October 5, 2023 • 51 mins
You know Andy Warhol from his quip on being famous for 15 minutes and paintings of soup cans, but even as far as artists go he was an eccentric and misunderstood person.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck, Bryan Jerry's here and this is Stuff
you should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And look, there's Andy Warhol. Yeah, Anitie Sedgwick and lou Reid.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, and Jackie Curtis and Valerie Solanas, the whole gangs here.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
We did one on that right in the Scum Manifesto.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Yes, we did, okay. Chapter eighteen of our book is
on the Scum Manifesto in Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
We did not do it as a podcast yet no,
Oh well, probably never will.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Oh okay, But I think, Chuck, before we get into this,
we should dispend something because I think it's very instructive
about Andy Warhol. He is. Probably the most famous quote
from him is that ever in the future, everyone will
be famous for fifteen minutes. And he didn't say that,
(01:03):
even in an interview in nineteen eighty he said he
didn't say it. He used it in I think a
nineteen eighty or sixty eight exhibition like the Notes, but
it wasn't his. There is at least four other people
who can make a claim to having said it first,
and that that says a lot about any Warhol that
he was not shy or embarrassed or even secretive about
(01:25):
taking other people's ideas, even asking for other people for
ideas to use in his own work. And then it
also shows that the idea that he said that, and
that that's so associated with him and his whole you know, ethos,
it also demonstrates that he himself was one of his
(01:45):
own works of art, his own brand, his own image,
his own everything about him was he was one of
his own works of art. And those two things are
all captured in just that one little quote.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. A little
bit about his childhood before we get to the good stuff.
He was born, actually, Andrew WARHOLA he would drop the
a years later. He was born. And it's interesting you
think of Warhol as a contemporary artist, which he is
in some ways, but he was born in nineteen twenty eight.
(02:18):
It's not like, you know, he was a bit older
when he was at Studio fifty four in the nineteen seventies,
older as in my age.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Even stranger than that, chuck. He was born in.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Pittsburgh, yeah, well not stranger if you're from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh
is very proud of their Warhol connection, especially to Carnegie
Mellon University, where he went. His parents were European immigrants
and his mother was an artist. He was the youngest
of three boys, and his parents were very encouraging of
his art. They got him a camera when he was
(02:50):
a little kid. They sent him to art classes and
eventually would pay for him to go. It was a
Carnegie Institute of Technology at the time, but Carnegie Mellon
now which is a great art school, which is kind
of period.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Right, Yeah, it really is. I read that the whole
family just kind of, I don't want to say coddle,
but he was a bit of the center of attention.
He was the center of the family, being the baby
of three boys. And when he was a kid, he
came down with Sydenham Korea or Korea which is also
known as Saint Vitas dance, which is a really mean
(03:23):
name for a neurological disorder where you have involuntary movements,
and he was in bed for a number of months,
and he again just happened to have a mom who
was into art, who took that time to teach him
to draw, and then he also spent some of that
time reading celebrity magazine. So those two things that he
(03:44):
got into when he was sick in bed really kind
of came together to form the foundation of his whole career.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, and like you said, he was the youngest. He
was also ill. He had a skin discoloration issue. He
didn't like his nose. He thought his nose was bulbous
and misshapen. He was bullied at school. He was always
very just always felt bad. It's sort of about the
way he looked. And then later in life when he
would wear wigs and have plastic surgery and wear makeup
(04:14):
and stuff like that, people would say that sort of
you know, was andy. From the time he was young.
His father would die when he was just fourteen years
old of johndice liver. It was very hard on young Andrew.
He could not go to the funeral. I don't know
if that's from emotion.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, yeah, he was completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, okay, Yeah, so he was hiding under his bed
during the wake. And eventually he would move to New
York City in nineteen forty nine, where he would drop
that a and become a very successful commercial illustrator kind
of pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, he knew how to hustle too. I read that
he would go to record stores and look at album
art and then pick out the labels that had the
coolest art, and then go to those labels and try
to get work from him. Man, it worked a lot,
and I think it's one of those things where once
you make a name for yourself with a couple of companies,
it gets easier and easier to get work. So he
made a pretty good name for himself. He made a
(05:07):
pretty good living as a commercial artist for at least
the first decade or so of his career. And he
had this style that I don't know was unique to him,
but you know, he basically adopted it himself, where he
would draw something, usually kind of out of proportion, some
parts were more detailed than others. It very very early
(05:28):
sixties drawing, like almost pink Panther type illustration, and then
he would blot the ink before it was dry, so
some parts would be thicker, some lines would be thicker
than other parts that were not even disconnected and almost
appeared dotted, and then he would go over and color
them in outside of the lines, like almost blot them
with paint. And he became really well known for that,
(05:51):
and it was really good to apply to women's shoes
and that was one of his favorite things to draw
commercial art for.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, he also started and this would come come in
very handy, as we will see when he sort of
had his assembly line art thing going at the factory,
he would he'd made stamps of things. He made rubber stamps,
and this is how he would do printmaking. So if
he had a client and was like, I love this,
but I don't like the color, he could go do
it again without starting all over, just by changing the
(06:19):
color out on the stamp. Or if he was doing
like screen printing or printmaking or something like that, He's
very easy to change things up. Then, like you said,
he won awards, he made some pretty good money. He
was out as a gay man in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I've even both I've seen that he was and that
he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Oh really, I've always seen that he was. But either way,
it was the art role of the nineteen fifties. Even
in that scene, it wasn't the most normal thing to
be out and proud.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Right for sure, No definitely. So one of the things
that made Andy Warhol Andy Warhol is he never really
saw the high art that he created gallery art versus
commercial art as something more elevated than the commercial art
work he did. It was just different or maybe he
could make more money for it. There were other people involved,
(07:14):
but he viewed the gallery owners, the curators and people
who would eventually commission him or you know, buy his work,
he would let them help shape it. Like he wasn't
like one of those you know the picture of the
artists who like can't take the first note about their work.
He would get like, yeah, exactly, like you were his
client when you were buying art from him. And that's
(07:36):
how he viewed it. And that was definitely new and
he carried that throughout his career and it had a
lot of benefits for him. And then toward the end
it really kind of detracted from his images.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
We'll see, yeah, for sure. Early on, and this is
in the fifties, you got to remember he was selling
some self published art books. He had one called Studies
for a Boy Book that was in a gallery called
the Bodily Gallery, and it was his first solo exhibition.
They were sketches of young men. He was not shy
about projecting sexuality in any of his works, and like
(08:13):
we said, this is nineteen fifties. Even in the art world,
some people accepted that stuff. Other galleries were like, no,
we can't have like gay themed art in our gallery,
even in like a New York art gallery. So he
was kind of pushing the envelope early on with that stuff.
He worked with his mom. His mom lived with him,
she moved to New York and lived with him for
about twenty years, Yeah, until she left in I think
(08:33):
nineteen seventy one's where she went home to die, right.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, essentially. And another just like with his father, he
ignored letters from his cousin telling him like his mom
was dying and apparently she was holding out for him
to visit, and he never did. And I don't think
he went to her funeral either. And he said later
that in a quote that he couldn't bear think of it.
He likened her to a bird that had died recently,
(08:59):
and that he couldn't been there to think of the
bird dying. That he just liked to think that it
was out for a walk. Yeah, So that kind of
thing just totally overwhelmed. He was very close to his mother.
I mean, think about it. He lived with his mother
for twenty years. Yeah, during like the height of his
career and fame, and supposedly also they were both deeply
religious Byzantine Catholics, and he would carry a rosary around
(09:21):
in his pocket with him. But there's a lot of
legends and stories about Andy Warhol. There's also another story
that he would carry loose diamonds around his pocket because
he liked to just kind of, you know, jiggle him
around like they were loose change. So who knows. It's
not entirely documented, but there's there's a whole thread of
there's a whole camp that it's like, No, he was
(09:42):
super religious, he just kind of hit it.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, he was a bit of a conundrum in a
lot of ways. The more I read about him, it
was interesting because he could be quite kind and giving.
He could also be very cruel, even to friends of his.
As we'll see, he was a lot of things. He
was a well known liar, So even things that you
read that Andy Warhol said oftentimes was not the truth.
(10:05):
And the way I took it was he wasn't like,
oh he's a liar. He's a bad guy because he lies,
or it seemed like you just like messing with people
and he would just make stuff up.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Yeah, some people. It's funny because you know, from the
outside you think of Andy Warhol as almost like an
art god, but inside the art world, like there were
a lot of people who are just annoyed with him,
or I just thought he was lame or a creep.
I saw him compared to basically an energy vampire. Yeah,
but then like you said, other people are like no,
he was very kindly and very giving of himself and
(10:39):
of his money and help people get like a start
for in their art career that they were looking for,
like you, Yeah, like you said, he he was a
contradiction in terms in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Yeah, big time. So he obviously is most famous for
being a pop artist. Pop art started in London in
the early fifties and Warhol was one of the first
few artists to kind of get involved in this art
movement that emerged from Dada and also just had a
lot of it was just sort of in the early
(11:11):
it was in the zeitgeist of the art scene at
the time of this idea of mass produced objects being
a theme. There was also, at the same time, though,
a very different world of people like Jackson Pollock and
abstract expressionism happening, people who are very serious about their
art and who I imagine did not appreciate this kid,
(11:32):
while he wasn't a kid by that point. But this
guy named Andy Warhol, this very eccentric guy, that's you know.
One of the very first things he did were those
celebrity screen prints, those silk screens, right.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yeah, one of the abstract expressionist kings, Williem d'cooning, told
Andy Warhol to his face that he was a killer
of beauty, a killer of art. He said, you even
kill laughter.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
You know, dacooning. He killed La Laughter two himself.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
He was pretty drunk at the time, but yeah, I'm
sure any Warhol didn't like to hear that. Right, So,
so he is associated with pop art, and it definitely
did dominate abstract expressionism, and it kind of said like, hey,
you don't have to just you don't have to take
art quite so seriously. And not only that, are you
(12:17):
guys paying attention over here to how commercial and consumerist
America is becoming. Let's start meditating on that a little
bit and like you said, one of the first ones
that really kind of gained attention were his silk screens
of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. And I think one of
the first ones he did was Marilynd's portrait on a
(12:39):
gold background, and it was meant to basically kind of
look like a Renaissance icon of the Madonna. Just the
gold suggested it, I guess something like that. And what
he was essentially saying, he was equating celebrity as replacing religion. Now,
so it was kind of like comments like that that
was the basis of early top art.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Should we take a break? Yeah, I don't think this
has any great cliffhangers, No, really, it doesn't. I was
trying to find one, all right, So we'll take a
break now and we'll come back with the sort of
the beginning of Andy Warhol's pop art career right after this.
