by Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, and stayed here through his college years at Carnegie Mellon University. Shortly after graduating, he relocated to New York City, where he became a successful commercial illustrator. Before long he was exhibiting his works in galleries, opening his studio (The Factory), producing movies, managing/producing The Velvet Underground rock band, writing books, and much more. I didn’t realize there was so much to his art! His paintings are some of the most expensive ever sold – in 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for $195 million!
The Andy Warhol Museum opened in 1994, seven year after his death. It is the largest museum in North American dedicated to a single artist and contains the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials; the museum has 900 paintings, 2,000 works on paper, 1,000 prints, 77 sculptures, 4,000 photographs, and 4,350 films/videotapes. Thankfully that’s not all on display.
The museum showcased works from throughout his career, and it was interesting to see how different the early items are from the silk screens of Campbell Soup Cans, Jackie O, and Marilyn Monroe that he became so famous for.
In 1973 Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily life and putting them in boxes he called “Time Capsules”; by the time of his death there were 610 of these capsules, each containing around 500 items. These are part of the museum’s collections, and at any given time they have an exhibit of different box contents.
After visiting the museum I was interested enough to look for a biography on Warhol, and found Warhol by Blake Gopnik; then I saw it was almost 1,000 pages and realized I wasn’t that interested, so I added Andy Warhol: A Biography by Wayne Koestenbaum to my queue instead.
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