Warhol with Archie, Photograph by Jack Mitchell

August 6, 1928– Andy Warhol:

“I think everybody should be nice to everybody.”

I remember quite well, my parents shaking their heads and exclaiming: “That is not art… it is a painting of a soup can!” when I expressed my appreciation for the work of Andy Warhol. The point of the matter was, I really “got him” even at eight years old, or especially at eight years old. Warhol was the subject of much scorn & derision from the critics, the public and my parents, but he is probably the most important artist of the 20th century. Warhol:

“Campbell’s Soup were really upset about my paintings and they were going to do something about it, and then it went by so quickly I guess there really wasn’t anything they could do. But actually, when I lived in Pittsburgh, the Heinz factory was there, and I used to go visit the Heinz factory a lot. They used to give pickle pins. I should have done Heinz soup. I did the Heinz ketchup box instead.”

Andrew Warhola, was born to Polish parents in Pittsburgh. He grew up to be the “Pope Of Pop,” and at a young age he was fascinated with the commercialism of pop icons in advertising and in everyday life.

Warhol helped to shape pop culture and was able to portend society’s fascination with the media and a world where everything is accessible on your phone at the touch of the button, 24/7. Warhol famously claimed that each individual would have his or her “15 minutes of fame,” and he certainly wouldn’t be surprised by the popularity of YouTube, MP3s, Twitter, America’s Got Talent, The Facebook, The Duggars, The Trumps or The Kardashians.

A master of multiple creative forms of expression, Warhol was a painter, writer, music producer, avant-garde filmmaker, magazine creator, sculptor, and photographer. Focusing on diverse and contrasting interests all at once, he was fascinated with all forms of media, blurring of gender identities, and the contrast between a sense of celebrity and privacy.

He was a groundbreaker in the notion of self as product. He even set up his studio as “The Factory”, overseeing a staff that turned out prints, silkscreens and products based on his work. He was also a remarkable, transcendent artist and a commanding craftsman.

Warhol was an ardent, practicing Catholic of the Eastern Byzantine strain, going to mass every day. But, he was also a secular artist, a champion of gay culture and an advocate of all things hip. Warhol was openly and undeniably gay, amazing for his era. Yet, he never actually spoke openly about his gayness or his private life even though being a public figure was the essence of who he was.

He painted, filmed, and photographed the obscene, the homoerotic, the trashy and the lewd, but never really engaged in it. Warhol:

“After 25 you should look but never touch.”

“The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.”

Warhol always seemed to me to be other worldly, amazingly untainted by the druggies, leather boys, and drag queens that moved in his circle. He projected a kind of naiveté and humility. The Factory was a center for the NYC avant-garde eager to engage in debauchery, staying up all night, but Warhol was noted for leaving by 10 pm to go home and go to bed. His longtime boyfriend was the remarkable interior designer Jed Johnson who kept his own place.

“Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good night.”

In 1973, Johnson persuaded Warhol to get a dog. They chose a brown, short-haired dachshund puppy that they named Archie, but Warhol insisted: “his stage name is Amos”. Warhol was totally in love. He took Archie to The Factory and art openings. At restaurants, Archie was always on Warhol’s lap, eating bits of food that he was slipped, always carefully hidden under Warhol’s napkin. He even used to take Archie to press conferences as his “alter ego”, deflecting questions to the dachshund that he did not want to answer.

I would certainly place Warhol as an ultimate Gay Icon although there is still plenty of speculation about his sex life. His legendary friend, poet, editor, artist Charles Henri Ford wrote:

“Everything is sexual to Andy without the sex act actually taking place.”

Warhol documented the newly blossoming LGBTQ community of NYC in those pioneering 1970s, chronicling the cultural underground, including nights at the discos, parties at Fire Island and the tragic beginnings of the plague. Much of his most famous works like portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor; films such as Blow Job (1964), My Hustler (1965) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), were all inspired by gay underground culture, and they openly looked at the complexity of gay male desire. His films often had their premieres in gay porn theaters.

In NYC in the mid-1990s, I saw an enchanting exhibit of his commercial drawings from the early 1950s, mostly ladies shoes and flowers, produced for advertising. These works predated his huge fame, but the essence of what he was about to bring was already there. I have a lot of material by and about him, including the very readable Andy Warhol’s Diaries (1989) where he writes about some of his relationships with guys.

I saw him several times at Studio 54 in the summer of 1976. I didn’t dare approach him, even as I was fortified by Quaaludes, but I slipped him a mash note written on a cocktail napkin via a bartender. Around that time, Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily life: correspondence, newspapers, souvenirs, childhood objects, used plane tickets and food which was sealed in plain cardboard boxes dubbed “Time Capsules”. By the time of his death, the collection grew to include 600 individually dated capsules. The boxes are now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. I would like to think my note is included in a box marked September 1976.

“When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.”

Warhol has been portrayed on screen by Crispen Glover, Jared Harris, Guy Pearce, and most effetely, by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel‘s film Basquiat (1996). My friend Gus Van Sant was planning a version of Warhol’s life with River Phoenix in the lead role just before Phoenix’s untimely death in 1993.

Warhol unexpectedly expired after successful gall bladder surgery in 1987. Johnson died in the TWA flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island in 1996.  Neither of them left me anything in their estates, even though they were both, like me, world-class collectors of American Art Pottery. Still, Warhol remains one of my favorite people of all time.

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”