(13:36):
All right, So we mentioned before the break. In nineteen
sixty one, I think one of his first pop artworks
was called black and White. It was black and white.
It was called Coca Cola two, and it's a drawing
of one of those great coke bottles. And this would
become a thing for him, like brands, especially food and beverages,
which is very interesting, I think. But he did those
(13:58):
silk screens right away. In the very next year, in
nineteen sixty two is when those Campbell soup cans came out.
A couple of the things he's most well known for
were those celebrity silk screens and the Campbell soup cans.
Thirty two portraits, And I love that Livia used those quotes,
used portraits and quotes because what he did was he
(14:19):
would project. Is what I did when I was a kid.
I had a little overhead projector, and I would project
an image of Opus the penguin, or build a cat
on a wall, and I would trace it. And I
would act like I could draw right when I couldn't.
I was just tracing something. And that's what he did
with those soup cans. He traced them from being projected
on a wall.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, so they were the first thirty two portraits were
hand drawn. His first Campbell soup one portraits were and
he actually didn't have the idea himself. He paid fifty
dollars to a designer named Muriel Latau at a party.
He paid by check for the idea. She said she
had a good idea and that was it, and he
(15:00):
turned it into his whole career. And then there's one
other development too while he was doing the Campbell soup
cans that really kind of altered his career that instead
of projecting onto a canvas and then hand drawing something
and then going back and painting it, he figured out
that you could take you could project an image onto
a silk screen that had amulsion on it that would
(15:22):
burn that image onto that silk screen, and all of
a sudden, you had a stencil and you could put
whatever color you wanted through it and make the same
thing over and over and over again. And so his
next series of soup cans were just Campbell's tomato soup,
but in all sorts of different colors. And that kicked
off the Maryland, the Elvis, the Jackie I think A
(15:45):
hundred Ways or something like that like that that changed
his career because not only did it it causes sensation
like nobody had made art like that before, and it
looked really cool, but also it allowed him to form
the assembly line that he eventually became famous for.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, I mean a lot of his art later on
was done by these people that worked for him in
the factory, and it was you know, if you've ever
been to like a T shirt silkscreen place and there's
people just like silkscreen t shirts, one after the other.
Andy Warhol was doing that kind of thing and becoming
very famous for it. It's very interesting how it all happened.
(16:24):
But there was a gallery in nineteen sixty two, the
Fairest Gallery in Los Angeles, where he had his first
solo pop art exhibition of these soup cans. The gallery
co owner was named Irving Bloom, and he displayed them
like they were shelves on or they were cans on
a shelf, like at a supermarket. Very clever. Dennis Hopper
(16:45):
very famously bought one of those first ones. But apparently
Warhol didn't even go. A lot of people didn't go.
Wasn't super big at first? A lot of people too, right, Yeah,
a lot of writers were making fun of it in
the press. One quote was like, Frankly, the cream of
asparagus does nothing for me, but the terrifying intensity of
the chicken noodle gives me a real zen feeling. So
(17:08):
he was being mocked until you know, he became Andy
warhowt and I'm sure he was mocked for a lot
of his career by some of the same critics that
had their nose turned up at stuff like this, for sure,
But it was the beginning of this movement in the
United States, and no one had ever seen anything.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Like it, No, because nobody had done anything like it. Like,
like you said, commercialism kind of slipped in here there,
but this was nothing but commercialism and a comment on
commercialism and our relationship to brands and all that kind
of stuff, and that was definitely new. And from that
the pop art esthetic like took off. You can basically
(17:47):
plant that at the feet of Andy Warhol in his
first Campbell's Soup camp portraits, and then very quickly after
that later on the Tomato soup portraits with silk screening.
And today I think, I think what had up and wash?
Did you say, Blum? Irving Blum? I said, bloom, but
bloom he he, It may be bloom either way. He
(18:09):
decided that those those portraits should not be sold off individually.
They didn't really make sense on their own. They made
sense as a group because it was allegedly all thirty
two flavors of Campbell's soup, and that you know, just
having Scotch broth by itself is kind of cool, but
not really, you need the whole thing. So he bought back,
(18:29):
including Dennis Hoppers. He bought back all of those first
thirty two portraits, and he paid Andy Warhol a thousand
dollars about ten thousand.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Dollars one today.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah, one hand drawn or hand painted soup can is
called a small torn soup can pepper pot. In two
thousand and six, that one sold for eleven point eight
million dollars. So Irving Blum got these things for a
song because it hadn't taken off yet, but it did
very quickly after.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Well that that small tour in campbell soup can that
wasn't even one of the big paintings. That was paper
dresses we talked about. Paper dresses were a thing at
the time, literally dresses made out of these paper pieces,
and he was making these paper dresses with images silk
screened on them, and Campbell's soup even started doing that
(19:22):
later on. But just one of the pictures from one
of the dresses sold for almost twelve million bucks.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Oh wow, that's great, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I also
saw too. I don't understand art unless somebody explains it
to me.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Same here.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
But I saw that the especially the silk screen tomato
soup cans that is the same soup can, but in
a bunch of different colors. That what he's doing is
by taking this thing that you take as a given
that's so familiar, it's a Campbell soup can. I recognize
that everybody knows what that is, and by putting by
playing with the colors and making different color combinations, he
(19:59):
was actually like basically melting the brand. The whole idea
of the brand, the whole identity of the brain was
just kind of being stripped away from the viewer's brain
and turned into something else without the viewer even really
realizing it, because the colors are so pretty that you
just kind of lost track that you're looking at a
soup can, even though you start out knowing that you're
(20:22):
looking at a soup can.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Interesting, Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting too.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yeah, as far as pop art goes, you know, you
mentioned a comment on consumerism. You know, it sort of
depends on who you ask on what it means. That
can be a comment on consumerism. It could be just
you know, everyday things are like celebrating something that's every
day in ordinary Andy Warhol himself said pop art is
(20:48):
just about liking things, and that he ate Campbell's soup
every day for lunch for twenty years. I don't know
if that's true. That sounds like one of his little
stories that he might tell. But for him it was
very simple. I don't think he tried to get too
overly analytical about it. He was just like, it's pop art,
and that's the whole point is you shouldn't examine it
too closely.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well. One of the other things, though, is that he
was very ambitious. He liked money, he liked fame, He
wanted to be known as the greatest artist in the world.
And he was like he was a consumer himself, Like
he liked stuff. He liked spending money on things, like
that story about him walking around with loose diamonds in
his pocket. So it's weird. He was. He liked the
(21:32):
very stuff that his paintings allegedly criticized or made fun
of or mocked or analyzed. He was into that same scene.
He wasn't an outsider to it. He was as much
an American consumer as anybody else. And that was that
was very odd for that time. You know, that was
the time where like you didn't want to be a
(21:52):
sellout or anything like that. Andy Warhol was a sellout
from the very beginning. He even put a fake ad
in The Village Voice saying like he to tach his
name to the following things if you would pay for it.
And it was a joke. But at the same time
it wasn't a joke. As we'll see, he started making
what he called business art and started making a lot
(22:13):
of money from it, and as a result of his
taking that up very quickly becoming like basically a sellout
as soon as he could. The art critics basically say
his period of actual good artwork just lasted from nineteen
sixty one with the Coca Cola bottles to the nineteen
(22:35):
sixty four Flowers edition, so three years. Interesting even though
his career kept going on that that was his last
notable painting. Specifically, there's an art critic for the Washington
Post named Blake Gopnik who wrote a nine hundred page
biography on Andy Warhol and his art, and he I
don't think it was just his opinion. I think that's
generally the art critic world's opinion that he was almost
(22:58):
a flash in the pan as far as actually producing
good art is concerned.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Well, yeah, I mean, because what he was was a
he kind of was the art. He created a brand
in a persona that was bigger than the art itself.
So it was I mean, you talk about separating art
from artists, it was indistinguishable. In any Warhol's case, It
was all a part of who he was, this, which
(23:24):
was this. He was the Campbell soup, can you know?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah? And I mean we take it for granted today
living decades into the postmodern era and now decades into
the era of influencers and Instagram, like that's a normal thought.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
To us, right, Totally.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
This guy was doing this when modernism still reigned and
postmodernism was just starting to bleed out of it where
there weren't such things as influencers like he. I don't
want to maybe he did. He might have invented it.
At the very least, he gave other people a lot
of other people the idea to try the same things.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah. Absolutely, we have to talk about his filmmaking because
he would branch out away from you know, screenprinting things.
Although he did that kind of throughout I think because
he had his factory going. But in the mid sixties
he started to make visual art. In sixty three, his
first film, Sleep I was about to say, came out,
(24:20):
but it kind of didn't really. I'm sure it played
in some avant garde theaters here and there, but his
movies were they weren't movies. They didn't have plots and
characters in three act structure and stuff like that. He
would set a camera up in front of the Empire
State Building and shoot it for eight hours. Sleep was
(24:40):
five hours and twenty one minutes of his boyfriend John
Giorno sleeping. His most successful movie, if you want to
call it, that, was called The Chelsea Girls in sixty six.
I Love Livia says it came at a relatively snappy
three hours.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, what's funny is it came in at three hours
because it was a six hour movie. He's split in
half and projected side by side next to each other,
so technically it was six hours.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It was six hours. But this also didn't have a plot.
He was very explicit with his real sex in movies
without it being well I'm sure a lot of people
labeled it pornography at the time, but it was art
also drug use too, Oh sure. He was very open
and explicit about all of this. At Like I mentioned
(25:27):
the factory, he had three places called the Factory, and
they were his art studios, they were his meeting places,
his party spaces, the first one being at East forty
seventh in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, that was a silver factory an artist named Billy
name name is not his real last name. He just
adopted it. It's kind of like generic. I love that. Yeah.
