Most of Glenn O’Brien’s professional career took place outside the Warhol ring—at numerous publications including GQ, Rolling Stone, High Times, Art Forum, Details, Allure, and others, as a writer and critic of men’s fashion. But it began in 1970 within its bounds at Interview, when he and Bob Colacello were hired together as co-editors. Glenn left the magazine mid-decade but returned to Interview in 1978 with the music column “Glenn O’Brien’s Beat.”

Black-and-white film still showing three men. The man on the viewer’s left is wearing a hat and appears in profile. The man in the center looks straight ahead, and the man on the right is seated.

O’Brien appears in one of Warhol’s Factory Diary videotapes (1971) documenting David Bowie’s visit to the Factory. In one brief sequence, O’Brien is seen with Warhol, Bowie, Tony Zanetta, and Allen Midgette. (I think of it as Warhol and three actors who would channel him either on stage or screen: Bowie portrayed Warhol in the film Basquiat in 1996; Zanetta, less obviously, played a Warhol-based character called B. Marlowe in Warhol’s stage play Pork in 1971; and Midgette was sent on a lecture tour of colleges that Warhol had agreed to give but wasn’t able to deliver because of his stage fright in 1967.)

O’Brien was also the co-creator and host of a short-lived show on Manhattan Cable’s public-access channels called T.V. Party, which featured significant figures in the downtown cultural scenes of punk music and graffiti art.

I had the great pleasure of meeting O’Brien several times. Over the years, he assisted the museum with essays in exhibition catalogues and other projects that relied on his pop culture and fashion expertise. One of my favorite memories was his recollection to me that he called Andy “The Boss” not merely out of adulation, but because it was true: O’Brien was his employee.

Another was the opportunity to show to him the original Polaroids from the photo shoot for the Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers album cover, which Warhol designed. It had always been a mystery to fans just who was wearing the blue jeans and who was in the white briefs. One of the Polaroids, though, included the model’s face, and it was clearly O’Brien in the briefs. He was very happy to see the photo, saying that for years he told friends that it was him in the famous artwork, because he recognized his body hair pattern, and now he had some real evidence. We still don’t know who is wearing the jeans!

The first time that I worked with O’Brien was for a magazine piece, naturally. The French magazine Paradies was interested in presenting one of Warhol’s Time Capsules, with images of the entire Time Capsule provided by the museum, and O’Brien’s writing about the objects contained within it. I gave O’Brien a list of the Time Capsules from his years at Interview; hardly any of them had yet been documented in any way, so this was a good opportunity for the museum.

He selected one Time Capsule; I skimmed through some of the objects in it and gave him an abbreviated list of them. He seemed pleased and decided to move forward with it. The next step was to photograph all the objects as the magazine wished, something like an exploded diagram of the parts of a car. We couldn’t do that exactly, but we could place them so that every object was visible. This wasn’t easy because many of the objects were large posters for an exhibition by the artist Joseph Beuys, signed by him. Another stand-out object was a scarf printed with the logo of Main Man, David Bowie’s production company in North America.

In later years, O’Brien persuaded the fashion designer Marc Jacobs to create a T-shirt and a cloth tote bag printed with a portrait of Warhol, with a portion of the profits to be donated to the museum. He also organized an exhibition and auction of leather jackets-as-artworks for the museum’s benefit. In short, he wanted to keep alive the creative legacy of the man he knew as The Boss.

The last time I was in touch with Glenn, a few years ago, I emailed him for advice on a style of hat that would flatter me. I wanted one for a special event: the opening of the Andy Warhol: By the Book exhibition I curated. I read his thoughts on hats in his book How To Be a Man and felt that a Homburg was my style. He responded unequivocally with his feeling that I could pull it off. He also noted that long ago, one of his relatives wore a Homburg every day, so he was all in favor of them staging a comeback.

For me, Billy was the main attraction of the grand opening weekend of The Andy Warhol Museum in 1994. He was excited by the energy patterns he saw flowing on the museum walls, and he could feel Andy’s presence, especially in the collection storage rooms. I felt that he was a powerful connection to Andy; two legendary figures of a storied moment in culture: New York in the mid-1960s. He often spoke of Andy’s audacity in creating his work, yet Billy may have outdone his boss in audacity when he chose a name for his on-stage persona with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966; he knew that he needed a name to attract attention, and gazing at a magazine subscription card, it came to him; he chose “Name” as his name. It still gets attention!

Billy returned to Pittsburgh several times afterward, either to give a public talk, sign copies of the latest book of his photos, or in 1997, to attend the opening of Billy Name: Factory Fotos 1963–68, which had originated at the ICA in London, through his gallery at the time, Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Most of the 200 photos were either from Billy’s collection, or the museum’s collection, with a few private loans. The Pittsburgh venue added many archival collection objects, including astrology charts for significant events (such as the moment when Andy was shot in 1968) or natal charts for assorted Superstars, all hand-drawn by Billy. The museum also showed the reel-to-reel audiotape boxes for opera recordings that he decorated with collages, and the Kodak photography books from which he learned his new art after Andy gave him a camera and set him on the path. The museum showed several hand-written notes from Billy to Andy, and the old steamer trunk that Billy found in the basement of 231 East 47th Street and painted silver; it quickly became a recognizable prop at the Factory and in some of Andy’s films.

