Bob Colacello - Holy Terror: andy warhol

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2014

Copyright 1990, 2014 by Robert Colacello

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers, New York, in 1990.

Vintage and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

Permission to reprint Candy Darlings letters courtesy of
The Jeremiah Newton/Candy Darling Collection.

Scott Cohen interview with Andy Warhol printed with permission,
copyright 1980 by Scott Cohen.

Excerpt from Hollywood Kids, a poem by Carrie Fisher,
copyright 1975 by Carrie Fisher.

Review of Andy Warhols Whitney show, ,
copyright 1971 by Barbara Rose.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-6986-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-6987-5

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Linda Huang
Cover photograph Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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To my mother and father

This book was originally published in 1990, three years after Andy Warhols death. Since then, as Warhols reputation has soared and his prices exploded, I have been asked the same question at least a thousand times: Did you have any idea, when you were working for Andy in the 1970s, how important and expensive he would become? I sort of did, as did most of us who helped turn out his art, his films, his magazine, his books, his TV shows at his studio known as the Factory. But he definitely knew. Or knew that was what he wanted. Beneath Andys bewigged feyness and maddening nonchalance lay an iron will and limitless ambition, which he revealed only to a select few and then more as a slip of the mask than a shared confidence.

This has all become more obvious to me as time has passed, and I am able to look back on the thrilling, crazy, exhausting years documented in this book with greater clarity and detachment. As Billy Name, the photographer-in-residence at the first of Andys four successive Factories (the one with the silver walls and nonstop parties), said in a 2006 PBS documentary, He wanted it so much, to be successful. He didnt want to be second-rate or an underling in any way. And he didnt want to be first-class or top rank either. He wanted to be a superstar. He wanted to be a big nova that would eclipse everything. That was the only thing that would satisfy Andy. And it happened.

Now, a quarter century after his death, it has become almost a clich to say that Andy Warhol was the most important artist of the second half of the twentieth century, just as Picasso was of the first half. In September 2012, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened an exhibition that gave some indication of how overwhelming the Warhol effect had become. Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years matched forty-five works made by Andy since his first gallery show in 1962 with some one hundred paintings, sculptures, photographs, and videos by those who followed. A partial list: Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Richard Artschwager, Chuck Close, Gilbert & George, Julian Schnabel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Tom Sachs, Takashi Murakami, Vija Celmins, Glenn Ligon, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Catherine Opie, Vic Muniz, Deborah Kass, Ryan Trecartin, and the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was represented by a Neolithic vase painted with the Coca-Cola logo.

Mark Rosenthal, the independent curator who conceived the Warhol show at the Met, said he had approached the subject with more questions than answers: Is Warhol the most important artist? Or has that just become an article of faith? I grudgingly came to the conclusion that its true. But I dont use the words important or influential. Hes the most impactful. I draw the analogy to a meteor hitting the earth and creating a whole new terrain.

Yet the criticism of the show was that it was too little and too late. Where was the latest crop of Warhols children: Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dustin Yellin, Enoc Perez, the Bruce High Quality Foundation? Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a well, duh exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows, wrote Peter Plagens, in his Wall Street Journal review, A Case for the Obvious. That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influenceprobably the pervasive influenceon contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naif the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.

I called the final chapter of this book, which covers the period from Warhols death to his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1989, Andy Is Everywhere. That has turned out to be an almost laughable understatement. Since 1990, there have been Warhol retrospectives in Tokyo, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Brisbane, Australia, as well as several hundred smaller exhibitions in museums and galleries from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Krakow, Poland. Even the United States Information Agency jumped on the Warhol bandwagon, organizing a show of ninety works that toured fourteen Eastern Europe and Central Asia cities, including Saint Petersburg, Prague, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Crowds turned out everywhere: 125,000 at Tokyos Museum of Contemporary Art; 200,000 at Berlins Neue Nationalgalerie; 230,000 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The titles of some of the exhibitions tell a story in themselves: Andy Warhol: Mirror of His Times, Andy Warhol, Mr. America, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal.

No period, medium, or aspect of the Warhol corpus, it seems, has gone unexplored. His 1950s pre-Pop work was the focus of Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol at New York Universitys Grey Art Gallery in 1989. The Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, and went on to Toronto, London, Marseille, Sydney, Perth, and Auckland, New Zealand. The Films of Andy Warhol were screened at the Whitney in 1988 and 1994, as part of the Andy Warhol Film Project, a collaboration with MoMA to catalogue, preserve, and re-release all of the movies, from Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of (1963) to Andy Warhols Bad (1977). The Hamburg Kunsthalle mounted the first retrospective of Warhols photography in 1999, and Frankfurts Museum fr Moderne Kunst was the first to devote an entire exhibition to the Time Capsules, in 2003. (These were the 612 cardboard boxes in which Andy had kept almost every piece of mail he received in the 1970s and 80s; only fifteen boxes were included in the exhibition, but those contained 4,000 items.)