He covered it in an aluminum foil and silver paint,
which gave it the name silver Factory. But it was
also a former fat hat factory. A fat factory is
(25:59):
another way to it. And the other reason factory applies
is because remember Andy Warhol was the one who came
up with assembly line art. Yeah, he would have an idea,
or maybe somebody would give him an idea. He would
execute it initially, like maybe create the first stencil, make
a couple versions of it with different color combinations, and
(26:19):
then after that he would basically leave it to his
assistants to start producing his art that he would sign
and it was his art. But that was a brand
new way of considering art, and so much so that
he had an assistant, a guy who basically became his
right hand His name was Gerard Malanga or Malanga as
we'll see. He would go to interviews with Andy Warhol,
(26:43):
and Warhol would be like, why don't you ask my
assistant Jerry here some questions. He did a lot of
my paintings, and I think most people at the time
thought he was kidding, and he wasn't kidding at all.
Not just Jerry, but other people were physically making the
paintings that he was selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, to be clear, I know people are typing up
emails right now. This is not a new idea, and
this is not something that doesn't happen all the time
in the art world. There are In fact, we got
an email from someone recently who was called a ghost artist,
like a ghostwriter. They very famous artists, many, many times
(27:20):
have assistants that actually pump out these paintings in their
style and sell them. Wow, it's always happened. I had
a friend who twenty five years ago did it for
a guy here in Atlanta, and now she's her own
artist and has her own gallery, which is great, great,
but that's how an assistant a lot of times can
get their foot in the door is by working for
a very famous artist who has other people paint their art.
(27:42):
It's just it happens all the time, all right.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Then, if he didn't invent it, he was the one
who made no secret of it whatsoever. He exposed it
and actually used it to his benefit.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Well, and his had definitely more of a assembly line
feel than the others. It's not like other ghost artists
like I'll paint the trees and then you slide it
to the next person who paints the mountain. It's like
a single artist sort of recreating the pieces of art,
or a team of six assistants that are all working
on their individual thing. It's not like a factory kind
(28:16):
of thing that Andy Warhol did, so it was a
little different.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So initially his assistants were basically, this is gonna sound unkind.
They were very heavy drug users, if not addicted to drugs.
They were very frequently street kids. A lot of them
have been kicked out of their houses because they were
transgender or they were gay. They were societies cast off
(28:45):
in weirdos, and he collected them like they were precious
memory figurines and surrounded himself with them.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Yeah, and that included well, he collected all kinds of people.
He collected them. The factory was a scene. Man. It
was like you could have some you know, seventeen year
old street kid who was a junkie sitting next to
a very famous, you know, actor like a Dennis Hopper
or a real musician. And of course, the Velvet Underground
(29:14):
was never that big in the United States. That's kind
of what they're famous for these days, is is America
not ever really accepting them. They were huge in Europe,
but the Velvet Underground was had a thing going to
New York. Andy Warhol was their first manager. He financed
that first great record and brought in Nico to sing
on it. He designed that great album cover with a banana,
(29:37):
and he was That was part of the scene. The
Velvet Underground was hanging out there at the factory. Dennis
Hoppers hanging out the factory. People are coming and going,
They're doing Heroin, They're having sex out in front of everyone,
shooting lots of speed. It was it was wild.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
It was super wild, like they people would just walk
around naked like it was nuts. Totally unhinged, like there
were very few rules or regulations or anything like that.
I think it was just one of those things where
if you got in, you could manage to stay in.
You could do basically whatever you wanted. And I also
get the idea that people performed like it was performative too,
(30:20):
that it was also very competitive because one of the
things that he was known to do was to just
really latch onto somebody and find them very interesting, and
then he would get bored with them and just kind
of leave them behind in the dust. And I think
that was one of the reasons why he was called
I think it was fran Leewitz who said that who
called him a vampire. He would not just kind of
(30:41):
take energy from people, he would also take talent from people.
Apparently he had a talent for recognizing the peculiar talents
that each individual person has and then using them for himself.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So, for example, I think one of his assistants named
Bob Colicello. Andy Warhol had a terrible memory, but he
liked to record everything with his tape recorder so he
could remember. Not everybody wanted him to use his tape recorder,
and Bob Colicello he found out had a really great memory,
So Bob Colicello was his human tape recorder when somebody
(31:17):
wouldn't let him record their conversation. Just stuff like that,
just random stuff like that. And he assembled his life
the way he wanted it, using the people he surrounded
himself with and then just kind of interchanging them like
they were tutress parts when he saw fit.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah. There was an author and a performer named Bridget
Berlin who was around in the sixties and seventies at
the factory. Hopped up on speed, she would do all
kinds of work. She sometimes would run the factory line.
Sometimes she would get a hold of his diaries and
edit his diaries. Sometimes she would co write his books.
(31:53):
Edie Sedgwick very probably one of the biggest of his
what he called the superstars as far as you know
name recognition. She was a very pretty young woman, very troubled.
She was from a very prominent family. They met in
nineteen sixty five when she was twenty one and he
was thirty six. She went out on to be in
ten of those movies of his, and they were inseparable.
(32:16):
At a certain point they would match outfits. She was
always on his arm. But when you talk to insiders,
they would say that, you know, he treated Edie very
badly at times, and at one point he said, do
you think Edie will let us film her when she
commits suicide? So it was that kind of thing that happened.
She very sadly died of a drug overdose when she
(32:36):
was twenty eight years old, so just seven years into
their relationship.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah. I've also seen it pointed out that there was
a habit of people around him dying young, and that's
not the case with everybody. Like Bridge of Berlin was
shown shooting up speed in Chelsea Girls, and I think
she lived at twenty twenty, so people could make it
out of his orbit alive, but other people like Edie
(32:59):
Sedgwick didn't. And some people blame Andy Warhol for encouraging
just that kind of behavior, people's self destructive behavior, either
for his own amusement or whatever he was getting out
of it.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
I think that cult song Edie was about Edie Sedgwick,
Oh was it?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah? She was supposedly the first it girl where whatever
she did started a nationwide trend among people who were
into fashion or style or whatever, Like she couldn't whatever
she did. It was just that she had her own thing,
and everybody put her up on this pedestal. She was
a bright, brilliant star.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah, Candy Darling was another one of his cohorts for
a while. And if you look up Candy Darling, like,
I didn't even know a ton about Warhol, a little
bit here and there, but when I looked up Candy Darling,
I was like, Oh, I've seen this person in pictures
like my whole life. I feel like Candy Darling was
a transgender woman who got hormone therapy at a time
(33:55):
when that wasn't something that people did or was even
very easy to get done. And also Jackie Curtis was
friends with Candy Darling and they were kind of a
pair with Warhol. And Jackie Curtis was a playwright and
a poet and a singer and was back in the
nineteen sixties playing with gender identity and using different pronouns
(34:17):
and using terms like you know, fluidity and things like that.
This is at a time where like no one was
doing this kind of thing, and that's what Jackie Curtis
is doing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yes, another very famous superstar. I don't know if we
said or not, he would call them superstars, the people
who are around him and starred in his movies and stuff. Yeah, okay, good,
well done, Chuck. Another superstar is a guy named Robert
Olivio who was known as On Dene. Is that how
you'd say it.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I don't know if it's on Dene or Undine, but
on Deane sounds more right.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I think so too. He met Andy Warhol at a
really chic party. No, I'm sorry. He met Andy Warhol
at an orgy in the early sixties, and on Dene
did not like Andy Warhol from the get go because
Andy Warhol was just standing there watching everybody, not participating basically,
and Undine didn't like that at all. So he had
(35:11):
his friend whose orgy it was, throw Andy Warhol out,
and they crossed paths again later and I guess hugged
it out, and on Deane became one of his favorite people.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah. I mean, there's a If you look up Andy
Warhol superstars, there's a very very long list of people.
We obviously can't go over all of them, but we
should mention Joe Dellasandro. He was the one and more
one of the more famous, at least in that scene.
Once one of the actors in many of his films,
and uh, just a sort of a gay subculture sex
(35:42):
symbol icon for you know, a couple of decades and
I think is still around.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
He was also he was also the model for the
rolling Stone sticky fingers cover.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Oh is that dallas Andro?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, that cover of is basically a man's crotch.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
You she's crotch.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Pretty tight jeans too, They're very tight. Do you want
to take a break and then come back and talk
about who shot Andy Warhol?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah? It was Lily Taylor.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Right after this, so nice reference chuck to I shot
(36:37):
Andy Warhol the movie which I think contains the Yola
Tango song. I shot Andy Warhol? Right, isn't that for
that movie?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Probably? I don't remember. It's been a while.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
That's a great song. It's gotta be Yeah, go listen
to that song. It's very good. So Valerie Salonis is
who Lily Taylor was playing in that movie. I shot
Andy Warhol and she was Again, if you have our book,
go read chapter eighteen. It goes no way book. No,
it wasn't in the kids book. No, it goes way
(37:06):
into detail about Valerie Salanis and the shooting but in
the abbreviated version, she was a radical feminist, a playwright,
a man hater. And I say that quite confidently because
she was the founder and sole member of the Society
for Cutting Up Men Scum, author of the Scum Manifesto,
which is definitely worth reading. I think I've mentioned before
(37:28):
on the show, and she had a beef with Warhol.
She wrote a play called Up Your Ass and she
wanted Warhol to produce it, and not only would he
not produce it, he lost the manuscript that she gave him,
or the script that she gave him, and that really
enraged her. And apparently the Andy Warhol Foundation and Museum
(37:50):
in Pittsburgh has that script still. They keep it under
lock and key, but she never got it back, essentially.
And then he also used some of her record words
without credit in one of his movies. So she did
not like Andy Warhol. She was kind of fixated on him,
and on June third, nineteen sixty eight, she shot him.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Up Your Ass is so funny.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Oh, and there's like so many like subtitles to it too,
but you can just call it up your Ass.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I haven't seen that in a long long time. I
saw that movie back when it came out, and Lily
Taylor was so good. I just I love her and
she's amazing in that role. But yeah, on June third,
nineteen sixty eight, she went to the apartment of another
sort of art scene lady named Margo Phiden and said
it was, you know, really pretty out of it. She
(38:41):
suffered from schizophrenia and so she was not having a
good day. She was still trying to get this play
made and was almost begging this woman, Margo, to do that.
