Andy Warhol loved the beauty in others but couldn’t see it in himself. A new exhibition shows how the artist’s insecurities about his appearance transformed his art.

Andy Warhol stepped out of the shower, and his friend John Giorno gaped. It was 1963, and something rare had just occurred: The artist allowed himself to be seen completely naked. Not even his trademark wig masked his bald head.

“Andy, you’re beautiful,” said Giorno, a poet who would later become Warhol’s lover.

Giorno had accompanied Warhol on a trip to a mutual friend’s house in Connecticut, and was struck by Warhol’s muscles. Who knew? Usually they were hidden by jeans and a loose white shirt. But he was well toned from his 18-hour-a-day, speed-fueled artist’s workout of silkscreening and painting.

Warhol never understood what Giorno saw; the artist could only see his reflection through a fun-house mirror of distortion. “He always thought he was ugly. He always thought everybody else was beautiful,” says Giorno. “He always thought everybody else’s ugly body was beautiful.”

Warhol’s gnawing insecurities about his own appearance were rooted in his sickly childhood and exacerbated by premature baldness, the taboo of homosexuality, and, later, scarring from gunshot wounds. Self-consciousness about physical imperfections is universal, but the Pop art icon took it to another level.

Now, a new exhibition, Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, will offer the first comprehensive look at Warhol’s complicated and fascinating relationship with the body. The brainchild of The Andy Warhol Museum’s Associate Curator of Art Jessica Beck, it opens at The Warhol on October 21 and runs through January 22, 2017. The show will include more than 200 paintings, drawings, and photographs that highlight the museum’s permanent collection as well as rarely traveled loans from the collections of other major American museums.

Among the works: a painting of an impaled car crash victim, Christ juxtaposed against a body builder, paintings of cosmetic surgery, and a rare photograph of Warhol pumping iron.

“In Warhol’s work and writing, he points out, over and over, that beauty has this close relationship to pain,” Beck notes. “His own anxieties become manifested into the work.”

Warhol even presented images of the body’s interior, creating medical sketches of the human anatomy to illustrate his famous quote: “Pop is just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside.”

His art also drew from the false promise of Madison Avenue—that clothes, cosmetics, and surgeries can create the ideal beauty. “He was really thinking about people’s insecurities about their appearance and his own,” says James Boaden, assistant professor of art history at the University of York in England who writes about Warhol. “He is as important as his artwork and that’s why he was so influential. He created a certain kind of persona and the paintings were drawn off the back of him. He created the persona out of his anxieties. He wore a wig, dressed in leather jackets, and disguised the body in ways that helped him reinvent himself.”

As a kid growing up in the South Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Warhol was always self-conscious about his appearance. At age 8 he contracted Sydenham chorea, also known as St. Vitus Dance, a rare disorder of the nervous system. During his youth he also suffered from a pale, blotchy complexion that polluted his self-image.

He would later use his art to criticize himself. His prominent nose became a theme in his early artwork as a student at Carnegie Technical Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) in the 1940s. His Nose Picker paintings are distorted self-portraits, his finger lodged up his nose, including one work titled The Lord Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose.

After college, Warhol continued engaging with the idea of fixing an imperfect nose, both personally and artistically. In the early ’50s, after moving from Pittsburgh to New York to become a commercial artist, he doctored his passport photo. Using a black pencil, Warhol narrowed his nose and filled in his balding head with hair. A trip to the surgeon’s office wouldn’t measure up to his improvements on paper. At age 29, he underwent unsatisfying plastic surgery on his nose.

“Warhol didn’t have true rhinoplasty where the nose is fractured and reshaped,” Beck says. “His nose issue was actually a skin issue. He had the skin shaved, a procedure which forces new skin to grow in its place. He spoke openly about his disappointment with the procedure in Popism,” even complaining that his pores looked larger afterwards. In fact, Beck says Warhol perfected his artistic style—now known as Pop art—by early experiments painting the human nose.

Then came the day, now a legendary event, when Warhol painted multiple versions of two gigantic images of Coca-Cola bottles, a symbol of Americana—some abstract and one in clean, simple lines. He asked his friend Emile de Antonio his opinion, and de Antonio told him to go with the simple lines and discard the rest. In 1962, Pop art was born with those soft drink bottles.

“His connection to Pop art starts with the body,” Beck says. A year before he created the Coca-Cola bottles, Warhol was doing similar experiments while painting a nose job ad that ran in the National Inquirer. In a series of four paintings titled Before and After, he created various versions—one in dribs and smears, others in half tones, and one in the clean lines that became his trademark. A pair of these early works will be on display in My Perfect Body.

