WARHOL-MANIA
The patron saint of contemporary art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) remains as relevant as ever. His work is traveling the country, and his influence looms far and wide.
GONE WEST
ANDY WARHOL, one of the most iconic artists of the twentieth century, needs little introduction. His vivid screen prints of consumer products and celebrities have become so omnipresent and his style so influential that his name and philosophy might as well be shorthand for the entire Pop Art movement.
What is unknown to many, however, was Warhol’s intense fascination with the American West, its history, and the larger than-life folk heroes who pioneered and inhabited it. The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum will host Warhol and the West from January 31 through May 10, 2020. The exhibit contains the artist’s Cowboys & Indians portfolio, one of his last major projects before his death in 1987, with portraits that include iconic Western
figures Geronimo, John Wayne, and Annie Oakley.
According to the exhibition’s curator, Michael Grauer, visitors can explore “thirty-three artworks by Warhol . . . and more than 140 items in the exhibit,” including related personal items and pieces from Warhol’s own collection of Western art. —LUCAS DUNN
ON TOUR | Warhol Exhibitions
WARHOL AND THE WEST | Through December 31, 2019
Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, Georgia
WARHOL AND THE WEST | January 31–May 10, 2020
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
THE CHELSEA GIRLS EXPLODED | Through March 22, 2020
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
WARHOL AND THE AMIGA | Ongoing
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
ANDY WARHOL: REVELATION | Through February 16, 2020
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
ANDY WARHOL—FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN | Through January 26, 2020
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
PHOTO REVOLUTION: ANDY WARHOL TO CINDY SHERMAN | Through February 16, 2020
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
ANDY WARHOL: SHADOWS | Through 2020
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York
POP POWER FROM WARHOL TO KOONS | Through March 8, 2020
Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
ANDY WARHOL: REVELATION | April 3–August 21, 2020
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
POP POWER FROM WARHOL TO KOONS | June 6–September 13, 2020
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
THE MAN FROM OKLAHOMA
Harold Stevenson was on the Pop Art periphery
In 1963 the Guggenheim refused to show what would later become one of its most popular acquired artworks. The New Adam (1962), a sprawling male nude, is painted across nine linen panels making up a nearly forty-foot-long work. This intimate and controversial piece by artist Harold Stevenson was considered for an early Pop Art exhibition with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, but was rejected for fear of being too distracting from the rest of the show. It’s moments like these that pushed Stevenson’s work to the periphery of Pop Art’s rise, but scholar and fellow Oklahoman Dr. Dian Jordan is working to give the late Stevenson a push into the spotlight.
Stevenson, a University of Oklahoma art school dropout, moved to New York in 1947, the same year Andy Warhol did. Jordan says they became fast friends, and Stevenson even influenced Warhol’s work. In 1964, Warhol produced a film about Stevenson, titled Harold. Jordan says Stevenson leaned into his roots upon arriving in the city, and became known as “the man from Oklahoma,” as he broke into the art scene.
Jordan has located paintings of his that landed in the homes of McCurtain County residents and other locals for an upcoming exhibition in his hometown of Idabel. In addition to the portraits Stevenson painted of his neighbors, the Smithsonian and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art will be lending to the show Stevenson works they’ve acquired—important pieces that Jordan says speak to the artist’s legacy. “[Stevenson’s] story is incredible,” Jordan says. “I want the locals to know they have something, that someone they know is part of the national treasures of art.” The exhibition is set to open March 10, 2020, at the Museum of the Red River. —KELLY ROGERS
MEMOIR
Factory Friends
From fifteen minutes to fifteen months, Andy Warhol finally received his due in the museum world. The most comprehensive Warhol art retrospective ever assembled, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 2019 and then moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 2019. Donna De Salvo, former chief curator at the Whitney and curator of From A to B and Back Again, later told me, “I’m going to repeat the show in Chicago with a team of curators, but the core will be the same. Our hardworking teams will re-create the Warhol exhibit a third time at the Art Institute of Chicago [through January 2020].”
For me, the latest hurrah began on August 9, 2018, when the Whitney staged a big birthday party for Andy’s nintieth (his actual birthday is August 6, 1945, the same date the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima). Claire Henry, assistant curator at the Whitney who is writing the catalogue raisonné of Andy Warhol’s films, invited me. We were working together for some time, discussing the making of Warhol’s 1965 film, The Bed, which I had written.
At the party, De Salvo introduced me to a reporter from the New Yorker who was writing a piece for Talk of the Town. Suddenly, a few weeks later, I had my own fifteen minutes of fame in the legendary magazine: “Upstairs, De Salvo encountered the playwright Robert Heide (seersucker suit, Campbells soup-can T-shirt, cane) and his partner, John Gilman (Interview cover shirt).”
My script for Andy and Edie Sedgwick entitled The Death of Lupe Velez (Lupe, it was ultimately called) was shot in color and has become one of Warhol’s most popular films. As for The Bed, after its premiere as a split-screen black-and-white collaboration between me and Andy at Jonas Mekas’ Film-Makers’ Cinemateque, the film went into one of Andy’s vaults and was only recently unearthed for purposes of study, scanning, and digitization by the Museum of Modern Art, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Whitney.
My collection of plays, Robert Heide 25 Plays (Fast Books, 2017), contains the play version of The Bed and the film script of The Death of Lupe Velez as well as a new play, I Shop: Andy Warhol about Andy’s well-known mania for collecting Americana.
The preview party at the Whitney on November 6, 2018, was also a flurry of press and famous Factory superstar Warholites, including Bibbe Hansen (daughter of Pop artist Al Hansen), Mary Woronov, Penelope Palmer (youngest of the Screen Test stars and daughter of Vogue cover model Ivy Nicholson), Interview editor and Vanity Fair writer Bob Colacello, Andy’s nephew artist James Warhola, and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik, whose book on Warhol will be published in 2020.
Not at the preview, of course, were those who have passed away, many of whom were my friends and are greatly missed, including Ultra Violet, Billy Name, Taylor Mead, Lou Reed, and Ingrid Superstar. The first fifty years of the twentieth century are given to Pablo Picasso, and the second half and possibly this ongoing century belong to Andy Warhol. —ROBERT HEIDE