And she said, you know that she couldn't do that,
and she said, oh, yes, you will, because I'm going
to shoot Andy Warhol. Showed off her gun and left,
(39:01):
and apparently Piden tried to warn Warhol wasn't able to
get to him. This is when the factory was now
at Union Square, and she shot him and did not
immediately kill him. We'll hold on to that till the end.
But he was really messed up. He got a lot
of had a lot of damage to his internal organs,
(39:23):
had many surgeries, a lot of scarring, and had to
wear a corset for the rest of his life because
of these injuries.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
A medical courses that held his guts in Essentially, Yeah,
I saw that he when he was recuperating in the hospital,
he said to somebody, you know, we got to get
some bigger things to hide behind.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That great, very any Warhol.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
So he did survive, but he was different after that,
and some people argue that he was already headed in
this direction. But basically he stopped hanging out with the
people living on the fringes of society, entered society like
high society. He took his rightful place there as like
a beloved art god among people who could pay millions
(40:09):
of dollars for paintings, got a really nice house, got
a Rolls Royce, and then the next factory that he
set up was like a legit business, and he started
making what he called business art, where if you were
very wealthy, you could have him paint you in the
style of Maryland or Elvis, that kind of silk screen thing,
(40:30):
and he would take your money and be totally fine
with it. And he became again such a sellout. There's
really no other way to put it. That even those
portraits started to become bad, like he didn't even pay
that much attention to him, even though that's what he
was doing. And he got such a bad name toward
the end of his career that when he was hanging
(40:51):
out with Bosquiot. Bosquiot's career was kind of dragged down
for a little period of time because he was very
close to Andy Warhol. That's how bad a reputation Andy
Warhol got. He became a parody of himself to people
in the art world toward the end of his life.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, it's a much different scene than I mean, he
kind of in a way got nineteen eighties, you know.
I guess he sort of mirrored what happened in the
nineteen eighties with consumerism and just you know, MTV came along.
He did a couple of shows on MTV very cool,
one called Andy Warhol's TV and one called Andy Warhol's
Fifteen Minutes. Yeah. They weren't a bad actually, but it
(41:33):
was a different thing for sure. He, like you said,
he sold out from the beginning. But I think everyone
in his circle like thought he really sold out in
the eighties, like and not in a good way that
he should be proud of, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
I think it just took the rest of the world
like that long to catch on that he he had
always been a sellout and was totally fine with that
and didn't care. Maybe that's so this is his reputation
in the art world. His star was still quite bright
everywhere else, Like he would be on TV. He like
you said, he had two different MTV shows in the
(42:11):
mid eighties, Like he was hanging out with some of
the great up and coming artists like bas Giacht or
Keith Herring. He was just he was very well known.
He got work as much as he needed, and his
last major work was pretty great. It was an interpretation
of the Last Supper. Part of it is like a
sale sticker that says six ninety nine. It's one of
(42:32):
the more prominent things, and then another prominent thing. There's
Jesus is on there too, and next to it it
says the Big Sea. I think Christ Christ the Big Sea.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It could be anything though, if you think about it, it.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Could be, but this is the Last Supper. So he
was again not really revered in the art world until
after his death, and it became very clear that this
guy was an artistic genior, not just in his art
but in his life too, Like the Time Capsules is
a good example of that.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yeah, he in seventy four he started a Time Capsules
project He filled up five hundred and sixty nine cardboard boxes,
a steamer trunk, twenty filing cabinets, and there you know letters, there,
brick of brec from his life. There's artwork, there's ticket stubs,
there's clothing all the way back from the nineteen fifties
(43:26):
for about close to thirty years worth of stuff in
these time capsules.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah, I saw he would just sweep his desk clean
into a box like once every week or two and
like right TC on it for time capsule.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Well, when you're that famous, that becomes hugely valuable. If
I swept the stuff off of my desk, it's not
worth anything, so.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Right, So you've got the time capsules, which is a
really deep peek into his life. He also kept diaries,
and you've brought this to my attention. She was super
into Andy Warhol for a while, and she found out
that he had been audited Chuck every year ye by
the irs from nineteen seventy two until his death in
(44:09):
nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, thank you Nixon.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, he attributed it to Nixon revenge from Nixon, and
that's actually probably a pretty good hypothesis because he had
created political artwork for George McGovern's nineteen seventy two campaign,
and it was like an ugly portrait of Nixon. Then
underneath it said vote McGovern. And it's entirely possible Nixon
ordered him to be audited and it just got kept up.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
That's that's no coincidence. You don't get audited every year, sure,
so it's not how it works.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
So he would start noting everything, right.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Oh, I'm sure that he kept very good records from
that point on.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
He did. He would dictate his diary by phone every morning,
and those became published later on as Andy Warhol's diaries.
So there's a lot known about that guy, and yet
he's still an enigma.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, very much. When I said earlier that he did
not die right away from that gunshot, he would die
from complications from that gun shot many years later, in
February of nineteen eighty seven, he was fifty eight years old,
complications of having his gallbladder removed, and it was you know,
they can draw a direct line to that shooting and
(45:18):
his eventual death. He left a treasure trove, like you said,
of stuff. He donated everything basically to what is now
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual arts. It's worth
a lot of money. They've given out close to three
hundred million bucks just in grants to more than a
thousand art organizations over the year, and I think they
(45:42):
are partnered with the Carnegie Institute and the Dia Art
Foundation to build the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which
is where I last year saw Bonnie Prince Billy play.
One of my many shows that I've seen it his
he played the Indy Warhol Museum, because that's what he does.
He plays it weird places like that or not weird,
(46:03):
just different places. And it was great and it was
cool to walk around that museum a little bit beforehand.
They have more than they have a lot of his work.
They have more than four thousand videotapes, and they got
those time capsules there.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Yeah, every single one of them, I think right. I
think so.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
So.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
In addition to predicting the fifteen minutes of fame for
the future, even if he didn't originally come up with it,
he also had another idea that I think kind of
came to fruition later on. He had an idea for
a chain of diners that he called Andy Matts, and
they were for people who eat alone and you just
sit at a table they serve you frozen food, and
(46:41):
then you watch TV by yourself, and that everyone has
their own TV set.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Basically just predicted smartphones and society today.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
That's where we are now. Yeah, thought of that.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
And then there's one other thing. If you are a
fan of cringe, you don't like cringe?
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Do you like cringe comedy?
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Yeah? Or yeah? Basically her cringe performance art.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
I like stuff like The Office. Okay, it can border
on like I don't want to watch this for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah. I can't take it very easily. And if you
watch his interviews, they're very cringey. He would purposely just
sit there and go er or whatever, and he wouldn't
like he didn't have anything to say or couldn't think
of what to say, like he would just be a
terrible interviewee.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And then there's also Mike Douglas no MERV Griffin Show
segment with him and Edie Sedgwick, and he just refuses
to talk the whole time, and it's up to Edie
Sedgwick to try to keep things going. It's she's like
twenty one years old. It's just really hard to watch.
I think I made it maybe a minute into it
(47:50):
and I was like, I can't watch this anymore.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
I could actually watch that stuff. Yeah, I'm going to
check that out.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Okay, you're gonna lie.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
I don't know how much I love it, but oh,
I don't know. Sometimes when someone is just I think
that it's having no regard for And I'm not saying
it's like it's cool to go in there and like
wreck an interview, but like I also think, like I
don't know, if someone doesn't believe in that system and
they think it's all bs to make a statement like
that is like fine, as long as everyone's not doing it.
(48:19):
No one wants to watch everybody do that.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, for sure. It's weird though, because he was enthralled
by celebrity from a very young age, but he wouldn't
participate in it when he was a celebrity himself, even
though he wanted to be a celebrity.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
A conundrum.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, for sure. I think that's it for Andy Warhol. Huh.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, this could have been two or three ups, but
I think it's a pretty good overview.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
I think so too. If you want to know more
about Andy Warhol, there, like you said, is a lot
more to learn, and you can find stuff starting out
on the internet, and then go to Pittsburgh and see
his stuff in person, and then save up eleven million
dollars and buy one of his painting yourself. That's right.
And while you're saving that money up, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
I'm gonna call this shortened Shortish in Swedish. Hey, guys,
Actually this is more than Swedish. This is great. Hey, guys.
I'm an old retired concert pianist who remembers miny Hammond
organs for my youth. I didn't play them professionally, but
listening to this, Josh, you're gonna love this. I was
the pianist for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I was so
(49:29):
interested though in the history of the Hammond. I had
no idea. I had actually never even thought about their origin,
although I played a few in funeral homes over the years.
I played big pipe Organs with stops, including for the
Pittsburgh Symphony, but I never mastered those slide bars on
the Hammond. It's interesting you did a whole podcast about
hamm and Organs, but I don't think we heard a
single musical note. There was a wonderful young lady, wrote Scott,
(49:52):
who used to play at the Hurricane Lounge in Pittsburgh.
She's still living, also in her early eighties like me.
Thanks for wonderful learning experience. And this, my friends, is
from a legend. Patricia prattis Jennings and I did a
little wormholing with Patricia and it turns out Patricia is
(50:13):
a legend. She played I believe she was the first
black woman to sign a major contract with the major
symphony in the United States.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
There's a great, great YouTube piece on her. I can't remember.
It's a Pittsburgh local, Pittsburgh thing, but it's really good
that she's interviewed, and she's just wonderful and amazing talent.