Up to that point, while Warhol was a highly successful commercial artist in the ’50s, his look was disheveled. “In the advertising trade, they called him Raggedy Andy,” says Boaden. “He used to wear shoes gaping at the front, with the toes poking out. If you think of the image of Mad Men, it was the complete opposite.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, social changes roiled over the United States and Warhol’s celebrity status grew. He used his image to rewrite his story, and the rules of visual art. His trademark sunglasses, silver wigs, and black leather jackets created a mysterious persona.

In TV interviews, Warhol would give only “yes” or “no” answers to questions— a level of concealment that made him an even more fascinating enigma. “There was power in withholding that private self,” Boaden recalls. “There was also power in the way in which he covers and hides his own body.”

In the ’60s, as Warhol made silkscreens of celebrities, he played with the concept of imperfection, and the inability to live up to expectations. “Marilyn Monroe’s face was not quite lined up with the color behind it,” Boaden says. “He played with imperfections in all sorts of ways—sometimes it’s very camp, photos of him in drag. Sometimes it’s very tragic, crime scene photos.”

In his Polaroid portraits, notes Beck, Warhol often took an aggressive approach to editing. “He’d use bright lights and put heavy powder on people as a way to bleach out imperfections.”

In his Death and Disaster series, which numbered some 70-odd works made in the mid-1960s, Warhol plucked images of mangled bodies from newspapers and police photo archives. “They’re not just car accidents. In one, the driver has been thrown from the vehicle and he is impaled around a lamp post,” Beck says. “It’s about the actual body trauma that goes on.”

Warhol also deconstructed the body into imperfect forms. His painting of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s body is broken down into sections that suggest a Polaroid or an X-ray. If you look closely, you’ll also see he adds a third arm to the body.

“There is always something askew with the bodies,” adds Beck. “It’s never an idolized beauty or perfect image. It’s never an Adonis. He’s always questioning or challenging that idea of perfection.”

In 1978, Warhol took the idea of body abstraction one step further with his Oxidation paintings, iridescent canvases made up of copper paint and urine, which combined creates a chemical reaction that turns green over time. He laid canvases with ground copper, and when invited friends and acquaintances urinated on the canvas the uric acid reacted with the copper in the paint, developing a trace of the body with its abstract splatters. Warhol and his collaborators experimented with both pattern and coloration by using a variety of metallic background paints and by varying the maker’s fluid and food intake.

Many of the artworks on view display the body in pieces, cropping it to show only sections at a time—torsos, feet, hands—which can be seen in such works as the film Sleep (1963) and the 1950s Boy Book drawings, which are about love and desire. “They’re incredibly intimate, beautiful, and with clean, elegant lines,” Beck says of the Boy Book works. “But there is also subversive desire at work in these sketches. Homosexuality in the 1950s was an illegal act. So, this sort of desire had to be hidden.”

Recalls Giorno, “Being gay was a death in the art world as well as the real world. But Andy was skillful at walking the line. Everyone knew he was gay. He got away with it.”

Just as the abstracted and tormented body are prominent themes of Warhol’s art, so is the sculpted body. For the show, Beck secured an Eve Arnold black-and-white photograph of Warhol in his New York studio, The Factory. It shows the artist in an unexpected pose: wearing sunglasses while lifting enormous dumbbells on a freestanding toilet. Even though Warhol enjoyed lifting weights at various times throughout his life, it’s rare to find photographs of him in the act, especially in the early ’60s.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist writer, entered The Factory and shot Warhol in the chest, nearly killing him. The event shook him to his core, Giorno says. Warhol described himself as “the living dead” and became cautious about anyone he invited into his social circle.

His own damaged body became a novel source of inspiration for his art. Warhol became less self-conscious about exposing his body—he even had photographs taken to show his imperfections, including prominent scarring and the medical girdle he wore to support his organs post-surgery.

“The surgery was botched,” Boaden says. “His body looked like Frankenstein, but he showed it off. He described a beautiful pattern on his skin. He played up how crazy he looked. He always liked horror movies.”

Ironically, Warhol had painted abstracts of girdle ads earlier in his career, including one titled Where is Your Rupture?

“The whole show is about ruptures,” Beck says. “A rupture exposes something. Perhaps that something is Warhol’s shame in his own body,” despite assurances from Giorno and others that he was actually beautiful.

Giorno could never convince Warhol that he was attractive. “But being humble is the most powerful position,” Giorno says. “It all got inverted into the art. His self-consciousness was transforming.”

Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body is generously supported by Cadillac and UPMC Health Plan.

Eric Shiner: What compelled you to move to New York City in the early 1980s, and how did Andy Warhol factor into your thinking at that time? Did you, in fact, meet Andy in those early days?

