Andy Warhol’s legacy is more than million-dollar price tags and silk screens and famous one-liners; it is more than his silver-plated Factory or the 1960s or even Pop Art as a movement. Warhol, if you think about it, was an endlessly persistent and utterly driven individual who, early on, realized the power of packaging—which is to say, the way things looked—as well as the way things were sold to us. He had a preternatural understanding of the American fixation on fame, and how easily society was (and would be) influenced. But is it possible to create a new interpretation of arguably one of the most influential people and assiduously well-covered subjects of the 20th century? The Andy Warhol Museum thinks so—it partnered with Cadillac on a collaborative traveling exhibition that kicked off Monday night at Cadillac House in downtown Manhattan, where it will remain until December 26 before traveling to Los Angeles on January 13 and Miami on February 3.
The exhibition, “Letters to Andy Warhol,” centers around five different interpretations of rarely seen letters from the Warhol archive. Sean Lennon, Warhol’s godson, took a letter from Mick Jagger and wrote a song to accompany an art creation–driven virtual reality experience. (Lennon also, in a written component to his contribution, recalls receiving a taxidermied version of Warhol’s tabby cat for Christmas.) Brian Atwood and J.J. Martin took a rejection letter from the Museum of Modern Art (the museum wasn’t interested in Warhol’s shoe illustrations, citing lack of space) and made a 100-foot-tall illustrated children’s book about acceptance called Bobby’s Brilliant Heels. Derek Blasberg took Polaroid portraits of his own famous friends, citing an ego-soothing note to the famously thin-skinned artist from Yves Saint Laurent. Chiara Clemente shot a short film, Screen Stories, in the manner of Warhol’s Screen Tests, in which she interviewed Sienna Miller, David LaChapelle, Aimee Mullins, Nick Rhodes, Zac Posen, and her father, Francesco Clemente. “It’s part of this idea that everyone starts somewhere,” said Clemente. Posen, for his part, reminisced at the party about growing up with a green Mao painting in his childhood home on Spring Street. (His father, also an artist, had traded Warhol for it.) “I was always terrified of the big green man,” the designer said.
Screen Stories and the Lennon-tracked VR experience first premiered last weekend aboard Summit at Sea, an annual cruise ship turned conference populated by socially aware millennials. Attendees there perused the letters, took pigment-saturated Warhol-esque selfies in the photo booth, and tried their hand at creating art in three dimensions, courtesy of VR. While on board, Clemente introduced the project with Warhol Museum curator José Carlos Diaz at a screening, where they discussed Warhol’s initial rejections and early successes, his obsession with Truman Capote and assorted other famous figures, his perseverance, and his uncanny ability to capture the inner lives of his subjects. “Andy Warhol was a first-generation American born to Slovakian immigrants,” Diaz said. “People forget that. His is a really American story.” And it’s a story that’s especially worth considering now.
“Letters to Andy Warhol” will be on view at Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street, New York City, 8:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. weekdays and 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. weekends, through December 26.