And it just knocks me out that in her eighties
she's like getting something out of our show.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
That is pretty cool. And that's a lot of range too,
going from the symphony to a funeral. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah, totally. But she played for the symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony
for decades.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
Right, but she could also play a funeral too. I'm
sure there's quite different. The whole ViBe's got to be different, you.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Know, I would think so.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
And also one more thing. I'll bet the Hurricane Lounge
was the place to be.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Sounds like it, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Thanks a lot, Patricia, that is really cool. Thank you
for writing in, and, like Chuck said, thank you for
getting something out of our episode. And if you want
to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with
us via email too. Send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
(51:23):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck, Bryan Jerry's here and this is Stuff
you should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And look, there's Andy Warhol. Yeah, Anitie Sedgwick and lou Reid.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, and Jackie Curtis and Valerie Solanas, the whole gangs here.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
We did one on that right in the Scum Manifesto.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Yes, we did, okay. Chapter eighteen of our book is
on the Scum Manifesto in Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
We did not do it as a podcast yet no,
Oh well, probably never will.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Oh okay, But I think, Chuck, before we get into this,
we should dispend something because I think it's very instructive
about Andy Warhol. He is. Probably the most famous quote
from him is that ever in the future, everyone will
be famous for fifteen minutes. And he didn't say that,
(01:03):
even in an interview in nineteen eighty he said he
didn't say it. He used it in I think a
nineteen eighty or sixty eight exhibition like the Notes, but
it wasn't his. There is at least four other people
who can make a claim to having said it first,
and that that says a lot about any Warhol that
he was not shy or embarrassed or even secretive about
(01:25):
taking other people's ideas, even asking for other people for
ideas to use in his own work. And then it
also shows that the idea that he said that, and
that that's so associated with him and his whole you know, ethos,
it also demonstrates that he himself was one of his
(01:45):
own works of art, his own brand, his own image,
his own everything about him was he was one of
his own works of art. And those two things are
all captured in just that one little quote.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. A little
bit about his childhood before we get to the good stuff.
He was born, actually, Andrew WARHOLA he would drop the
a years later. He was born. And it's interesting you
think of Warhol as a contemporary artist, which he is
in some ways, but he was born in nineteen twenty eight.
(02:18):
It's not like, you know, he was a bit older
when he was at Studio fifty four in the nineteen seventies,
older as in my age.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Even stranger than that, chuck. He was born in.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Pittsburgh, yeah, well not stranger if you're from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh
is very proud of their Warhol connection, especially to Carnegie
Mellon University, where he went. His parents were European immigrants
and his mother was an artist. He was the youngest
of three boys, and his parents were very encouraging of
his art. They got him a camera when he was
(02:50):
a little kid. They sent him to art classes and
eventually would pay for him to go. It was a
Carnegie Institute of Technology at the time, but Carnegie Mellon
now which is a great art school, which is kind
of period.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Right, Yeah, it really is. I read that the whole
family just kind of, I don't want to say coddle,
but he was a bit of the center of attention.
He was the center of the family, being the baby
of three boys. And when he was a kid, he
came down with Sydenham Korea or Korea which is also
known as Saint Vitas dance, which is a really mean
(03:23):
name for a neurological disorder where you have involuntary movements,
and he was in bed for a number of months,
and he again just happened to have a mom who
was into art, who took that time to teach him
to draw, and then he also spent some of that
time reading celebrity magazine. So those two things that he
(03:44):
got into when he was sick in bed really kind
of came together to form the foundation of his whole career.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, and like you said, he was the youngest. He
was also ill. He had a skin discoloration issue. He
didn't like his nose. He thought his nose was bulbous
and misshapen. He was bullied at school. He was always
very just always felt bad. It's sort of about the
way he looked. And then later in life when he
would wear wigs and have plastic surgery and wear makeup
(04:14):
and stuff like that, people would say that sort of
you know, was andy. From the time he was young.
His father would die when he was just fourteen years
old of johndice liver. It was very hard on young Andrew.
He could not go to the funeral. I don't know
if that's from emotion.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, yeah, he was completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, okay, Yeah, so he was hiding under his bed
during the wake. And eventually he would move to New
York City in nineteen forty nine, where he would drop
that a and become a very successful commercial illustrator kind
of pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, he knew how to hustle too. I read that
he would go to record stores and look at album
art and then pick out the labels that had the
coolest art, and then go to those labels and try
to get work from him. Man, it worked a lot,
and I think it's one of those things where once
you make a name for yourself with a couple of companies,
it gets easier and easier to get work. So he
made a pretty good name for himself. He made a
(05:07):
pretty good living as a commercial artist for at least
the first decade or so of his career. And he
had this style that I don't know was unique to him,
but you know, he basically adopted it himself, where he
would draw something, usually kind of out of proportion, some
parts were more detailed than others. It very very early
(05:28):
sixties drawing, like almost pink Panther type illustration, and then
he would blot the ink before it was dry, so
some parts would be thicker, some lines would be thicker
than other parts that were not even disconnected and almost
appeared dotted, and then he would go over and color
them in outside of the lines, like almost blot them
with paint. And he became really well known for that,
(05:51):
and it was really good to apply to women's shoes
and that was one of his favorite things to draw
commercial art for.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, he also started and this would come come in
very handy, as we will see when he sort of
had his assembly line art thing going at the factory,
he would he'd made stamps of things. He made rubber stamps,
and this is how he would do printmaking. So if
he had a client and was like, I love this,
but I don't like the color, he could go do
it again without starting all over, just by changing the
(06:19):
color out on the stamp. Or if he was doing
like screen printing or printmaking or something like that, He's
very easy to change things up. Then, like you said,
he won awards, he made some pretty good money. He
was out as a gay man in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I've even both I've seen that he was and that
he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Oh really, I've always seen that he was. But either way,
it was the art role of the nineteen fifties. Even
in that scene, it wasn't the most normal thing to
be out and proud.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Right for sure, No definitely. So one of the things
that made Andy Warhol Andy Warhol is he never really
saw the high art that he created gallery art versus
commercial art as something more elevated than the commercial art
work he did. It was just different or maybe he
could make more money for it. There were other people involved,
(07:14):
but he viewed the gallery owners, the curators and people
who would eventually commission him or you know, buy his work,
he would let them help shape it. Like he wasn't
like one of those you know the picture of the
artists who like can't take the first note about their work.
He would get like, yeah, exactly, like you were his
client when you were buying art from him. And that's
(07:36):
how he viewed it. And that was definitely new and
he carried that throughout his career and it had a
lot of benefits for him. And then toward the end
it really kind of detracted from his images.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
We'll see, yeah, for sure. Early on, and this is
in the fifties, you got to remember he was selling
some self published art books. He had one called Studies
for a Boy Book that was in a gallery called
the Bodily Gallery, and it was his first solo exhibition.
They were sketches of young men. He was not shy
about projecting sexuality in any of his works, and like
(08:13):
we said, this is nineteen fifties. Even in the art world,
some people accepted that stuff. Other galleries were like, no,
we can't have like gay themed art in our gallery,
even in like a New York art gallery. So he
was kind of pushing the envelope early on with that stuff.
He worked with his mom. His mom lived with him,
she moved to New York and lived with him for
about twenty years, Yeah, until she left in I think
(08:33):
nineteen seventy one's where she went home to die, right.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, essentially. And another just like with his father, he
ignored letters from his cousin telling him like his mom
was dying and apparently she was holding out for him
to visit, and he never did. And I don't think
he went to her funeral either. And he said later
that in a quote that he couldn't bear think of it.
He likened her to a bird that had died recently,
(08:59):
and that he couldn't been there to think of the
bird dying. That he just liked to think that it
was out for a walk. Yeah, So that kind of
thing just totally overwhelmed. He was very close to his mother.
I mean, think about it. He lived with his mother
for twenty years. Yeah, during like the height of his
career and fame, and supposedly also they were both deeply
religious Byzantine Catholics, and he would carry a rosary around
(09:21):
in his pocket with him. But there's a lot of
legends and stories about Andy Warhol. There's also another story
that he would carry loose diamonds around his pocket because
he liked to just kind of, you know, jiggle him
around like they were loose change. So who knows. It's
not entirely documented, but there's there's a whole thread of
there's a whole camp that it's like, No, he was
(09:42):
super religious, he just kind of hit it.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, he was a bit of a conundrum in a
lot of ways. The more I read about him, it
was interesting because he could be quite kind and giving.
He could also be very cruel, even to friends of his.
As we'll see, he was a lot of things. He
was a well known liar, So even things that you
read that Andy Warhol said oftentimes was not the truth.
(10:05):
And the way I took it was he wasn't like,
oh he's a liar. He's a bad guy because he lies,
or it seemed like you just like messing with people
and he would just make stuff up.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Yeah, some people. It's funny because you know, from the
outside you think of Andy Warhol as almost like an
art god, but inside the art world, like there were
a lot of people who are just annoyed with him,
or I just thought he was lame or a creep.
I saw him compared to basically an energy vampire. Yeah,
but then like you said, other people are like no,
he was very kindly and very giving of himself and
(10:39):
of his money and help people get like a start
for in their art career that they were looking for,
like you, Yeah, like you said, he he was a
contradiction in terms in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Yeah, big time. So he obviously is most famous for
being a pop artist. Pop art started in London in
the early fifties and Warhol was one of the first
few artists to kind of get involved in this art
movement that emerged from Dada and also just had a
lot of it was just sort of in the early
(11:11):
it was in the zeitgeist of the art scene at
the time of this idea of mass produced objects being
a theme. There was also, at the same time, though,
a very different world of people like Jackson Pollock and
abstract expressionism happening, people who are very serious about their
art and who I imagine did not appreciate this kid,
(11:32):
while he wasn't a kid by that point. But this
guy named Andy Warhol, this very eccentric guy, that's you know.
One of the very first things he did were those
celebrity screen prints, those silk screens, right.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Yeah, one of the abstract expressionist kings, Williem d'cooning, told
Andy Warhol to his face that he was a killer
of beauty, a killer of art. He said, you even
kill laughter.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
You know, dacooning. He killed La Laughter two himself.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
He was pretty drunk at the time, but yeah, I'm
sure any Warhol didn't like to hear that. Right, So,
so he is associated with pop art, and it definitely
did dominate abstract expressionism, and it kind of said like, hey,
you don't have to just you don't have to take
art quite so seriously. And not only that, are you
(12:17):
guys paying attention over here to how commercial and consumerist
America is becoming. Let's start meditating on that a little
bit and like you said, one of the first ones
that really kind of gained attention were his silk screens
of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. And I think one of
the first ones he did was Marilynd's portrait on a
(12:39):
gold background, and it was meant to basically kind of
look like a Renaissance icon of the Madonna. Just the
gold suggested it, I guess something like that. And what
he was essentially saying, he was equating celebrity as replacing religion. Now,
so it was kind of like comments like that that
was the basis of early top art.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Should we take a break? Yeah, I don't think this
has any great cliffhangers, No, really, it doesn't. I was
trying to find one, all right, So we'll take a
break now and we'll come back with the sort of
the beginning of Andy Warhol's pop art career right after this.