Ai Weiwei: My father, Ai Qing, was a poet. He was accused of being a ‘rightist’ and was exiled to the remote desert region of Xinjiang. We lived through the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and political struggles. Those early experiences informed my decision to leave China; to be far away. Throughout my childhood, the United States was portrayed as a propagator of imperialism and as an enemy of the state. America seemed like the furthest place I could possibly go. I wanted to be in New York, the cultural center. I arrived in the United States in 1981 and went to New York in 1983, where I remained for ten years.

Early on, I was exposed to Andy Warhol and was immediately drawn to him. He was, and remains, an interesting figure, not only for his art and personality but also everything related to him. The first book I bought in New York was The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975). I found a signed copy of the book at the Strand.1 Reading it gave me a firsthand account of who Warhol was as a person, what he was like and what his interests were, what his style and attitude was towards everything. I read other books from his generation, but to me Warhol always remained the most interesting figure in American art. I saw him a few times during openings in the downtown art scene, around the Lower East Side, and once at PS1.

ES: Prior to leaving China, what was your work like in the 1970s? What informed it? What changes did you see as a result of your move to New York?

AW: Before I went to the United States, I was a student at a film school. My major was in animation and the kind of work I was doing involved very simple drawings. I realized much later that my way of making drawings was similar to Warhol’s, particularly his early drawings of cats and portraits for his friends. At the time, I knew almost nothing about contemporary American art. I had received one book, as a gift, on Jasper Johns’s work. In our so-called art circle, nobody appreciated what Johns had done. It was not until after I had arrived in New York that I began to appreciate his work. Johns became an early influential figure in my studies and a bridge to understanding the work of Marcel Duchamp and ultimately Warhol.

ES: Warhol’s father died after drinking contaminated water in West Virginia when Andy was only fourteen years old. It was the most traumatic event a young man could endure. Can you talk about your own relationship with your father and how that shaped you as an artist?

AW: I come from a very different kind of family. My father was an intellectual, a poet, but he was also exiled. Growing up, I never saw my father write a word. During the Cultural Revolution, the most difficult period, he was forced to clean toilets. At the time, those kinds of public toilets in rural China were beyond one’s imagination. But he made the toilets so clean and I never saw someone put so much effort into cleaning toilets. I really respect my father as someone who was highly aesthetically trained and lived and breathed poetry, but who at the same time handled the most lowly and brutal work, while never really complaining. That mentality, and his actions, had a very strong influence on me.

ES: What was the most rewarding part of your time in New York? Can you talk about how long you were there, what it meant for you, how you survived, and ultimately what compelled you to return to China?

AW: I spent my time in the United States as an outsider, never really aspiring for so-called American values. I never tried to get myself established with position, status, economic satisfaction, or material things. I had very limited resources, so I worked all kinds of jobs. From carpentry to house cleaning, gardening to print and frame shops, I took many different kinds of jobs to survive. I saw no opportunity for me to feel comfortable in that society and to be recognized. However, my stay in the United States was a chance to immerse myself in the arts and to be involved in intellectual discussions. This allowed me to be quite independent and liberal. I enjoyed spiritual freedom there.

After twelve years in the Unites States without returning to China, I received news that my father was ill, and I decided I had to return. Before he passed away, I had to come back and stay with him.

ES: Describe what it was like to return to China after so many years in New York. What surprised you the most? What angered you the most? Do you think your decision to return was the right one to make?

AW: Before I came back, everyone was saying that China had changed dramatically, but I was under no illusions. I knew there were some things that could never change. When I returned, I realized I was right. Yes, we have very tall buildings, wide roads and many cars. Economically, China has developed tremendously; however, the state is still under strict Communist control. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, universal suffrage and an independent press are not accepted. All of these common values are restricted and controlled, which is very disappointing.

When I first returned, I did not have much to do. If I wasn’t at home, I would go out to the antique market. Visiting the antique market imparted experience and knowledge I would have never gained elsewhere. I soon attempted to establish an underground culture, to publish independent books and develop a platform for contemporary activities. I made The Black Cover Book (1994), The White Cover Book (1995) and The Grey Cover Book (1997).2 I organized an exhibition titled Fuck Off. With Hans van Dijk and Frank Uytterhaegen, I established the first contemporary gallery in China, which we named China Art Archives and Warehouse. There we exhibited early works by artists working in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many artists active today came from that period.

I never really evaluate decisions as being right or wrong. I could not know what my life would have been like if I did not come back. I guess every decision is the right decision. I never think that I have made any wrong decisions in my life. I do not even think I can make a wrong decision.

…

The full interview 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.

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.

A revelatory exhibition features a little-known but widely influential chapter of Andy Warhol’s life: redefining the book.

During his pre-Pop days, Andy Warhol would throw coloring parties at his favorite Upper East Side haunt, Serendipity 3. Friends and strangers alike would help him add color to drawings he made for his self-published books—a low-tech version of today’s crowdsourcing campaigns—while downing the shop’s signature “frrrozen hot chocolate.”

