because I was the only one with a 16mm projector. A key figure was Robert Fraser who was the ringleader of this underground scene through his art gallery.

Paul McCartney – Interview with The Guardian, November 2008

I was a fan of the Andy Warhol idea, not so much of his films but I liked the cheekiness of Empire, the film of the Empire State Building, I liked the nothingness of it. So I would do a bit of that.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

These days I’ve stopped thinking that anything is weird or different. There’ll always be people about like that Andy Warhol in the States, the bloke who makes great long films of people just sleeping. Nothin’ weird anymore. We sit down and write, or go into the recording studios, and we just see what comes up.

Paul McCartney – Interview with New Musical Express, June 1966

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From Wikipedia:

Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol’s specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City’s Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was “to see time go by.”

A week after the film was shot, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who was cinematographer for Empire) speculated in the Village Voice that Warhol’s film would have a profound influence on avant-garde cinema. In 2004, Empire was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

From 411: Andy Warhol’s Empire | MoMA:

Filmed from nightfall to early morning, Empire consists of a single frame of the Empire State Building. Recorded from the neighboring Time & Life Building, the skyscraper appears suspended in midair. Flashes of light marking the start of a new reel, the changing summer sky, and fleeting windowpane reflections punctuate an otherwise motionless image. Empire is projected at a slowed-down speed so that it screens for a total of eight hours—allowing viewers, as Warhol said, “to see time go by.”

The artist was inspired to make Empire following the announced construction of the World Trade Center; its twin towers would soon eclipse the elder landmark’s record as the world’s tallest building. Warhol was fascinated by fame—as evidenced by his paintings and silkscreens of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis—and his gaze presents the skyscraper as a fading superstar. Although Empire’s extended duration was intended to challenge audiences, it also opens spectatorship to a place where boredom has the potential to be tantalizing.

Last updated on December 22, 2023