On some forgotten photos of Andy Warhol and his legacy as an art collector

In 1977 Aurelio Amendola is a 30-year-old photographer fond of portraying artists. He has already captured Marino Marini and Giorgio De Chirico (along with many others he will take picture of during his long career, from Alberto Burri to Antoni Tapies, from Roy Lichtenstein to Hermann Nitsch). Landed in New York at the end of the 70s, he can’t help but longing to capture Andy Warhol. It is then that a friend of his ( the Italian sculptor Nello Finotti, in town for an exhibition at Alexander Iolas) calls the Factory on his behalf. “It so happens that an Italian girl picked up the phone, and Finotti handed it over to me” tells Amendola to CFA. “Excuse-me but who are you to be expecting to photograph Warhol?” His reply was quite irreverent: “I publish on “Oggi” magazine. Moreover, I have portrayed De Chirico, I may as well take a picture of Andy Warhol!”. It followed a10-minute waiting. “Come around tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock, sharp”, said the girl back on the phone. Hence, it was thanks to two, albeit naive, magic words that convinced Warhol and indeed opened the Factory’s doors: “Oggi”, the Italian magazine, as much pop as Drella’s art; and “De Chirico”, the master so venerated by the father of Pop Art.

 

Warhol showed up extremely elegant, with a pair of black boots that impressed me to the extent that, almost 40 years later, I do still wear the same. I was struck by his calmness, as well as by his hairpiece. He was very kind and accommodating. He agreed upon half an hour, I stole him two. He did everything I asked him to. He didn’t speak, ever. But at each shoot he would glance at me with a smile of approval on his face.” And that meeting produced the only pictures of Andy Warhol posing in his personal office. There are many photographs of Warhol at the Factory, with that spaced out look he used to offer to photographers, as to state that his body was made of the same matter as their magazines. In Amendola’s pictures however, he looks like someone who is actually posing for a book. Warhol is acting, albeit an unfamiliar role if compared to the usual media role of ambiguous and unfathomable star.

 

Amendola went back to Warhol years later to take other pictures. This time it was the artist Sandro Chia (friends of both) to intermediate. “When I saw Warhol again I was shocked”, claims today the photographer. The new pictures turned out to be funereal, macabre at times. Something serious had indeed taken place. Few months earlier, the writer, actress and activist Valerie Solanas had shot at Warhol. As known, the bullets hit and damaged all the vital organs. The artist had barely survived, and this episode had wrecked his psyche. Amendola’s pictures witness his soul’s transformation. And they are the last pictures that portray Warhol just a few months before his death (22 February 1987).

 

All the images are now on show for the very first time: in Italy, after Marca in Catanzaro, they will be exhibited at Teatro Olimpico and at Galleria degli Antichi in Sabbioneta, from 12 November to 12 January. And it is not a coincidence that on 29 and 30 October they will also be displayed at Moretti Gallery in London. Their importance is equally related to what is not on the foreground. To the items belonging to Warhol, to his private collection. What about the stuffed penguin, the sculpture of a native American, or that oil painting from the end of 19thcentury that you glimpse in the snapshots? The answer came up just after Warhol’s death, with the discovery of a majestic collection: more than 10.000 objects arranged in various rooms over a 8.000m2 surface. Apparently Amendola’s photos are the only evidence picturing Warhol next to some of the pieces of his eclectic collection, never shown when the artist was alive. Today the artist’s collection doesn’t exist any longer, it was dismembered on 3 May 1988, when the last lot of a 30 million$ sale went under the hammer at Sotheby’s. The catalogues of that auction are still nowadays fetish items for collectors, exactly as the pieces they describe.

 

Amendola’s pictures are thus a way to remember Warhol as an unusual collector, too. The artist has indeed been defined as one of the most compulsive and ecumenical collectors of the 20th century. Fourteen years after the collection’s dismantle, in 2002, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh dedicated a show to the most significant pieces (“Obsession/Possession: Object from Andy Warhol personal collection). John W. Smith, curator of the archives and of the show, noticed how, unlike the majority of collectors, who tend to be interested in only a few specific areas of relevance, Warhol had multiple passions, and did not only aim at acquiring new pieces, but also at pinpointing new fields of collecting.

 

While describing the unforgettable Sotheby’s auction, John W. Smith asserted: “From furniture by the important early 19th-century cabinetmaker Joseph Barry to unopened boxes of cookie jars from the 1940s, Warhol’s possession required the expertise of every one of Sotheby’s specialist departments. The final inventory filled a six-volume catalogue that soon became as collectible as the objects they described”.

 

Amongst the most consistent sections of the collection, there were to be found repertoires of Art Deco object, American Indian Art, Folk art, and American Classical and Federal furniture. However, as we are dealing with an artist, what matters when tackling this topic doesn’t only concern his aesthetic tastes, but also the relationship between Wahrol’s art and his activity as a collector. In this regards, Smith’s words are indeed enlightening: “For Andy Warhol, collecting was neither a hobby nor, as some critics have suggested, a symptom of psychological dysfunction. Collecting itself is a defining characteristic that runs through all Warhol’s art. In the Archives of Warhol museum there are over six hundred cardboard boxes in which Warhol saved what seems to be every piece of paper that ever passed through his life. Additionally, there are more than four thousand audiotapes made by Warhol that record casual conversations between him and his friends. There are the thousand of photographs and hours of videotape he used to visually collect and document every fact of life”.

 

So as his art has destroyed (or confused) the boundaries between the high and the low, likewise his collection was prone to absorb great masterpieces as well as the stuffed penguin you can spot in Aurelio Amendola’s picture. “His collections” said Smith “forces us to think about the world of objects in new ways… and invite us to re-examine the cultural values and hierarchies we’ve been taught, freeing us to re-organize the world and its objects according to our individual tastes and desire”. That of Warhol was perhaps the only collection which had the same aims as his art. And possibly Warhol wouldn’t mind too much that his collection had been entirely disassembled. The same Warhol used to claim: “I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece. I don’t even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more.”

November 25, 2020