I visited Billy at his home in Poughkeepsie a couple of times, too. One of these visits led to him lending the museum a fairly large group of archival materials, from which I curated a small exhibition in the old Archives Study Center also in 1997, titled Kronk! after one of Billy’s favorite words within his aerial canon of concrete poetry.

Billy was a special guest at the opening party for The Warhol’s exhibition The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion at its initial venue, The Whitney Museum in New York, in October 1997. I saw Billy at the Gershwin Hotel a few times, too, just north of Madison Square Park.

In 2007 I had the honor of interviewing Billy for the catalogue for the museum’s co-produced exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia. In 3,000 words, built around discussing five of his photos that were in the exhibition, we touched on many fascinating details of Billy’s days at the Factory, and Billy cleared-up several of my misconceptions about Andy.

More recently (2014), Billy is one of the on-screen talents in the museum’s introductory film, along with Paul Warhola, Bob Colacello, Vincent Fremont, Brigid Berlin, and other significant figures in Andy’s life. This film was produced for the museum’s 20th anniversary in 2014, for which a star-studded party was thrown; it was the last time that I saw Billy.

In 2009, Andy’s Screen Test of Billy was one of the 13 chosen for the museum’s live performance event, 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, which features a selection of Andy’s four-minute silent film portraits with commissioned soundtracks by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, performing as Dean and Britta. In the film, Billy illuminated his face very dramatically, with a single bright light reflecting in the left lens of his sunglasses: it’s so bright that the right lens almost seems to be a hole. Billy may have learned this masterful technique from his earlier mentor, Nick Cernovich, lighting designer for the Judson Church and other avant-garde theaters in New York of the early 1960s.

Billy brought this knowledge and skill to his work on Andy’s films, as well as acting in several of them. He served Andy in other capacities: from business secretary to installing the Box sculptures at the Stable Gallery in 1964, and overseeing Andy’s books of the period: Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (1967) and a, A novel (1968). In this lengthy quotation from my interview with Billy, he discusses why they decided to excerpt text from a to be used as a header on each page, and how that functions:

“The idea for the headers was simply to add the flavor of an actual ‘published novel—maybe even a historical novel’ to the tome. Leaving everything unedited with no evidence that the artist is sophisticated was a little too bland feeling. The headers gave an excitement of running themes throughout the reading and a suggestion of ‘body’ for the novella-like flow. The title of lower case ‘a’ was actually a tribute to e e cummings’s style with no case distinctions and no punctuation as a predecessor to a, A novel. An allusion to previous cultural standards has been the sign of an intelligent artist since Mozart and before. But anything more than these two applications to the manuscript would have seemed phony. It’s only because they are applied with a ‘camp’ attitude that it works. Andy really was intelligent; he simply wasn’t overly articulate in those days.”

Even when domesticated, the cat embodies freedom. Cats generally do as they wish, not as instructed.[1] In attitude and behavior, they are the opposite of dogs, which are widely considered ‘man’s best friend’. Contrarily, a cat can be very close to a human, but almost always on its own terms; the English-language expression ‘like herding cats’ encapsulates the feline’s autonomy. Cats, while usually quiet, also possess a wider range of vocalizations – spitting, hissing, purring, chirping and more – than their canine counterparts. Their expressive use of these sounds (as many as 100, according to some sources) indicates their complex desires.

Many of the most celebrated modern Western artists were closely associated with cats, as can be seen in photographs of Jean Cocteau, Gustav Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. At points in their lives, both Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei have lived with an abundance of cats. Warhol is alleged to have had as many as twenty-five cats in his home at once, while Ai’s studio (FAKE) harbors a reported forty felines.[2] The small furry animals are a frequent subject for both artists, including numerous postings to Ai’s social media feeds. Cats have appeared in art since the time of ancient Egypt; perhaps most frequently in the nineteenth-century Art Nouveau work of Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. One of the most unusual works of art with a cat is by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, who recorded his Interview with a cat in 1970.[3]

Warhol and cats

In the 1950s, when Warhol was working as a commercial artist in New York, he was surrounded by a clowder of Siamese cats. Somehow reminiscent of the fossilized remains of dinosaurs, their paw prints were literally left on some of his artworks, including the cover of a copy of Wild Raspberries, the artist’s cookbook parody of 1959 made with his friend Suzie Frankfurt.[4] Having scampered about upon Warhol’s art, these furry creatures left their mark much more profoundly on the artist himself.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Siamese first entered Warhol’s life, but he made reference to live-in felines as early as 1951 or 1952. A postcard Warhol addressed to Truman Capote, but failed to mail, is signed “from me and my cat.” Cards sent to and from his friend Tommy Jackson reference cats and “pussies.”[5] Old bios for Warhol published in the magazine Interiors track the expansion of his cat colony: eight in 1953, and ten in 1954.[6] With one exception, all of Warhol’s Siamese cats were named Sam, foreshadowing his reliance on repetition in his later Pop work. One wonders if Warhol was actually thinking of his cats when he created the Cow wallpaper, 1966, or Ethel Scull thirty-six times, 1963 (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). The uniquely named Hester seems to have been the matriarch of Warhol’s brood.