(13:36):
All right, So we mentioned before the break. In nineteen
sixty one, I think one of his first pop artworks
was called black and White. It was black and white.
It was called Coca Cola two, and it's a drawing
of one of those great coke bottles. And this would
become a thing for him, like brands, especially food and beverages,
which is very interesting, I think. But he did those
(13:58):
silk screens right away. In the very next year, in
nineteen sixty two is when those Campbell soup cans came out.
A couple of the things he's most well known for
were those celebrity silk screens and the Campbell soup cans.
Thirty two portraits, And I love that Livia used those quotes,
used portraits and quotes because what he did was he
(14:19):
would project. Is what I did when I was a kid.
I had a little overhead projector, and I would project
an image of Opus the penguin, or build a cat
on a wall, and I would trace it. And I
would act like I could draw right when I couldn't.
I was just tracing something. And that's what he did
with those soup cans. He traced them from being projected
on a wall.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, so they were the first thirty two portraits were
hand drawn. His first Campbell soup one portraits were and
he actually didn't have the idea himself. He paid fifty
dollars to a designer named Muriel Latau at a party.
He paid by check for the idea. She said she
had a good idea and that was it, and he
(15:00):
turned it into his whole career. And then there's one
other development too while he was doing the Campbell soup
cans that really kind of altered his career that instead
of projecting onto a canvas and then hand drawing something
and then going back and painting it, he figured out
that you could take you could project an image onto
a silk screen that had amulsion on it that would
(15:22):
burn that image onto that silk screen, and all of
a sudden, you had a stencil and you could put
whatever color you wanted through it and make the same
thing over and over and over again. And so his
next series of soup cans were just Campbell's tomato soup,
but in all sorts of different colors. And that kicked
off the Maryland, the Elvis, the Jackie I think A
(15:45):
hundred Ways or something like that like that that changed
his career because not only did it it causes sensation
like nobody had made art like that before, and it
looked really cool, but also it allowed him to form
the assembly line that he eventually became famous for.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, I mean a lot of his art later on
was done by these people that worked for him in
the factory, and it was you know, if you've ever
been to like a T shirt silkscreen place and there's
people just like silkscreen t shirts, one after the other.
Andy Warhol was doing that kind of thing and becoming
very famous for it. It's very interesting how it all happened.
(16:24):
But there was a gallery in nineteen sixty two, the
Fairest Gallery in Los Angeles, where he had his first
solo pop art exhibition of these soup cans. The gallery
co owner was named Irving Bloom, and he displayed them
like they were shelves on or they were cans on
a shelf, like at a supermarket. Very clever. Dennis Hopper
(16:45):
very famously bought one of those first ones. But apparently
Warhol didn't even go. A lot of people didn't go.
Wasn't super big at first? A lot of people too, right, Yeah,
a lot of writers were making fun of it in
the press. One quote was like, Frankly, the cream of
asparagus does nothing for me, but the terrifying intensity of
the chicken noodle gives me a real zen feeling. So
(17:08):
he was being mocked until you know, he became Andy
warhowt and I'm sure he was mocked for a lot
of his career by some of the same critics that
had their nose turned up at stuff like this, for sure,
But it was the beginning of this movement in the
United States, and no one had ever seen anything.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Like it, No, because nobody had done anything like it. Like,
like you said, commercialism kind of slipped in here there,
but this was nothing but commercialism and a comment on
commercialism and our relationship to brands and all that kind
of stuff, and that was definitely new. And from that
the pop art esthetic like took off. You can basically
(17:47):
plant that at the feet of Andy Warhol in his
first Campbell's Soup camp portraits, and then very quickly after
that later on the Tomato soup portraits with silk screening.
And today I think, I think what had up and wash?
Did you say, Blum? Irving Blum? I said, bloom, but
bloom he he, It may be bloom either way. He
(18:09):
decided that those those portraits should not be sold off individually.
They didn't really make sense on their own. They made
sense as a group because it was allegedly all thirty
two flavors of Campbell's soup, and that you know, just
having Scotch broth by itself is kind of cool, but
not really, you need the whole thing. So he bought back,
(18:29):
including Dennis Hoppers. He bought back all of those first
thirty two portraits, and he paid Andy Warhol a thousand
dollars about ten thousand.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Dollars one today.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah, one hand drawn or hand painted soup can is
called a small torn soup can pepper pot. In two
thousand and six, that one sold for eleven point eight
million dollars. So Irving Blum got these things for a
song because it hadn't taken off yet, but it did
very quickly after.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Well that that small tour in campbell soup can that
wasn't even one of the big paintings. That was paper
dresses we talked about. Paper dresses were a thing at
the time, literally dresses made out of these paper pieces,
and he was making these paper dresses with images silk
screened on them, and Campbell's soup even started doing that
(19:22):
later on. But just one of the pictures from one
of the dresses sold for almost twelve million bucks.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Oh wow, that's great, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I also
saw too. I don't understand art unless somebody explains it
to me.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Same here.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
But I saw that the especially the silk screen tomato
soup cans that is the same soup can, but in
a bunch of different colors. That what he's doing is
by taking this thing that you take as a given
that's so familiar, it's a Campbell soup can. I recognize
that everybody knows what that is, and by putting by
playing with the colors and making different color combinations, he
(19:59):
was actually like basically melting the brand. The whole idea
of the brand, the whole identity of the brain was
just kind of being stripped away from the viewer's brain
and turned into something else without the viewer even really
realizing it, because the colors are so pretty that you
just kind of lost track that you're looking at a
soup can, even though you start out knowing that you're
(20:22):
looking at a soup can.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Interesting, Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting too.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yeah, as far as pop art goes, you know, you
mentioned a comment on consumerism. You know, it sort of
depends on who you ask on what it means. That
can be a comment on consumerism. It could be just
you know, everyday things are like celebrating something that's every
day in ordinary Andy Warhol himself said pop art is
(20:48):
just about liking things, and that he ate Campbell's soup
every day for lunch for twenty years. I don't know
if that's true. That sounds like one of his little
stories that he might tell. But for him it was
very simple. I don't think he tried to get too
overly analytical about it. He was just like, it's pop art,
and that's the whole point is you shouldn't examine it
too closely.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well. One of the other things, though, is that he
was very ambitious. He liked money, he liked fame, He
wanted to be known as the greatest artist in the world.
And he was like he was a consumer himself, Like
he liked stuff. He liked spending money on things, like
that story about him walking around with loose diamonds in
his pocket. So it's weird. He was. He liked the
(21:32):
very stuff that his paintings allegedly criticized or made fun
of or mocked or analyzed. He was into that same scene.
He wasn't an outsider to it. He was as much
an American consumer as anybody else. And that was that
was very odd for that time. You know, that was
the time where like you didn't want to be a
(21:52):
sellout or anything like that. Andy Warhol was a sellout
from the very beginning. He even put a fake ad
in The Village Voice saying like he to tach his
name to the following things if you would pay for it.
And it was a joke. But at the same time
it wasn't a joke. As we'll see, he started making
what he called business art and started making a lot
(22:13):
of money from it, and as a result of his
taking that up very quickly becoming like basically a sellout
as soon as he could. The art critics basically say
his period of actual good artwork just lasted from nineteen
sixty one with the Coca Cola bottles to the nineteen
(22:35):
sixty four Flowers edition, so three years. Interesting even though
his career kept going on that that was his last
notable painting. Specifically, there's an art critic for the Washington
Post named Blake Gopnik who wrote a nine hundred page
biography on Andy Warhol and his art, and he I
don't think it was just his opinion. I think that's
generally the art critic world's opinion that he was almost
(22:58):
a flash in the pan as far as actually producing
good art is concerned.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Well, yeah, I mean, because what he was was a
he kind of was the art. He created a brand
in a persona that was bigger than the art itself.
So it was I mean, you talk about separating art
from artists, it was indistinguishable. In any Warhol's case, It
was all a part of who he was, this, which
(23:24):
was this. He was the Campbell soup, can you know?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah? And I mean we take it for granted today
living decades into the postmodern era and now decades into
the era of influencers and Instagram, like that's a normal thought.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
To us, right, Totally.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
This guy was doing this when modernism still reigned and
postmodernism was just starting to bleed out of it where
there weren't such things as influencers like he. I don't
want to maybe he did. He might have invented it.
At the very least, he gave other people a lot
of other people the idea to try the same things.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah. Absolutely, we have to talk about his filmmaking because
he would branch out away from you know, screenprinting things.
Although he did that kind of throughout I think because
he had his factory going. But in the mid sixties
he started to make visual art. In sixty three, his
first film, Sleep I was about to say, came out,
(24:20):
but it kind of didn't really. I'm sure it played
in some avant garde theaters here and there, but his
movies were they weren't movies. They didn't have plots and
characters in three act structure and stuff like that. He
would set a camera up in front of the Empire
State Building and shoot it for eight hours. Sleep was
(24:40):
five hours and twenty one minutes of his boyfriend John
Giorno sleeping. His most successful movie, if you want to
call it, that, was called The Chelsea Girls in sixty six.
I Love Livia says it came at a relatively snappy
three hours.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, what's funny is it came in at three hours
because it was a six hour movie. He's split in
half and projected side by side next to each other,
so technically it was six hours.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It was six hours. But this also didn't have a plot.
He was very explicit with his real sex in movies
without it being well I'm sure a lot of people
labeled it pornography at the time, but it was art
also drug use too, Oh sure. He was very open
and explicit about all of this. At Like I mentioned
(25:27):
the factory, he had three places called the Factory, and
they were his art studios, they were his meeting places,
his party spaces, the first one being at East forty
seventh in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, that was a silver factory an artist named Billy
name name is not his real last name. He just
adopted it. It's kind of like generic. I love that. Yeah.
