Andy Warhol

From Wikipedia:

Andy Warhol (/ˈwɔːrhɒl/; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame”.

In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. In June 1968, he was almost killed by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot him inside his studio. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58 in New York City.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Warhol has been described as the “bellwether of the art market”. Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. His works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, a 1963 serigraph titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million, which is the most expensive work of art sold at auction by an American artist.

Paul McCartney met with Andy Warhol in 1966 when art dealer Robert Fraser brought Warhold and a group of his friends to Paul’s Cavendish home in London.

We watched Empire, which is something like three hours of one building, which is pretty tough going — it’s a good job we were into pot because we couldn’t have handled it otherwise! It was one of his very long films. It went on. In fact, if I had seen that coming I would have probably said to Robert, “Oh no, don’t let’s see that one. Have you got anything else?”

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

It was daring but it was laborious to watch. Very very boring. Endlessly boring. I must say it was not a great evening out. The people in the room being bored with you and Andy being enigmatic at the back of it all.

It was nice to have Andy there. He was a very shy, quiet guy. I got the impression he didn’t want to say too much in case it came out stupid. I hate to say it but it created an air of incredible mystery. He seemed like a nice bloke. I remember we had dinner at the Baghdad House in Fulham Road. The great attraction there was they let you smoke hash downstairs because it was Baghdad and everything, so we sat around a table and had yoghurt and honey and various Iraqi things.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

There wasn’t that much action in the Empire State Building. And we just sat around with a bunch of friends, and Andy was very enigmatic, didn’t say more than two words: ‘Nice room. Thank you.’ Then we ended up going to the Baghdad House, which was the only place we knew of in London where you could smoke hash downstairs. We sat around this long table and ordered up various little couscous things. I never really talked to Andy though. But it was great fun and I thanked Robert for engineering thosemoments.

Paul McCartney – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

The Apple label was for the Beatles’ music. But there was an undercurrent where John met Yoko [then an experimental artist] and I hung out with Allen Ginsberg. Andy Warhol came to my house and showed his film Empire there because I was the only one with a 16mm projector. A key figure was Robert Fraser who was the ringleader of this underground scene through his art gallery.

Paul McCartney – Interview with The Guardian, November 2008

I was a fan of the Andy Warhol idea, not so much of his films but I liked the cheekiness of Empire, the film of the Empire State Building, I liked the nothingness of it. So I would do a bit of that.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

These days I’ve stopped thinking that anything is weird or different. There’ll always be people about like that Andy Warhol in the States, the bloke who makes great long films of people just sleeping. Nothin’ weird anymore. We sit down and write, or go into the recording studios, and we just see what comes up.

Paul McCartney – Interview with New Musical Express, June 1966

From Wikipedia:

Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol’s specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City’s Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was “to see time go by.”

A week after the film was shot, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who was cinematographer for Empire) speculated in the Village Voice that Warhol’s film would have a profound influence on avant-garde cinema. In 2004, Empire was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

From 411: Andy Warhol’s Empire | MoMA:

Filmed from nightfall to early morning, Empire consists of a single frame of the Empire State Building. Recorded from the neighboring Time & Life Building, the skyscraper appears suspended in midair. Flashes of light marking the start of a new reel, the changing summer sky, and fleeting windowpane reflections punctuate an otherwise motionless image. Empire is projected at a slowed-down speed so that it screens for a total of eight hours—allowing viewers, as Warhol said, “to see time go by.”

The artist was inspired to make Empire following the announced construction of the World Trade Center; its twin towers would soon eclipse the elder landmark’s record as the world’s tallest building. Warhol was fascinated by fame—as evidenced by his paintings and silkscreens of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis—and his gaze presents the skyscraper as a fading superstar. Although Empire’s extended duration was intended to challenge audiences, it also opens spectatorship to a place where boredom has the potential to be tantalizing.

Robert was a good friend of Andy Warhol’s and when Andy came over he said, ‘Can we hire a projector and show one of Andy’s films?’ Paul Morrissey really made the movies — he was quite a good friend too.

Paul McCartney – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

I was with Andy at the Cannes Film festival in 1967. We connected with Robert in London right away – he was really nice. We had the print of Chelsea Girls with us when we got to London. We’d taken it to Cannes to show at the Film Festival, and there were so many reels and it was so expensive that we’d taken it in our luggage. […] But they never screened it. They had announced it, it was part of the programme, but they hadn’t given it a date. They didn’t know how to screen the film. They needed two projectors and two screens, and I had to try and show them how to do it.

Then they were afraid there’d be some scandal because of ten seconds of male nudity, which they’d heard about but never seen. They never screened it. They refused to show it. The first time ever that an invited film was never screened.

And then we left and took it to Paris and showed it at the Cinematheque, and then took it to London, all in our suitcases. And we met Robert and we must have shown it in Robert’s apartment. He was renting his apartment from Kenneth Tynan and I was very impressed by that. It was pretty empty, that apartment – we went over there a number of times. Robert would just call up Paul McCartney or John Lennon. A lot of people came. Paul McCartney lent us one of the projectors.

Paul Morrissey – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

Robert called and asked me to bring Paul’s 16mm sound projector, because Chelsea Girls needed two projectors used simultaneously. So I took it over, arrived at 23 Mount Street and found about fifty or more people crammed in, lying all over the floor, all the Warhol entourage. We showed the movie and someone complained about the noise and the police came. Robert had this amazingly arrogant attitude towards the police which stopped them coming in. They tried. They were pointing to people passed out on the floor, saying, ‘Is he all right?’, but Robert just ignored this and ordered or pushed them back out on to the landing. ‘

Stash Klossowski – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

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