The Siamese breed was peaking in popularity in the United States at the time, so it seems that he kept them in order to start breeding business on the side. Siamese cats are distinctively beautiful; they also are considered among the most intelligent and vocal of cat breeds. Even Hollywood (a frequent bellwether for Warhol’s creative efforts) jumped on the bandwagon: in the 1958 film Bell, Book and Candle, Kim Novak’s character (the beguiling modern witch Gillian Holroyd) was given a ‘familiar’ in the form of a Siamese cat named Pyewacket.[7] This considered, Warhol’s cat breeding business should have boomed, but his model failed. According to his friends, the cats became inbred and were notorious for bad behavior, crushing the plan for extra income. Warhol’s home was so overrun with cats that he had to give them away. The animals themselves, however, gained identities in the process: painter Philip Pearlstein and his wife Dorothy Cantor renamed their pair Cimabue and Sassetta, while author Ralph T. Ward (himself known as Corky) had Sweetie.[8]

…

Weiwei and cats

It seems no accident that Ai Weiwei, an internationally renowned artist now stripped of his Chinese passport, surrounds himself with twenty to thirty cats, many of them former strays to whom he’s given a very comfortable home in his studio.[26] Speaking about them, Ai says, “I love them and the people in this office all love these cats.” Just like Warhol’s Hester, most of Ai’s cats are not neutered. He says, “I didn’t choose them, they chose me.”

The cat’s essential characteristic of individual freedom is magnified in comparison to the restrictions placed on Ai, and the larger issues to which he draws our attention: absences of freedom, justice and responsibility. “They’re very independent. They [broke] several of my artworks. It’s [sic] very costly, these cats, but we cannot function [without them].”[27]

The cats and dogs in my home enjoy a high status; they seem more like the lords of the manor than I do. The poses they strike in the courtyard often inspire more joy in me than the house itself. Their self-important positions seem to be saying, ‘This is my territory,’ and that makes me happy. However, I’ve never designed a special space for them. I can’t think like an animal, which is part of the reason why I respect them; it’s impossible for me to enter into their realm. All I can do is open the entire home to them, observe, and at last discover that they actually like it here or there. They’re impossible to predict.[28]

While perhaps only a coincidence, the cat is absent from figures of the Chinese zodiac depicted in Ai’s Circle of animals / Zodiac Head: Gold, 2010. There are several versions of the ancient origins of this zodiac. According to one, the animals were summoned by the Jade Emperor to a meeting, stating he would name each year according to the order in which the animals arrived; in another, Cat drowns after making a pact with Rat, which is the reason cats chase rats, in eternal revenge. There are many other cat myths in China, unrelated to the zodiac. One states that soon after the gods created the Earth, the goddess Li Shou, herself a cat, was made its overseer, and she and all of her fellow cats were given the ability to speak. Soon it became clear Li Shou was not up to the task, as she kept falling asleep. The gods asked Li Shou to choose her successor, and she picked humans, who were then given the power of speech at the expense of cats.[29]

In the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the many cats of FAKE are seen lounging and patrolling the studio. In a widely known scene, one cat (Tian Tian) is captured demonstrating his unusual ability to open a door. The artist asks:

Where did this intelligence come from? All the other cats watch us open the door. So I was thinking, if I never met this cat that can open doors, I wouldn’t know cats could open doors. Cats can open the door, but only men can close it.[30]

Ai’s observation can be read as a critique of humans’ misuse of power. Perhaps it is time for us to hand back the reins of power – and the power of speech – to Li Shou? Ai claims that each time he gives an interview at his studio, one particular cat, Lai lai, is always present: ‘He’s never missed a word’.[31] Does this cat possess a vestigial understanding of the long-lost ability to speak?

…

The full essay is printed in the catalogue Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, available for purchase in The Warhol Store. The catalogue is published by NGV, in collaboration with The Warhol and Ai, and edited by Eric Shiner, The Warhol’s director, and Max Delany, former NGV senior curator, contemporary art. Alongside reproduced images by both artists are essays by an international team of art experts, curators, and scholars that survey the scope of the artists’ careers and interpret the impact of Warhol and Ai on contemporary art and life.

Notes

[1] In the author’s many years of experience with numerous domestic cats, he has been able to train only two (Batgirl and Batman, tuxedos born to a tortoiseshell mother) to recognize his whistle.

[2] Ai’s assistant Darryl Leung informed the author that the number of resident cats at FAKE fluctuates between twenty and thirty.

[3] Recorded at Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), 12 Burgplatz, Düsseldorf, 1970. Broodthaers interviewed a cat regarding esoteric subjects, such as market trends in contemporary art. The work contains a transcription of the interview. An edition of fifty copies was published by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, in 1995.

[4] This copy is in Warhol’s Time Capsule 12, held by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Wild Raspberries is a brilliant parody of French cuisine, which was becoming enormously popular in the United States at that time.

[5] This correspondence is found in Warhol’s archives, in the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum.

[6] These references were initially noted by Neil Printz; my reference is Lucy Mulroney’s ‘One blue pussy’, Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, Summer 2014, pp. 559–92. Mulroney cites Printz’s work.

[7] The name Pyewacket has roots in the horrific Salem witch trials in early American colonial history of the mid-seventeenth century.

