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Friday, August 20, 2021 Warhol’s 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. He was always looking for new ideas and opportunities that he could create. Another of his critically successful films was Chelsea Girls (1966). It was a highly innovative film that consisted of two 16 mm-films being projected simultaneously with two different stories shown together. The sound would be raised in one film and lowered in the other so that it could elucidate the first. The many images seemed to replicate Warhol’s early 1960 silk-screen creations. Warhol was a great fan of Radley Metzger’s film work and said that his firm The Lickerish Quartet was “an outrageously kinky masterpiece”. Warhol’s film Blue Movie (1968) portrayed Warhol superstar Viva making love in bed with Louis Waldon – another Warhol superstar. It was his last film as a director and was shown publicly in New York in 2005. The first time in thirty years. After the 1968, shooting at The Factory, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his involvement in filmmaking. His assistant director took over the film-making business at the Factory and directed these films more towards mainstream cinematography. Andy Warhol’s Dracula and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein were two of these films and were much more mainstream than anything Warhol would have attempted. After Warhol’s death his films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. “My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case ‘run on’ – manifest my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.” Andy Warhol ••• Warhol produced music too. He adopted the band Velvet Underground and made them a crucial element of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable
multimedia performance art “I met him a couple of show. Warhol, together with times, but we seldom shared Paul Morrissey who acted as more than platitudes...He the band’s manager, dressed wanted to be very superficial. the band all in black and And seemingly emotionless, made them perform, someindifferent, just like a dead times with Nico, in front fish.” of the movies that he was - David Bowie presenting. He produced their first album The Velvet The band Triumph also Underground and Nico and wrote a song about Andy designed their record album. Warhol, “Stranger In a Warhol’s involvement simply Strange Land” in their 1984 paid for the band’s studio album Thunder Seven. time. Warhol and the band leader disagreed with the ••• direction the band should take, and the relationship Warhol produced sevended. After Warhol’s death, eral unbound portfolios of The Velvet Underground his work. The first of sevband members Lou Reed and John Cale re-united to WARHOL’s ‘Triple Elvis’ painting sold for $81.9 eral bound self-published books by Warhol was 25 Cats release Songs for Drella – a million at an auction in New York in 2014 Named Sam and One Blue tribute to Warhol. Warhol designed many record album covers Pussy printed in 1954. The original issue was limstarting with This is John Walllowitch!!! (1964); ited to one hundred and ninety. An original was The Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers (1971) auctioned in May 2006 for US $35,000 by Doyle and Love you Live (1977); the two John Cale New York. Other self-published books by Warhol albums The Academy in Peril (1972) and Honi include: A Gold Book, Wild Raspberries, and Holy Soit (1981). One of Warhol’s last covers was a por- Cats. His book A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu trait of Aretha Franklin for her 1986 gold album was published in 1955 and marked his transition from commercial to gallery artist. After gaining Aretha. Warhol influenced the punk rock band Devo, as fame he wrote several books that were published well as David Bowie, who recorded a song “Andy commercially: a, A Novel (1968); The Philosophy Warhol” for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Lou of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) Reed, the band leader of The Velvet Underground, (1975); Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980); and wrote the song “Andy’s Chest” about Valerie Sola- The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). Warhol created the fashion magazine Interview nas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. He recorded it with The Velvet Underground and it was released in 1969 that is still published today. To produce his original silkscreens Warhol made in 1985. Bowie later actually played Warhol in the photographs, or had them made, by his friends and 1996 movie Basquiat. assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera, The Big Shot, that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting had an enormous effect on artistic photography. Warhol was a very gifted photographer. It was his incredible eye and judgement that created a whole incredibly successful artistic wave. “The silver moon has long since set, the spoon recycled in the blue bin. The foil has tarnished, the ‘new’ Factory dining room, scene of lunches ... has closed its high double doors. Art has become an essential, not a caprice, all too often a trivialised version of Andy’s originality ...” - Nicky Haslam The Impatient Pen
THE DIPTYCH ‘Silver Car Crash’ sold at Sothebys for $105.4 million in 2013.
Warhol’s will stipulated that his entire estate, except for a few modest family legacies, would go to create a foundation dedicated to the advancement of visual arts. • Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia; Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990) by Bob Colacello; The Genius of Andy Warhol (2009) by Tony Scherman and David Dalton; Warhol: The Biography (2009) by V. Bockris; and The Impatient Pen (2019) by Nicky Haslam.
