Perhaps one of the strangest facts about American artist Andy Warhol involves Warhol’s time capsules, archived at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. They contain 610 cardboard boxes, 40 filing cabinets and one large trunk in which Warhol stored materials of daily life.
Warhol hid photos, newspapers and magazines, letters and books in a box located next to his working table. At the end of each month, the box was sealed and the date added. The box contents include varied items including a mummified foot, Caroline Kennedy’s birthday cake, a 17th-century German book on wrestling and drawings of 1950s icons such as Jean Harlow’s dress or Clark Gable’s boots.
The collection as an archive is the most extensive collection of everyday objects in an artist’s life. In many ways, these bits and pieces are much like a large, organic and multidimensional diary. Only 91 of the 611 capsules have been opened, and 19 have been fully analyzed and recorded. The museum was recently awarded a grant to digitally catalogue the entire collection and three full-time archivists are spending three years going through all the remaining boxes.
Andy Warhol`s Collections
The original shopaholic, Warhol shopping daily and hoarded a collection of biscuit jars, Native American folk art, taxidermy specimens (including Cecil the Great Dane and an African lion), jewelery, half-used perfume bottles, autographed photographs of movie stars, World Fair souvenirs, cowboy boots, Art Deco furniture, dental molds and his trademark white wigs.
He had great difficulty ridding himself of objects. At the time of his death in 1987, only two rooms of his five-storey house in New York’s Upper East Side were habitable, the rest was filled with multiple items. Warhol believed that department stores are just another form of museums.
American Artist Links with the Stars
Andy Warhol once interviewed director Steven Spielberg in a hotel room with Mick Jagger’s ex-wife Bianca Jagger in the room. The bizarre interview includes Spielberg talking about swallowing a transistor and the ghosts that exist in the snowy television reception from the 1950s.
Warhol lived among celebrities and he created the Rolling Stone's emblem depicting the big tongue that first appeared on the cover of the Sticky Fingers album.
His celebrity status also proved dangerous. Valerie Solanas, an intellectual, possibly psychotic prefeminist, injured Warhol in 1968 when she shot him outside of his famous Factory studio. Solanas was the founder and sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men.
Andy Warhol Pop Art and Warhol Prints
Perhaps Warhol's best-known visual work is the painting of a can of Campbell's soup which was first exhibited in a 1964 show called The American Supermarket. The show was intended as a typical American small supermarket environment with the goods created by prominent 1960s pop artists.
Warhol’s soup can cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what is art.
Andy Warhol is an American artist whose influence continues because of the weird facts associated with his work and life. It was Warhol who coined the idea of everyone having 15 minutes of fame however, his celebrity status filled with facts that are stranger than fiction certainly extends his popularity.