[8] Named after the painters of the early Italian Renaissance Cimabue (Bencivieni di Pepo, Florence c. 1240–1302) and Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, c. 1390–1450).

[26] In an email to the author on 7 May 2015, Ai’s assistant Darryl Leung wrote: “The cats all come to the studio in different ways. Sometimes they are found on the street; sometimes they jump into the studio by their own volition, other times friends might bring the cat to the studio.”

[27] Ai Weiwei in 258 Cats, Hosen Tandijono, China, 5:38 mins, 2013, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFUVigZYyJo>.

[28] Ai Weiwei, ‘Here and now’, posted 10 May 2006, in Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, ed. & trans. Lee Ambrozy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 2011, p. 49.

[29] A folk tale from Quebec concerns a specific ‘talking cat’ named Chouchou; it was first published in 1952.

[30] Ai Weiwei in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Alison Klayman, Expressions United Media, MUSE Film and Television, Germany, 90 mins, 2012.

[31] Ai in 258 Cats.

In 1971, Warhol’s play Pork (based on tape recordings made in Warhol’s studio a few years earlier) was performed in London and New York. Bowie attended the London shows, having already written his songs “Andy Warhol” (!) and “Queen Bitch,” a reference to The Velvet Underground. Bowie later produced brilliant solo recordings by Lou Reed, the front man for The Velvets.

Bowie apparently didn’t meet Warhol in London. However, Tony Zanetta, Cherry Vanilla, Wayne County, and Leee Black Childers—all of whom were in the Pork cast or crew—soon became the core of Bowie’s production company in New York, MainMan. Later in 1971—through his agent at RCA, Martin Last—Bowie sent Warhol an advance reference recording copy of the Hunky Dory album vinyl pressing (as well as the “Andy Warhol” single), with song titles Bowie wrote by hand.

When David Met Andy

In September that year, Bowie visited Warhol’s Factory for the first and only time, and performed a strange mime routine; then-Factory staff member Glenn O’Brien (beginning his long career in journalism, working on Warhol’s Interview magazine) recalls that Bowie also performed his “Andy Warhol” song, although that is missing from the video recording of the event, which is in the museum’s collection. Glenn reports that the song’s lyric that Warhol “looks a scream” upset Warhol, as he was extremely self-conscious about his physical appearance.

Warhol Didn’t Paint Bowie’s Portrait

Some of Warhol’s celebrity portraits were created for the packaging of recorded popular music, such as Aretha Franklin, Billy Squier, and Paul Anka. There were conceptual designs, too: the bold banana AND the subtle blackness for The Velvet Underground album covers, the zipper AND cannibalistic Polaroids for The Rolling Stones, a punked-out passport AND 35 mm grid for John Cale, etc.

He painted conventional portraits of songstresses Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, and Dolly Parton that were not LP covers, but he never made either a conventional portrait of Bowie, nor designed any of his LP covers, for reasons unknown. Warhol also did a posthumous portrait of punk rocker Sid Vicious, for the cover of FILE magazine.

Warhol & Bowie during My Art School Days

In Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bowie plays a strange visitor to our planet, who in one scene obsessively watches a massive wall of TVs. Back then, my friends and I all remarked how Warholian that scene was, as a riff on Warhol’s recently stated love of the medium (we were college freshmen; this was long before The Andy Warhol Museum). Absent physical evidence on campus, for arts and humanities students, Warhol was still a presence at Carnegie Mellon University, his alma mater (class of 1949) and mine (class of 1981). Warhol’s work was often discussed informally, or in critiques and studios; who knew? Maybe one of us had the very same workspace as Warhol.

For Bowie: as in art schools everywhere, students and younger faculty debated their favorite Bowie persona, while exploring fashion and playing music in, or alongside, local punk and New Wave bands named Dress up as Natives, Combo Tactic, Carsickness, The Cardboards, and others. All were influenced to some degree by The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie. During this period, Bowie played Pittsburgh in 1976 and 1978.

When Bowie Played Warhol

In 1996, Bowie played Warhol in Basquiat, the first film directed by Julian Schnabel (who for the prior 15 years was well known for his paintings). That gave me, as the assistant archivist at The Warhol, an opportunity to meet Bowie.

The museum had agreed to lend one of Warhol’s wigs and a leather jacket, to be worn exclusively by Bowie in the role. When shooting commenced, they were hand-carried to the set by the museum’s then-archivist John W. Smith (now director of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art). I remember John’s excitement (and my jealousy) when he returned: “I said to David, ‘you have no idea what this means to me.’ Bowie carefully placed the wig upon his head and said, ‘YOU have no idea what this means to ME.’” It was a rare moment in the rituals of hero worship.

Months later, my turn came: the objects were needed for a Manhattan photo shoot promoting the film in Vanity Fair. I arrived in the Chelsea studio at around 8 a.m.; a breakfast buffet covered several large tables. I ate and chatted with crew members. The stars arrived: Jeffrey Wright, Dennis Hopper, Parker Posey, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe, and others. Eventually, (The Thin White Duke/Aladdin Sane/Ziggy Stardust/Major Tom) DAVID BOWIE arrived.