Well before the interconnected world of the 21st century, books—mass produced and relatively inexpensive—reached people in ways paintings on a gallery wall could not. And as far as Warhol was concerned, that made it a medium well worth exploring.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Warhol was an avid reader whose literary interests ranged from movie star and Princess Diana biographies to cookbooks, astronomy, plastic surgery, and antiques. A photograph taken in his Montauk, New York, home in the 1970s shows his books arranged spine-in on the shelves.

Throughout his life and work, books, in one form or another and at one time or another, provided the artist with information, inspiration, and income, says Matt Wrbican, chief archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum.

“Publishing was huge during his lifetime,” says Wrbican. “And creating books was vital to his career.”

The first exhibition in the United States to crack the spine on this chapter of the artist’s career opens October 10 at The Warhol and runs through January 10, 2016. Curated by Wrbican, Warhol By the Book features some 300 objects—paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, works never fully realized, and a sampling of books from Warhol’s own eclectic library, including a first edition of the Atkins Diet and a volume on poodles.

Wrbican’s goal: “To represent everything Andy did in regard to books.” No small task considering Warhol’s exploits as an author, commercial illustrator, and publisher. He contributed to 80 books in his lifetime, providing illustrations for mass-market children’s fiction, language instruction, a satirical cookbook, and a book on etiquette.

Ongoing efforts to examine and organize the more than half a million objects in The Warhol’s archives, such as the quirky contents of the artist’s 610 Time Capsules, have helped shape this little-known narrative.

According to Wrbican, the majority of the collection has yet to be sorted, so new discoveries are constantly being made. “Two years ago,” he recalls, “we found original drawings for the book 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy that had never seen the light of day and so the colors are spectacular, stunning.” They are standouts in the exhibition.

Books were the focal point of the 2013 exhibition Reading Andy Warhol organized by Germany’s Museum Brandhorst. Although Wrbican lent his expertise and even penned an essay about Warhol’s unfinished Marilyn Monroe Book for the catalogue, the show never made it to the United States. This gave Wrbican all the more reason to continue exploring the topic, discovering that the artist’s efforts went far beyond any preconceived notions. “The multiplicity of ideas, the amount of work—it’s staggering,” he affirms. “In some ways, books represent Warhol’s most accessible work.”

Kathryn Price, curator of collections at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, where Warhol By the Book debuted this past spring, agrees. “The show is revelatory for a lot of people,” she says. “It proves that Warhol interacted with books his entire life and that there were moments when books grounded him.”

Andy the book worm

Perhaps the most significant of those books, the “two biggies” as Wrbican likes to call them, are a family prayer book and a celebrity scrapbook Warhol put together at age 11. The belief is they provided him with both spiritual and earthly comfort as he struggled through a serious childhood illness and then the death of his father when he was just 14.

Andrej Warhola, a construction worker who emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, scrimped and saved $1,500 so that his son, considered the best bet to support the family, could start hitting the books at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945. Four years later, Warhol graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in pictorial design.

A handful of Warhol’s textbooks from college and his days at Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School, as well as several class assignments, are included in Warhol By the Book. Complete with handwritten notes in the margins, underlining and doodles, they provide a glimpse into Warhol’s early interactions with the printed page. They also foreshadow the first chapter in Warhol’s career: successful commercial illustrator.

Many unfinished works are highlighted, including this unique maquette for a book made from Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints that unfolds to measure nearly 30 feet. Other gems: the mock-up designer’s copy of Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) and A Gold Book.

Other signs of big things to come: drawings for Leroy, the Mexican Jumping Bean—a short story written by his fellow Carnegie Tech classmate Philip Pearlstein—marking Warhol’s first work to accompany a narrative; and a homework assignment depicting the novel All the King’s Men as an illustration. Both are included in the exhibition.

That early professional chapter in the life of Andy Warhol took the artist to New York City. Soon, he was making a name for himself and a better than decent living as major publishing houses such as Doubleday, Harper & Brothers, and J.B. Lippincott commissioned him to design their dust jackets.

His cover renderings for Pistols for Two and The Saint in Europe—both part of the popular Crime Club series of the day— and his illustrations for Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette show a willingness to revise and rework his submissions in order to meet his clients’ needs. According to Price, these early examples aren’t readily identifiable, at least to most people, as Warhol’s. His signature style was still evolving.

Before he went Pop, Warhol focused a great deal of his creative energy on self-publishing. It was through books that the artist worked out many of the themes that would define his career: documentation, reproducibility, mass-produced visual culture, and authorship. In addition to his famous coloring parties, he enlisted his mother, Julia, who moved to New York City in 1952 and lived with her son for the next 20 years, to brand his projects with her fancy script.