He covered it in an aluminum foil and silver paint,
which gave it the name silver Factory. But it was
also a former fat hat factory. A fat factory is
(25:59):
another way to it. And the other reason factory applies
is because remember Andy Warhol was the one who came
up with assembly line art. Yeah, he would have an idea,
or maybe somebody would give him an idea. He would
execute it initially, like maybe create the first stencil, make
a couple versions of it with different color combinations, and
(26:19):
then after that he would basically leave it to his
assistants to start producing his art that he would sign
and it was his art. But that was a brand
new way of considering art, and so much so that
he had an assistant, a guy who basically became his
right hand His name was Gerard Malanga or Malanga as
we'll see. He would go to interviews with Andy Warhol,
(26:43):
and Warhol would be like, why don't you ask my
assistant Jerry here some questions. He did a lot of
my paintings, and I think most people at the time
thought he was kidding, and he wasn't kidding at all.
Not just Jerry, but other people were physically making the
paintings that he was selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, to be clear, I know people are typing up
emails right now. This is not a new idea, and
this is not something that doesn't happen all the time
in the art world. There are In fact, we got
an email from someone recently who was called a ghost artist,
like a ghostwriter. They very famous artists, many, many times
(27:20):
have assistants that actually pump out these paintings in their
style and sell them. Wow, it's always happened. I had
a friend who twenty five years ago did it for
a guy here in Atlanta, and now she's her own
artist and has her own gallery, which is great, great,
but that's how an assistant a lot of times can
get their foot in the door is by working for
a very famous artist who has other people paint their art.
(27:42):
It's just it happens all the time, all right.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Then, if he didn't invent it, he was the one
who made no secret of it whatsoever. He exposed it
and actually used it to his benefit.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Well, and his had definitely more of a assembly line
feel than the others. It's not like other ghost artists
like I'll paint the trees and then you slide it
to the next person who paints the mountain. It's like
a single artist sort of recreating the pieces of art,
or a team of six assistants that are all working
on their individual thing. It's not like a factory kind
(28:16):
of thing that Andy Warhol did, so it was a
little different.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So initially his assistants were basically, this is gonna sound unkind.
They were very heavy drug users, if not addicted to drugs.
They were very frequently street kids. A lot of them
have been kicked out of their houses because they were
transgender or they were gay. They were societies cast off
(28:45):
in weirdos, and he collected them like they were precious
memory figurines and surrounded himself with them.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Yeah, and that included well, he collected all kinds of people.
He collected them. The factory was a scene. Man. It
was like you could have some you know, seventeen year
old street kid who was a junkie sitting next to
a very famous, you know, actor like a Dennis Hopper
or a real musician. And of course, the Velvet Underground
(29:14):
was never that big in the United States. That's kind
of what they're famous for these days, is is America
not ever really accepting them. They were huge in Europe,
but the Velvet Underground was had a thing going to
New York. Andy Warhol was their first manager. He financed
that first great record and brought in Nico to sing
on it. He designed that great album cover with a banana,
(29:37):
and he was That was part of the scene. The
Velvet Underground was hanging out there at the factory. Dennis
Hoppers hanging out the factory. People are coming and going,
They're doing Heroin, They're having sex out in front of everyone,
shooting lots of speed. It was it was wild.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
It was super wild, like they people would just walk
around naked like it was nuts. Totally unhinged, like there
were very few rules or regulations or anything like that.
I think it was just one of those things where
if you got in, you could manage to stay in.
You could do basically whatever you wanted. And I also
get the idea that people performed like it was performative too,
(30:20):
that it was also very competitive because one of the
things that he was known to do was to just
really latch onto somebody and find them very interesting, and
then he would get bored with them and just kind
of leave them behind in the dust. And I think
that was one of the reasons why he was called
I think it was fran Leewitz who said that who
called him a vampire. He would not just kind of
(30:41):
take energy from people, he would also take talent from people.
Apparently he had a talent for recognizing the peculiar talents
that each individual person has and then using them for himself.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So, for example, I think one of his assistants named
Bob Colicello. Andy Warhol had a terrible memory, but he
liked to record everything with his tape recorder so he
could remember. Not everybody wanted him to use his tape recorder,
and Bob Colicello he found out had a really great memory,
So Bob Colicello was his human tape recorder when somebody
(31:17):
wouldn't let him record their conversation. Just stuff like that,
just random stuff like that. And he assembled his life
the way he wanted it, using the people he surrounded
himself with and then just kind of interchanging them like
they were tutress parts when he saw fit.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah. There was an author and a performer named Bridget
Berlin who was around in the sixties and seventies at
the factory. Hopped up on speed, she would do all
kinds of work. She sometimes would run the factory line.
Sometimes she would get a hold of his diaries and
edit his diaries. Sometimes she would co write his books.
(31:53):
Edie Sedgwick very probably one of the biggest of his
what he called the superstars as far as you know
name recognition. She was a very pretty young woman, very troubled.
She was from a very prominent family. They met in
nineteen sixty five when she was twenty one and he
was thirty six. She went out on to be in
ten of those movies of his, and they were inseparable.
(32:16):
At a certain point they would match outfits. She was
always on his arm. But when you talk to insiders,
they would say that, you know, he treated Edie very
badly at times, and at one point he said, do
you think Edie will let us film her when she
commits suicide? So it was that kind of thing that happened.
She very sadly died of a drug overdose when she
(32:36):
was twenty eight years old, so just seven years into
their relationship.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah. I've also seen it pointed out that there was
a habit of people around him dying young, and that's
not the case with everybody. Like Bridge of Berlin was
shown shooting up speed in Chelsea Girls, and I think
she lived at twenty twenty, so people could make it
out of his orbit alive, but other people like Edie
(32:59):
Sedgwick didn't. And some people blame Andy Warhol for encouraging
just that kind of behavior, people's self destructive behavior, either
for his own amusement or whatever he was getting out
of it.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
I think that cult song Edie was about Edie Sedgwick,
Oh was it?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah? She was supposedly the first it girl where whatever
she did started a nationwide trend among people who were
into fashion or style or whatever, Like she couldn't whatever
she did. It was just that she had her own thing,
and everybody put her up on this pedestal. She was
a bright, brilliant star.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah, Candy Darling was another one of his cohorts for
a while. And if you look up Candy Darling, like,
I didn't even know a ton about Warhol, a little
bit here and there, but when I looked up Candy Darling,
I was like, Oh, I've seen this person in pictures
like my whole life. I feel like Candy Darling was
a transgender woman who got hormone therapy at a time
(33:55):
when that wasn't something that people did or was even
very easy to get done. And also Jackie Curtis was
friends with Candy Darling and they were kind of a
pair with Warhol. And Jackie Curtis was a playwright and
a poet and a singer and was back in the
nineteen sixties playing with gender identity and using different pronouns
(34:17):
and using terms like you know, fluidity and things like that.
This is at a time where like no one was
doing this kind of thing, and that's what Jackie Curtis
is doing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yes, another very famous superstar. I don't know if we
said or not, he would call them superstars, the people
who are around him and starred in his movies and stuff. Yeah, okay, good,
well done, Chuck. Another superstar is a guy named Robert
Olivio who was known as On Dene. Is that how
you'd say it.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I don't know if it's on Dene or Undine, but
on Deane sounds more right.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I think so too. He met Andy Warhol at a
really chic party. No, I'm sorry. He met Andy Warhol
at an orgy in the early sixties, and on Dene
did not like Andy Warhol from the get go because
Andy Warhol was just standing there watching everybody, not participating basically,
and Undine didn't like that at all. So he had
(35:11):
his friend whose orgy it was, throw Andy Warhol out,
and they crossed paths again later and I guess hugged
it out, and on Deane became one of his favorite people.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah. I mean, there's a If you look up Andy
Warhol superstars, there's a very very long list of people.
We obviously can't go over all of them, but we
should mention Joe Dellasandro. He was the one and more
one of the more famous, at least in that scene.
Once one of the actors in many of his films,
and uh, just a sort of a gay subculture sex
(35:42):
symbol icon for you know, a couple of decades and
I think is still around.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
He was also he was also the model for the
rolling Stone sticky fingers cover.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Oh is that dallas Andro?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, that cover of is basically a man's crotch.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
You she's crotch.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Pretty tight jeans too, They're very tight. Do you want
to take a break and then come back and talk
about who shot Andy Warhol?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah? It was Lily Taylor.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Right after this, so nice reference chuck to I shot
(36:37):
Andy Warhol the movie which I think contains the Yola
Tango song. I shot Andy Warhol? Right, isn't that for
that movie?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Probably? I don't remember. It's been a while.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
That's a great song. It's gotta be Yeah, go listen
to that song. It's very good. So Valerie Salonis is
who Lily Taylor was playing in that movie. I shot
Andy Warhol and she was Again, if you have our book,
go read chapter eighteen. It goes no way book. No,
it wasn't in the kids book. No, it goes way
(37:06):
into detail about Valerie Salanis and the shooting but in
the abbreviated version, she was a radical feminist, a playwright,
a man hater. And I say that quite confidently because
she was the founder and sole member of the Society
for Cutting Up Men Scum, author of the Scum Manifesto,
which is definitely worth reading. I think I've mentioned before
(37:28):
on the show, and she had a beef with Warhol.
She wrote a play called Up Your Ass and she
wanted Warhol to produce it, and not only would he
not produce it, he lost the manuscript that she gave him,
or the script that she gave him, and that really
enraged her. And apparently the Andy Warhol Foundation and Museum
(37:50):
in Pittsburgh has that script still. They keep it under
lock and key, but she never got it back, essentially.
And then he also used some of her record words
without credit in one of his movies. So she did
not like Andy Warhol. She was kind of fixated on him,
and on June third, nineteen sixty eight, she shot him.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Up Your Ass is so funny.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Oh, and there's like so many like subtitles to it too,
but you can just call it up your Ass.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I haven't seen that in a long long time. I
saw that movie back when it came out, and Lily
Taylor was so good. I just I love her and
she's amazing in that role. But yeah, on June third,
nineteen sixty eight, she went to the apartment of another
sort of art scene lady named Margo Phiden and said
it was, you know, really pretty out of it. She
(38:41):
suffered from schizophrenia and so she was not having a
good day. She was still trying to get this play
made and was almost begging this woman, Margo, to do that.