Then I Met David Bowie

He sauntered into the huge bright room, cheerfully greeting everyone. As he came closer, I thoroughly cleaned my hands and checked (for the twelfth time?) the boxes holding our precious items.

But I could never have been prepared for his greeting: “So, you’re the Warhol bloke?” said the thin man with famously mismatched eyes, (which I could not stop staring at!). “What will your next job be? Are you waiting for Jasper Johns to die?” That cracked up everyone within earshot. The brilliant, dark wisecrack demonstrated his knowledge of art history, particularly of an artist who was of great importance for Warhol (and, I’m delighted that he’s yet among us).

Bowie walked to his makeup room; I followed, carrying my treasures, hoping that he and the film crew would follow our written instructions on properly caring for the wig and jacket. I mentioned something about that and got an assurance in reply. Perhaps 20 minutes later, a commotion arose in that corner, with Bowie rushing around in his boxer shorts, hotly pursued by the makeup artist flicking a wet towel at his posterior.

Posterity and Bowie

I’ve often wondered if the experience of borrowing archival objects from a museum led Bowie to organize his own archives, which were used for the touring exhibition David Bowie Is, organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago and still traveling (in Groningen, The Netherlands), as I write.

When the Warhol objects were returned to our museum, staff discovered that makeup had colored the wig slightly rouge, but it was also properly combed out. To my horror, I noticed that the lining of a jacket pockets had been ripped. I felt something inside, strange: a bit stiff, but yielding. I reached in, and carefully pulled it out. The mystery object was a very colorful printed card, with some metallic ink. A New York State Lottery card (a $5 winner, even!)—signed and dated by David Bowie, leaving his mark on this very personal artifact of his hero Warhol. A memento, at the very least, announcing, “I was here!”

Around 2006, I told this story to artist Glenn Ligon, who had been invited to curate an exhibition from the museum’s collections. He was very interested in the archives, and he insisted that we mat and frame the Bowie lottery ticket. It hung in his exhibition, to which he gave a title lifted from Warhol’s book, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975): “Give me another piece … smaller …smaller …” Glenn also chose to show the jacket and the same wig (one of several dozen nearly identical wigs in the museum’s collection), which my colleagues and I refer to now, informally, as “the Bowie wig.”

When the Basquiat film was released, the museum received a lovely color photograph of Bowie in his Warhol guise, as a gift from the film’s production company. Along with the treasures that Bowie had sent to Warhol in the early 1970s, I included the photo and wig in a small exhibition on our third floor devoted to Warhol’s relationship to rock-and-roll music, commemorating the recent opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

John Warhola (Andy’s middle brother) was a frequent visitor to the museum in those days; he would drop by my office to tell me a story or ask a question. As he studied the objects in the rock-and-roll display, he pointed to the photo of Bowie and stated, “I’ve never seen that picture of Andy before. Where is it from?” When I told him the truth, he laughed and admitted, “What? Oh, that’s really good, it sure fooled me!”

John asked if he could get a print, too. I hope that the producers replied kindly to his inquiry!

Meanwhile, back in Munich, during a lunch break I met a young man who was the assistant of artist Ellsworth Kelly; they were installing the next show at Haus der Kunst: a full-on retrospective of Mr. Kelly’s beautiful abstract paintings and sculpture. This news was a great surprise, as Mr. Kelly’s work was of great interest to me when I was a young art student in the 1970s, and I was enthralled by the bold freedom expressed in his work.

I mentioned this to the assistant (whose name I do not recall, regrettably foreshadowing in retrospect, as it were). He replied that I should tell this personally to Mr. Kelly (or, as he put it, “You should tell Ellsworth; he would be so happy.”) I was in total astonishment; imagine having the chance to speak to one of the heroes of your youth. We decided that the assistant would relay this to his boss. The next day, still to my surprise, I was invited to have a coffee.

I could not hide my shyness, but I managed to utter my story, to say how just seeing a group of his then-new curvy shaped canvases from the mid-1970s reproduced at a mere fraction of their actual size in a catalogue for a show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., changed my ideas about what art could be, and how much I admired his boldness and the importance of that experience for my efforts at painting in art school. Mr. Kelly was indeed very happy to hear this; I was taken aback, again. As he was a huge art star, I assumed that he would be accustomed to such stories and that another would make no difference, but his personality was equally as graceful as his elegant art work.

Mr. Kelly noted my position, and elaborated; it went something like this: “So, you work for The Andy Warhol Museum. I knew Andy, and I recall a story that you may want to hear. It’s not much, just a fragment, but I think it shows a side of him that many people aren’t aware of.”

Wow, I thought, what could this be? “Yes! Please, what do you remember?” I almost fell off my stool; this was a golden opportunity. It’s so important to collect memories before they are gone!

After apologizing for not having all of the details, Mr. Kelly then told me the tiny fragment of memory that he had: sometime in the 1960s or ‘70s, at a sale or auction of contemporary art, several of the artists were walking through the exhibition of works. One—a young woman—was upset with the manner in which her work was displayed; she felt that it was not being shown to its best advantage, and Warhol was adamant in telling her to insist that the work be re-hung to her satisfaction, as this would affect the sale price, and subsequently would lower her prices forever after.