Warhol was nothing if not a pragmatist. “There was a practical side to these collaborations,” Price says. “He simply needed more hands; it was a means to a goal.”

The book boss

If the goal was just to publish, Warhol far surpassed expectations by producing an extraordinarily large number and diverse assortment of products. There were books based on his personal interests (In the Bottom of My Garden, À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu), those he sent as gifts or promotional pieces (Love Is a Pink Cake, A Is an Alphabet), children’s books (The House That Went to Town, There Was Snow on the Street and Rain in the Sky), books about animals (25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, Velvet the Poodle), and satire (Wild Raspberries).

The one constant was Warhol’s ever-expanding construct of what a book was and what it was meant to do. “He made books that didn’t have any images and books that didn’t have any text,” Price says. “It really depends on which book you’re talking about, whether the form is the art or the content is the art.”

As the somewhat sheltered ’50s gave way to the seemingly boundless ’60s, Warhol’s notoriety, both as an artist (enter the Campbell’s Soup Can) and as a celebrity (The Factory doors swung open) was rapidly gaining traction. Embarking on new collaborations with musicians, poets, and filmmakers, it’s no wonder his books also followed such divergent paths.

He established one of those partnerships with his assistant, poet Gerard Malanga. Together they produced Screen Tests / A Diary, a collection of black-and-white stills culled from Warhol’s famous short, silent films of famous visitors to The Factory. The filmstrip photos of the likes of Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Edie Sedgwick are juxtaposed with poems written by Malanga specifically to accompany each portrait.

The two would later publish Chic Death, again joining Warhol’s visuals—his Death and Disaster paintings—with Malanga’s words.

Words, in the form of a transcript of the amphetamine-fueled, Factory-discovered actor Ondine talking for 24 hours, dominate Warhol’s 1968 book, a, A Novel, hailed by one critic as a “new kind of Pop artifact.” The opposite can be said about the scale model of the Marilyn Monroe Book, uncovered in Time Capsule 55. Never actually printed, this handmade prototype is comprised of 38 octagon-shaped pages that accordion out to reveal abstract details taken from Warhol’s famous Marilyn silkscreen prints. When fully opened, this concertina-like book reaches nearly 30 feet in length.

Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) is truly a mixed bag of genius and a precursor to the multimedia platforms of today. The first of several books to defy the definition of a book, this seminal publication has been called a “children’s book for hipsters.” The cover image of Warhol and company assembled in front of his Brillo boxes is a negative printed in silver and black. The inside is bursting with pop-ups, including a Hunt’s tomato paste can and an elaborate castle; objects made to be removed , a balloon and a noisemaker; audio by way of a flexi-disc featuring a four-minute interview with the Velvet Underground’s Nico and others; and an advertisement for the book itself promoting of all things: a “do-it-yourself nose job.”

Warhol’s last two decades proved to be less prolific, at least in terms of books. Mined from his tape-recorded musings, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) offers the artist’s take on just about everything. While Warhol is listed as the author, his assistant at the time, Pat Hackett, was the unacknowledged ghostwriter. Hackett was, however, credited for her role in helping to craft their next venture—POPism: The Warhol Sixties, a meditation on the beginnings of the movement.

Several of Warhol’s final projects seemed to carry him full circle, taking him back to his days as an illustrator: children’s books featuring offset reproductions of his Toy paintings and the Vanishing Animals series, a collaboration with environmentalist Kurt Benirschke.

Of course, in the aftermath of Warhol’s death in 1987, plenty of books have been written about him: there’s Hackett’s edit of The Andy Warhol Diaries, Victor Bockris’ Warhol: The Biography, and Wayne Koestenbaum’s Andy Warhol: A Biography not to mention any number of compilations of his work.

The old saying tells us never to judge a book by its cover, but is it fair to judge a man by his books? “Warhol was all about accessibility and getting his work into the hands of the masses,” Price says.

“He is such a ubiquitous artist. There’s so much material from each decade, it has absolutely changed my perspective. I have a deeper understanding and respect for him.”

Warhol By the Book is supported in part by the Affirmation Arts Fund.

It wasn’t until I got older that I realized who Warhol was and what he did. Around my late teens, I discovered the experimental rock group The Velvet Underground, for which he produced the band’s first album along with designing the record cover. By that time, I thought of him more as a person in the music scene and did not really understand his large body of artwork. Later, when I was studying graphic design, I was more attentive to Warhol and started looking at his work through the lens of a young graphic design student. His use of color, composition, the selection of images, and the step/repeat method in his silkscreens were a huge influence on how and what I painted.