And she said, you know that she couldn't do that,
and she said, oh, yes, you will, because I'm going
to shoot Andy Warhol. Showed off her gun and left,
(39:01):
and apparently Piden tried to warn Warhol wasn't able to
get to him. This is when the factory was now
at Union Square, and she shot him and did not
immediately kill him. We'll hold on to that till the end.
But he was really messed up. He got a lot
of had a lot of damage to his internal organs,
(39:23):
had many surgeries, a lot of scarring, and had to
wear a corset for the rest of his life because
of these injuries.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
A medical courses that held his guts in Essentially, Yeah,
I saw that he when he was recuperating in the hospital,
he said to somebody, you know, we got to get
some bigger things to hide behind.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That great, very any Warhol.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
So he did survive, but he was different after that,
and some people argue that he was already headed in
this direction. But basically he stopped hanging out with the
people living on the fringes of society, entered society like
high society. He took his rightful place there as like
a beloved art god among people who could pay millions
(40:09):
of dollars for paintings, got a really nice house, got
a Rolls Royce, and then the next factory that he
set up was like a legit business, and he started
making what he called business art, where if you were
very wealthy, you could have him paint you in the
style of Maryland or Elvis, that kind of silk screen thing,
(40:30):
and he would take your money and be totally fine
with it. And he became again such a sellout. There's
really no other way to put it. That even those
portraits started to become bad, like he didn't even pay
that much attention to him, even though that's what he
was doing. And he got such a bad name toward
the end of his career that when he was hanging
(40:51):
out with Bosquiot. Bosquiot's career was kind of dragged down
for a little period of time because he was very
close to Andy Warhol. That's how bad a reputation Andy
Warhol got. He became a parody of himself to people
in the art world toward the end of his life.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, it's a much different scene than I mean, he
kind of in a way got nineteen eighties, you know.
I guess he sort of mirrored what happened in the
nineteen eighties with consumerism and just you know, MTV came along.
He did a couple of shows on MTV very cool,
one called Andy Warhol's TV and one called Andy Warhol's
Fifteen Minutes. Yeah. They weren't a bad actually, but it
(41:33):
was a different thing for sure. He, like you said,
he sold out from the beginning. But I think everyone
in his circle like thought he really sold out in
the eighties, like and not in a good way that
he should be proud of, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
I think it just took the rest of the world
like that long to catch on that he he had
always been a sellout and was totally fine with that
and didn't care. Maybe that's so this is his reputation
in the art world. His star was still quite bright
everywhere else, Like he would be on TV. He like
you said, he had two different MTV shows in the
(42:11):
mid eighties, Like he was hanging out with some of
the great up and coming artists like bas Giacht or
Keith Herring. He was just he was very well known.
He got work as much as he needed, and his
last major work was pretty great. It was an interpretation
of the Last Supper. Part of it is like a
sale sticker that says six ninety nine. It's one of
(42:32):
the more prominent things, and then another prominent thing. There's
Jesus is on there too, and next to it it
says the Big Sea. I think Christ Christ the Big Sea.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It could be anything though, if you think about it, it.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Could be, but this is the Last Supper. So he
was again not really revered in the art world until
after his death, and it became very clear that this
guy was an artistic genior, not just in his art
but in his life too, Like the Time Capsules is
a good example of that.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yeah, he in seventy four he started a Time Capsules
project He filled up five hundred and sixty nine cardboard boxes,
a steamer trunk, twenty filing cabinets, and there you know letters, there,
brick of brec from his life. There's artwork, there's ticket stubs,
there's clothing all the way back from the nineteen fifties
(43:26):
for about close to thirty years worth of stuff in
these time capsules.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah, I saw he would just sweep his desk clean
into a box like once every week or two and
like right TC on it for time capsule.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Well, when you're that famous, that becomes hugely valuable. If
I swept the stuff off of my desk, it's not
worth anything, so.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Right, So you've got the time capsules, which is a
really deep peek into his life. He also kept diaries,
and you've brought this to my attention. She was super
into Andy Warhol for a while, and she found out
that he had been audited Chuck every year ye by
the irs from nineteen seventy two until his death in
(44:09):
nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, thank you Nixon.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, he attributed it to Nixon revenge from Nixon, and
that's actually probably a pretty good hypothesis because he had
created political artwork for George McGovern's nineteen seventy two campaign,
and it was like an ugly portrait of Nixon. Then
underneath it said vote McGovern. And it's entirely possible Nixon
ordered him to be audited and it just got kept up.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
That's that's no coincidence. You don't get audited every year, sure,
so it's not how it works.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
So he would start noting everything, right.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Oh, I'm sure that he kept very good records from
that point on.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
He did. He would dictate his diary by phone every morning,
and those became published later on as Andy Warhol's diaries.
So there's a lot known about that guy, and yet
he's still an enigma.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, very much. When I said earlier that he did
not die right away from that gunshot, he would die
from complications from that gun shot many years later, in
February of nineteen eighty seven, he was fifty eight years old,
complications of having his gallbladder removed, and it was you know,
they can draw a direct line to that shooting and
(45:18):
his eventual death. He left a treasure trove, like you said,
of stuff. He donated everything basically to what is now
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual arts. It's worth
a lot of money. They've given out close to three
hundred million bucks just in grants to more than a
thousand art organizations over the year, and I think they
(45:42):
are partnered with the Carnegie Institute and the Dia Art
Foundation to build the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which
is where I last year saw Bonnie Prince Billy play.
One of my many shows that I've seen it his
he played the Indy Warhol Museum, because that's what he does.
He plays it weird places like that or not weird,
(46:03):
just different places. And it was great and it was
cool to walk around that museum a little bit beforehand.
They have more than they have a lot of his work.
They have more than four thousand videotapes, and they got
those time capsules there.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Yeah, every single one of them, I think right. I
think so.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
So.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
In addition to predicting the fifteen minutes of fame for
the future, even if he didn't originally come up with it,
he also had another idea that I think kind of
came to fruition later on. He had an idea for
a chain of diners that he called Andy Matts, and
they were for people who eat alone and you just
sit at a table they serve you frozen food, and
(46:41):
then you watch TV by yourself, and that everyone has
their own TV set.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Basically just predicted smartphones and society today.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
That's where we are now. Yeah, thought of that.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
And then there's one other thing. If you are a
fan of cringe, you don't like cringe?
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Do you like cringe comedy?
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Yeah? Or yeah? Basically her cringe performance art.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
I like stuff like The Office. Okay, it can border
on like I don't want to watch this for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah. I can't take it very easily. And if you
watch his interviews, they're very cringey. He would purposely just
sit there and go er or whatever, and he wouldn't
like he didn't have anything to say or couldn't think
of what to say, like he would just be a
terrible interviewee.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And then there's also Mike Douglas no MERV Griffin Show
segment with him and Edie Sedgwick, and he just refuses
to talk the whole time, and it's up to Edie
Sedgwick to try to keep things going. It's she's like
twenty one years old. It's just really hard to watch.
I think I made it maybe a minute into it
(47:50):
and I was like, I can't watch this anymore.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
I could actually watch that stuff. Yeah, I'm going to
check that out.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Okay, you're gonna lie.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
I don't know how much I love it, but oh,
I don't know. Sometimes when someone is just I think
that it's having no regard for And I'm not saying
it's like it's cool to go in there and like
wreck an interview, but like I also think, like I
don't know, if someone doesn't believe in that system and
they think it's all bs to make a statement like
that is like fine, as long as everyone's not doing it.
(48:19):
No one wants to watch everybody do that.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, for sure. It's weird though, because he was enthralled
by celebrity from a very young age, but he wouldn't
participate in it when he was a celebrity himself, even
though he wanted to be a celebrity.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
A conundrum.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, for sure. I think that's it for Andy Warhol. Huh.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, this could have been two or three ups, but
I think it's a pretty good overview.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
I think so too. If you want to know more
about Andy Warhol, there, like you said, is a lot
more to learn, and you can find stuff starting out
on the internet, and then go to Pittsburgh and see
his stuff in person, and then save up eleven million
dollars and buy one of his painting yourself. That's right.
And while you're saving that money up, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
I'm gonna call this shortened Shortish in Swedish. Hey, guys,
Actually this is more than Swedish. This is great. Hey, guys.
I'm an old retired concert pianist who remembers miny Hammond
organs for my youth. I didn't play them professionally, but
listening to this, Josh, you're gonna love this. I was
the pianist for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I was so
(49:29):
interested though in the history of the Hammond. I had
no idea. I had actually never even thought about their origin,
although I played a few in funeral homes over the years.
I played big pipe Organs with stops, including for the
Pittsburgh Symphony, but I never mastered those slide bars on
the Hammond. It's interesting you did a whole podcast about
hamm and Organs, but I don't think we heard a
single musical note. There was a wonderful young lady, wrote Scott,
(49:52):
who used to play at the Hurricane Lounge in Pittsburgh.
She's still living, also in her early eighties like me.
Thanks for wonderful learning experience. And this, my friends, is
from a legend. Patricia prattis Jennings and I did a
little wormholing with Patricia and it turns out Patricia is
(50:13):
a legend. She played I believe she was the first
black woman to sign a major contract with the major
symphony in the United States.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
There's a great, great YouTube piece on her. I can't remember.
It's a Pittsburgh local, Pittsburgh thing, but it's really good
that she's interviewed, and she's just wonderful and amazing talent.
And it just knocks me out that in her eighties
she's like getting something out of our show.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
That is pretty cool. And that's a lot of range too,
going from the symphony to a funeral. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah, totally. But she played for the symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony
for decades.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
Right, but she could also play a funeral too. I'm
sure there's quite different. The whole ViBe's got to be different, you.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Know, I would think so.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
And also one more thing. I'll bet the Hurricane Lounge
was the place to be.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Sounds like it, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Thanks a lot, Patricia, that is really cool. Thank you
for writing in, and, like Chuck said, thank you for
getting something out of our episode. And if you want
to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with
us via email too. Send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
(51:23):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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