Mr. Kelly could not remember the artist’s name, or what her work was like, so we could not even guess who it might have been. But, as he said, her identity wasn’t so important, it was what HE did. Mr. Kelly emphasized: Andy Warhol gave free career advice to another artist—not being competitive, but supportive.

And she (that mysterious unnamed artist), did become a very well-known and successful artist, “You know her, and her work, I just can’t remember her name, I’m so sorry!” is something like how he put it, as I recall now, nearly 20 years later.

And of course, Mr. Kelly was right; Warhol had such a public visibility as a celebrity far beyond the art world, that for him to make the effort to point out the seriousness of that crucial moment to the artist, it would seem quite surprising to people who did not know him well, and even for those (such as Mr. Kelly), it was an extraordinary moment of generosity.

So, as we have just passed the holiday season, also known to many as the “Season of Giving,” it seems appropriate to bring this memory of “giving of oneself” by the museum’s namesake and subject: Mr. Andy Warhol, who gave the world so very much.

As did Mr. Ellsworth Kelly: he gave me a beautiful (if brief, and even frustrating), memory that I am delighted to share with the readers of this blog. He inspired me to create in my youth, and his enormous output of art is still very exciting to me and to many others. Just like Warhol, Mr. Kelly was a true master, a giant of his time, and for all time.

(Isabelle Collin Dufresne, September 6, 1935-June 14, 2014)

A cultural figure who perhaps could only have existed in the 1960s, the actress and artist Ultra Violet achieved fame as a Warhol Superstar, yet she appeared in very few of his films. As Warhol’s biographers David Bourdon and Fred Lawrence Guiles have both noted, her penchant for publicity helped place her among those who are most-closely associated with Warhol; she had a sixth sense for photo ops. She was also the first Superstar to publish her Warhol memoirs after his passing in 1987, with a title borrowing the quotation which is so closely linked to him: “Famous for Fifteen Minutes.”

According to her book, they met in December 1963 when  the great Spanish Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali (1904-1989), with whom Dufresne (as she was then known) had been associated for the previous five years as model and muse brought her to Warhol’s newest studio, The Factory, on East 47^th Street. Although Warhol correctly wrote that it was 1965, he did immediately invite her to appear in his films. She describes her “exquisite Chanel suit woven of gold-pink-blue thread” that  Warhol later described in both POPism and his posthumous Diaries, recounting the Palm Sunday luncheon given by Dali in 1978 at which Ultra wore the very same suit  she had worn at their first meeting.

Warhol also noted that Ultra bought a Flowers painting that day in 1965, one of the largest from that series, for $500. In his memoir of the 1960s, POPism, Warhol wrote that the painting was still wet, and that she was not yet “Ultra Violet” nor had yet started dying her hair purple. He also noted that she reminded him of the Hollywood star Vivien Leigh, and it was her physical beauty that no doubt made him contact Ultra when the photographers came around.

The Flowers painting was in her collection for several decades; she loaned it to the Warhol Museum for a short time soon after the museum opened. Ultra was one of the Superstars who attended the museum’s grand opening in 1994, and also took part in its inaugural symposium in 1995, “Warhol’s Worlds.”

Among the Warhol films Ultra Violet appeared in were three Screen Tests, The Life of Juanita Castro in 1965, I a Man, and several reels of Four Stars in 1967. She was also one of the Warhol Superstars who were cast as members of the underground in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy in 1968. She appeared in many other films over the following years, but her sole ensuing project with Warhol that bore tangible results was her eponymous music recording in 1973, for which Warhol provided a single Polaroid photo of bug-eyed Ultra with a big red apple held in her mouth. The photo is printed on the back cover of the LP, rather than the front, which featured a photograph of what Warhol described as her “incredibly long tongue.”

She also took roles on the stage, perhaps most significantly in John Vaccaro’s production of Charles Ludlam’s Conquest of the Universe, at which Marcel Duchamp requested to meet the cast in 1968. In the fall of that year, she was featured in a trio including her fellow superstar Viva and Warhol on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, in a story about Warhol’s return to activity following the assassination attempt on June 3 that year. She was also among five of “Andy’s Girls,” a feature in issue 3 of the short-lived magazine Avant-Garde in 1968. A color poster of her, fully nude in bed, under Roy Lichtenstein’s enormous red Pop banner of a handgun, was widely available at that time.

Previously to her years with Dali, Isabelle associated with the elderly English surrealist painter John Graham (1886-1961). She was later involved with the American sculptor John Chamberlain (1927-2011), of Warhol’s generation. All of her affairs with artists seem to have been prompted by her rebellion against her conservative family. Her father was a wealthy French businessman; she was educated (her website notes she earned a BA in Art from Le Sacre Coeur in Grenoble, in 1953), and left for America at the age of 17. She is said to have undergone exorcism by a Catholic priest in 1948; a “near-death experience” in 1973 resulted in her return to Christianity, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s difficult to say precisely whether or how this may be related to a performance she created in 1972, The Last Supper, presented at The Kitchen, the then-new center for avant-garde arts in Manhattan.