With this Exposures series, Lost & Found, I made oil on canvas paintings that focus on Warhol’s photography and film works to coincide with the large book selection of Warhol’s monographs and other published books featured in The Warhol Store. Also included are some paintings based on discarded photobooth strips from museum visitors. Assistant Curator Jessica Beck provided me with a collection of photobooth pictures to incorporate with the other paintings in the installation. These lost-and-found images of previous visitors remind me of a Warhol photograph or his Screen Tests, so they are somewhat of an indirect extension or continuation of his photographic work. The people in the photobooth pictures are “familiar” strangers that represent the general public brought to the museum via Warhol and his work. They are small snapshots of visitors past and present.

The three large gray paintings in the store windows, which show the back of Warhol’s head (it’s almost as if he’s looking into The Warhol Store), focus on the infamous wig. A sort of “anti-portrait” where you don’t see the whole sitter’s face but you recognize who it is. These “wig” paintings are based on photographs circa the early 1970s.

As I was working on the project, I noticed Warhol’s films themselves have a very painterly look to them. For instance, one of my paintings is based off of his very first film Sleep (1963), where there is some movement and camera angles, but for more than five hours you see a man being essentially still, almost posing for a painting. He did similar films like this where there isn’t much action, but there doesn’t need to be. A lot of my own paintings are based on photos I snapped of movies, TV, and even YouTube clips, so approaching Exposures this way was nothing new, but it gave me a much better appreciation and unique perspective of Warhol’s film work.

Thanks to The Warhol and its staff, and a big thanks to Jessica Beck for her wonderful input and very generous support with this project. Exposures: Travis K. Schwab: Lost & Found is on view in the museum’s street-facing windows in The Warhol Store through November 22, 2015.

Join us for an artist talk with Travis K. Schwab on Saturday, September 19, 2 p.m., in The Warhol Store. Guests are encouraged to engage in a community critique about his installation.

One day when I was outside looking at the windows, a guy came up to me and said, “Did you make this? It’s great.”

With people often looking a little lost, I was cautious. “What exactly do you mean?” “Well, the way you juxtaposed these two ways of representing the bags; it’s cool with the text. I had to go out to the street again to understand it; it’s meant to be seen from here. Here you get it.”

Another day a man came up to me and said, “Now everyone is doing it, but Warhol really was the first.”

That was a strong point he made. Warhol introduced screen printing into the field of contemporary art. We are all following in his footsteps. I could not tell if the passerby meant exactly that, but before I could ask, he was immediately gone, hurrying to catch the baseball game at PNC Park.

All my projects are site specific works in which I use existing info graphics, logos, and ads that are found directly around the project location. I transform this material very much in the ”Pop-art-way” so it stays recognizable and becomes an entry point for the public to engage with the work. But something strange happened in this project. Although there would have been a lot of potential visual material directly available around me, not to speak of Warhol’s own pictorial universe I could have picked from, I ended up using exclusively material that was hidden in boxes and on hard disks in the museum’s archive. I was allowed access to the archive and began to dig through boxes of old deteriorating toiletries stored in Ziploc bags that started leaking. And I got hooked to this strange mixture of smells of degenerated skin products all meant to smooth our outer surface layer. This time I was searching for my source material exactly behind this visible surface layer, in the private, the hidden. Through my projects I try to capture something of the essence of a place.

What is for me the essence of The Andy Warhol Museum? Well, a large part of it obviously derives from the focus on Warhol the artist, the icon of 20th century art, the true predecessor of our “selfie-culture.” And the museum lobby, with its Screen Tests, couch, and Cow Wallpaper, certainly emphasizes this. But the more I thought about Warhol, the more I read, the more I knew, the more mysterious he became. Full of contradictions, very carefully orchestrated by him.

How could I respond to this? I temporarily took up the role of the archaeologist, the archivist. First carefully photographing boxes full of zip-lock bags, then the different bottles and containers inside. Continuing on this path, I started studying the museum’s cataloging manual. I was hooked again! The cataloging records describe minutely each archived item in the most neutral way possible, without attaching a specific value to the one or the other object. These texts are meant to be clear and objective, in a true Cartesian way, detached of emotions and seen from the outside. Using this ”archival gesture” on the large windows created an odd mystery and felt like the perfect counterpart to the decorative act of encroaching and framing I applied on the glass door.

GLYCERINE and ROSE WATER by artist Stefan Hoffmann is on view in the museum’s entrance space through October 4, 2015.

Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s assistant curator, who’d found my work through David Oresic, the director at Silver Eye Center for Photography, invited me to the museum to research for my >Exposures series window display. We were looking for links between my work and Warhol’s for Exposures, and I’d found it in three places. The first was in Truck, the second was in The Warhol Store, and the third was in the trash.

My work over the past few years has been about exploring the overlooked, uncurated pieces of our lives. What defines the moments, objects, and experiences that (by design or circumstance) slip under the surface and out of our memories? In 2014, this question in mind, I started painting dumpsters: big, hulking, innocuous objects that exist everywhere, grotesquely colorful, yet they attempt to be invisible. The product we found for the windows plays on this idea of elevated, ubiquitous objects in contemporary art: Coca-Cola novelty products, balloon dog bookends, and pillows in the form of Warhol’s famous banana reference the transformation from refuse to iconic form.

TREASURE/TRASH is my answer to the challenge of creating a dialogue between my work, Warhol’s work, and the store product at the museum. Using the dumpster paintings as a jumping off point, I constructed three new paintings to hang in The Warhol Store’s windows. In a nod to Warhol’s silkscreens, I was inspired to try a new process: painting on translucent polyester instead of canvas. The result is a series of two-sided paintings that transform when seen from outside and inside The Warhol Store.

I’d like to thank Jessica Beck, as well as The Warhol’s Director Eric Shiner, Paul Matarrese, Lori Braszo, and Abby Beddall for all of their help and support throughout this project.

Exposures: TREASURE/TRASH is on view through September 13, 2015.

Stephanie Garrison: The ideas for your installations begin with a response to the space, can you explain your initial process?

Stefan Hoffmann: Well, the initial process is pretty simple. I consciously try to avoid forming any ideas beforehand about what I am actually going to do because I am really looking for something that would make sense at the place I’m working. I’m always working in very public situations. These situations change very rapidly. The circumstances can be totally different. I have to work in an environment for a specific moment of time, and that’s when I’m developing it. It has to make sense for me, in the space. When I come to a place, I redefine the visual vocabulary I’m using. My first approach is to find the visual material that I would use in the project.

SG: To find the visual material, you spent some time in The Warhol’s archives collection. What did you find, and what did you ultimately choose to form the visual basis for this installation?

SH: At the moment I put my foot into the museum, I was thinking about Warhol’s Time Capsules, all the material, which the museum has available. Since I’m reacting to the visual material which surrounds me, coming into The Warhol would mean I would have to react to the visual universe of Andy Warhol, which is almost impossible to do. This universe is so strong and convincing that it wouldn’t make sense to position myself next to this giant in this direct and literal way, re-appropriating some of his imagery.

So, in the archive I could find a different angle on his personality and his life. It was a very special opportunity for me to have access to all the old material that was found in Warhol’s apartment when he died. This wasn’t Time Capsule material, but just the old toiletries he collected and kept. I was particularly struck by these bottles in all these little plastic bags. When I entered the archives and saw these old toiletries, I knew that was going to be my source material.

SG: Could you talk more about how you decided to use the bags as a stand-in for museum constructs?

SH: The most obvious reaction was to take the bottles out of the plastic bags, and photograph them separately, a little bit like Warhol would use the Campbell’s soup can. But then I thought, these bags are fascinating. What interested me was this gesture of conservation in a museum context. For me, the museum was visible in the fact that there is this bag surrounding the bottles. There was a lot of references, for me, to Silver Clouds, for instance. The archivist is usually a hidden person in a museum, yet their way of defining, describing, and classifying the objects is a crucial gesture in elevating “normal stuff” into something worthy of preserving, into a cultural object.

SG: Do you encounter challenges working in different spaces for each of your projects?

SH: Yes, I always encounter endless amounts of challenges, and all the challenges are always totally different. And I think this is the most fascinating part of me working so publicly. The circumstances are totally unpredictable. This is a very complex social environment where I have to try to function within a structure, which is already there. For me, there is never this neutral white cube, which is empty, and I’m just installing my “high art” ideas. I come into a living environment, so to speak, even the lobby where I’m working now goes on functioning as it functions normally.

This is the very specific nature of my process, which is challenging. I have to be very flexible. For instance, at The Warhol, you have tons of events, there are also lots of people I had to ask for permission to use all the materials. Everyone was extremely helpful though, I have to say. It is really an absolute pleasure to work here.

SG: Do you consider maneuvering through this living environment the biggest challenge you faced on this project?

SH: I think the biggest challenge was not in the space itself, in defining a project for this museum, it was Andy Warhol, himself; that is the biggest challenge. Because being a vertical silkscreen printer, he’s kind of the inventor of screen printing in the art context. Being someone who is appropriating screen printing, and using it very prominently, can very easily turn into simply illustrating Warhol. My challenge was, would I be able to come up with an artistic position, which would be a meaningful statement in this context.

Visitors are encouraged to engage with Hoffmann in The Warhol’s entrance space during his installation process. Hoffmann also worked with The Warhol’s summer camps to create a vertical silkscreen installation on the museum’s underground Conservation Lab windows. Rather than silkscreen images of items from the The Warhol’s archives, he worked with the kids to create and photograph their own keepsakes in plastic bags, which were then burned onto screens and printed on the windows.