More recently, since 1990 she was very actively creating art at her studios in both New York and Nice, with themes of mirrors and the current vogue for “selfie” digital photography. Her website notes four exhibitions of her recent work this year, including a group exhibition which just opened on June 7 at Château Musée Grimaldi, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. A solo show of recent work was held in New York at the Dillon Gallery in April/May of this year. An exhibition titled The Spectrum of Ultra Violet was held in her honor by Culture Shock at Volta NY in March. She was also among 18 artists included in a touring group show of recorded sound, 15 Minutes, curated by Jeff Gordon.

Top image credit:
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
I, A Man, 1967-68
16mm film, color, sound, 95 minutes.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

A short clip of Leee can be seen here, describing the notorious artists’ bar Max’s Kansas City, excerpted from the museum’s “Talk on the Wild Side” event in 2011. That discussion focused on the 1971 productions of Warhol’s play “Pork” and its influence on Glam rock, with cast-and-crew Cherry Vanilla (in support of her memoir), Tony Zanetta, and Leee (and moderated—such as it was—by me.)

Native Kentuckian Leee Black Childers was stage manager and official photographer for “Pork,” and an essential character of New York’s underground of the late-1960s and ’70s. He stage-managed Jackie Curtis’s play “Femme Fatale” at La MaMa ETC in 1970, “World Birth of a Nation” by Wayne County, and “Pork” at both La MaMa in New York and the Roundhouse in London, all directed by Anthony Ingrassia.

Leee became David Bowie’s official tour photographer for “Ziggy Stardust,” and spent a season in the Hollywood Hills house-sitting Iggy Pop and the Stooges. In addition to the Factory and Max’s, Leee was a regular at CBGB. He managed punks Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and rockabilly revivalists Levi and the Rockats.

Leee’s documentary photos of “Pork” were shown at the Warhol Museum in the exhibition “Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Warhol’s Work” in 2009. His photographs of the punk scene have been shown worldwide. A book on his work, “Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rockstars & Punks,” was published in 2012.

Warhol’s oft-quoted statement is most likely a reference to the work of the child star he adored. Shirley Temple’s importance in his young life, though nearly exclusively through the medium of Hollywood celluloid, can’t be understated. Virtually each of his biographers and numerous essayists have mentioned her name when discussing Warhol and his work, if only in passing. Warhol said that the only thing he didn’t like about her movies was the ending, when the father figure inevitably arrived to spoil the fun.

Shirley Temple was born on April 23, 1928, just a few months before Warhol (August 6). Her films, made primarily between 1932 and 1939, were a staple of Depression-era America; for many people they were the only brightness in an otherwise gloomy world. She often played the role of an orphaned child, pluckily, cheerfully, and determinedly resolved to overcome all adversity. She also played peacemaker, and reformer of gamblers. At their heart, her films are morality tales, and they were well-timed to succeed. She also starred with the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in several movies in which they sang and tap-danced together, perhaps the first time that such interracial happiness appeared in Hollywood.

Much as Warhol’s mother Julia encouraged his childhood creativity, Gertrude Temple enrolled Shirley in dance school at the age of 3; both of them wanted Shirley to be star. Warhol was far from alone in his love; she succeeded beyond their dreams. She was voted the most popular star in Hollywood for several years running, earning 3 million dollars for her studio (admission to a movie was just 10 cents in those days). The dimple-faced little girl with 56 perfect golden curls was bigger than macho mustachioed Hollywood heartthrob Clark Gable, and President Roosevelt, who was as determined as Shirley’s characters in her films to lead his nation to economic prosperity once again. The Brown Derby restaurant created a non-alcoholic cocktail named in her honor, and there was merchandise galore: every little girl had to have a Shirley Temple doll. She even had a fan club in Czechoslovakia, as she learned 50 years later when she served as the U.S. Ambassador to that nation.

As a boy, Warhol went to the movies at the local cinemas in his Pittsburgh neighborhood, Oakland. With the help of his older brothers, Paul and John, he also wrote to his favorite stars to ask for autographed photos, which he carefully kept in a photo album. She signed his photo, “To Andrew Worhola from Shirley Temple,” and he dated it “1941” on the back. At some point thereafter, it was hand-colored, quite possibly by Warhol’s brother John who, with their cousin John Preksta, operated a photo portrait business for a brief time after the end of World War II.

Warhol’s Shirley Temple photo appears in a different photo of Warhol from about 1966, which was published in a French magazine at about that time. By then, the photo was framed and positioned in a traditional place of honor: the center of the mantel in Warhol’s home.

Warhol also owned a small milk pitcher made of cobalt blue glass and printed with Temple’s image and signature, something that could be acquired by mail in exchange for a cereal box-top at the height of her stardom. In the early 1950s, Warhol was bombarding author Truman Capote with fan letters to such a degree that Capote later referred to himself as “Warhol’s Shirley Temple.” In one of the only direct references in his work to his childhood idol, Warhol borrowed the title of one of her classic films for one of his most important films with Edie Sedgwick, “Poor Little Rich Girl” (1965). A few years later, a different signed photo of Shirley Temple graced the back cover of the August 1972 issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine, in full magnificent color and absolutely suitable for framing.

On February 1^st, Ricard’s life ended suddenly but, according to painter Brice Marden he was surrounded with friends at Bellevue Hospital, having been diagnosed with cancer after seeking hip-replacement surgery. His story begins with mystery; sources note that Ricard was born in Boston in 1946, but some admit that even this much is questionable.