Glycerine and Rose Water is on view through October 4, 2015.

Pearlstein had spoken earlier that evening in the museum’s auditorium to an audience of nearly 100 patrons as he recounted his career and introduced his latest series of masked-model paintings. Pearlstein is an artist who is not afraid to challenge his own aesthetic, and it was fascinating to see that with such a vast portfolio, he continues to create and actively engage with his works.

In one anecdote, Pearlstein spoke about winning first prize in the Scholastic magazine competition his junior year of high school for his painting Merry-Go-Round, which was then published in Life magazine.[1][2] Five years later in an art class at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), Pearlstein was approached by a young man who, in reference to his work in the Life publication, asked:

“How does it feel to be famous?”

To which Pearlstein replied, “It only lasted five minutes.”

Then the young man, Andy Warhol, positioned his easel next to Pearlstein’s, and a friendship formed.

Although one may be more familiar with the names Warhol or Pearlstein, Pearlstein emphasized that Dorothy Cantor was an integral part of this narrative. When Warhol, Cantor, and Pearlstein were working in New York in the 1950s, she was actively submitting works to competitions and galleries, for which she received national recognition. Despite her early gallery successes, Cantor realigned her focus away from painting to raise her and Pearlstein’s three children.

This is Cantor’s first museum showing as a featured artist, which may be surprising as her talent is apparent in her skillful renderings of urban landscapes. She is able to transform stark, commonplace highways and subways into elegant, organic forms, which remind me of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York landscapes from a few decades earlier. Outside of group shows at the Tanager Gallery, Cantor’s only prior museum showing was at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956 exhibition Recent Drawings U.S.A., in which her sketch Descent was featured alongside artists like New York new-comer Ellsworth Kelly and established artist Edward Corbett.[3][4]

Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Pittsburgh to New York brings together a fascinating compilation of diverse works to tell an important story of three artists and their intertwined roads to success.

Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Pittsburgh to New York is on view through September 6, 2015. The exhibition is co-curated by Jessica Beck, assistant curator of art, and Matt Wrbican, chief archivist.

[1] Pearlstein, Philip. Merry-Go-Round ca. 1939-40. Oil on board. Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery.

[2] “Youngest Generation of American Artists Hold Whopping Good Show at Pittsburgh,” Life magazine. June 16, 1941.

[3] Cantor, Dorothy. Descent ca. 1955-1956. Graphite on paper.

[4] The Museum of Modern Art. Recent Drawings U.S.A. On View at Museum. 1956. Web. 1 June 2015.

Because Warhol’s contract with Commodore specified that only hard-copy versions of the work would be considered art, the digital origin files remained Warhol’s property. For nearly 30 years, Warhol’s Amiga experiments were locked away on floppy disks stored in the museum’s archive. The discovery and release of several of these digital experiments last year, as chronicled in the video Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments, brought to light a new angle on Warhol’s artistic practice.

Chief Archivist Matt Wrbican on Warhol’s computer use:

Warhol had never used a computer before and was completely unfamiliar with the use of a mouse. By 1985, he had spent 50 years drawing and painting directly with a pen, pencil, or brush, which requires an entirely different coordination of the hand and eye.

This new born-digital work inspired some great conversations among museum staff about how best to present the experiments to on-site visitors. Everyone quickly agreed that, if we could pull it off, displaying the files on the creation device would be the most appropriate and authentic. So with a loose desire to put an Amiga 1000 in the gallery and allow visitors to manually explore the origin files, we called on our brilliant friends over at IonTank. Thankfully, they were up for a challenge.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working closely with IonTank to create an Amiga-based interactive that visitors can actually operate to navigate a selection of 10 origin files created by Warhol and his assistants as they learned to use the Amiga 1000.

Designers and developers started by sourcing an original Amiga 1000 and then reverse engineering it to figure out how to make it work from both software and exhibition-grade hardware perspectives. The shell and innards have been modified to allow for constant, ongoing usage, but all the 1980s details remain. The mouse is jumpy and doesn’t track tightly, and the files open much slower than we’re accustomed to these days, but the authenticity of the operating experience goes a long way in conveying the blunt, primitive nature of the digital tools available for artists at the time.

Version 1.0 of the Amiga interactive is truly an object of vintage technological beauty. Unfortunately for us, it’s shipping out shortly for a multiple-venue tour of South Korea lasting through 2016. However, we’re already working on a version 2.0 with a new Amiga. This next iteration will include some new participatory user features. That unit is scheduled to make its debut later this year, and the museum’s galleries here in Pittsburgh will be its permanent home.