According to a note written by Billy Name in an appointment book for the year 1968 which is held in The Warhol Museum’s archives, Rene Ricard may have been born on July 23. This interpretation isn’t entirely clear however, since the note states only “Rene Roger.” The suggestion of a birth date is due to the fact that each of Billy’s other entries in the same appointment book are individual’s birth dates and locations. Examples include “March 2, 1942 / 5 am  Brooklyn / LOU REED,” and “August 6, 1928 / Pittsburgh / ANDY WARHOL,” and others including the recently departed Taylor Mead and Louis Waldon. This information was essential for Billy as he cast astrological charts for his friends. Jed Johnson also made notes in this book, indicating when Warhol was in Arizona shooting Lonesome Cowboys, and when the Factory moved from 47^th Street to 33 Union Square West, and other practicalities.

In his book POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, Tony Scherman writes that Rene was among the Harvard/Cambridge/Boston crowd that entered The Factory in 1965 (notably Edie Sedgwick, Ed “The Sugar Plum Fairy” Hood, Chuck Wein, Danny Fields, Danny Williams, and others). Ricard had a minor non-speaking role in Warhol’s film Kitchen (1965), washing dishes in the background as Roger Trudeau attempts to seduce Edie Sedgwick. The next year, Rene introduced teenage beauty Susan Bottomly to Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga, and she became known as International Velvet (being the Warhol equivalent of youthful Elizabeth Taylor’s role in National Velvet.) Ricard also appears in a reel of The Chelsea Girls, but due to Warhol’s instructions for how this double-screen film should be projected, his reel is silent in favor of that appearing at the right. According to Callie Angell, Ricard also appeared in six reels that were shot for Four Stars, the 25-hours-long film that consumed Warhol’s attention throughout 1967.

Rene Ricard’s notoriety in Warhol’s realm lies in his 1966 role in The Andy Warhol Story, an hour-long film that was never released. Little of the film is actually known to this day, though the two reels exist in the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but are not preserved. Published statements about it vary in the details (in interviews, Ricard himself wasn’t clear on where it was shot, either in his own apartment or Robert Arkin’s) but generally agree that Ricard portrayed Warhol in a vicious manner; Edie Sedgwick is also in the film, either also playing the role of Warhol, or that of someone abused by him. The story goes that the soundtrack was poorly recorded, either a series of beeps or recording only Sedgwick’s voice, rendering Ricard’s portrayal essentially silent.

Beyond his Warhol film days, yet still referencing them, Ricard acted in Underground U.S.A. (Eric Mitchell, 1980) which also included Factory-ites Taylor Mead and Jackie Curtis in the cast, along with then-current scene stars John Lurie, Patti Astor, and Cookie Mueller.

Among other citations, Rene Ricard’s poetry was published in Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair and George Plimpton’s The Paris Review. The Dia Art Foundation (one of three founding partners in the Warhol Museum) chose his work for their initial poetry publication, Rene Ricard 1979-1980. The marvelous series of Hanuman Books’ miniature editions included Ricard’s God With Revolver (1990). Along with fellow poets Robert Creeley, John Weiners and Michael McClure, Ricard read his poetry at an event at The Warhol in 1997, in conjunction with an exhibition of Francesco Clemente’s recent portraits of these poets as well as Allen Ginsberg and other figures from the New York scene.

The previous year, 1996, Ricard was himself portrayed in film, by Michael Wincott in Julian Schnabel’s directorial debut, Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Bowie as Warhol.

One of Ricard’s best-known critical pieces for Artforum magazine is The Radiant Child, which announced the arrival of Basquiat as a new creative figure in the art world, in December 1981. In it, Ricard suggested through historical references (Pompeii, Socrates, and more) that not only was his work – and others of his generation, including Keith Haring, John Ahearn, Clemente, and Schnabel’s original guise as painter—new and bold, but also timeless, and maybe heroic. “Where is Taki?” Ricard repeated this graffiti phrase in his essay as poetic refrain, read also as it was seen incessantly in the personalized and fabulous subway cars of the day.

“Where is Taki?” To quote one of Ricard’s recent poem-paintings: “The V.I.P. room is closed.”

In the preface to his interview with Ricard in Vice magazine in 2009, Rocco Castoro noted of his subject: “In his criticism, Rene was one of those guys who saw things before anybody else did and who knew how to make people understand why what they were looking at was so damn important. That’s an essential role. That’s the kind of guy we all need.”

In the Vice interview, Ricard gave his thoughts on his chosen art form: “I loathe poetry. I just gave a poetry reading and other poets were standing up and reciting their rhymes from memory, I guess that’s cute, you know, with the backbeat, but I loathe it. I don’t like what I read in The New Yorker. I really like my own poetry a lot and I think that’s why I write it. Of all the arts, it’s the one I know the least about, and it’s interesting that it’s the one I practice and earn my living on. Anyway, yes, I like my own work. It speaks to me.”

Vice mag http://www.vice.com/read/fashion-hello-rene-ricard-886-v16n6

Dia book http://www.diabooks.org/item.m?itemID=19491

Basquiat review http://izharpatkin.com/Catalog_3.html