Aspen Art Museum Andy Warhol: Lifetimes - COLORADO CONNECTION - Mark Sink

 Aspen Art Museum 

Andy Warhol: Lifetimes

Dec 3, 2021-Mar 27, 2022

ANDY IN ASPEN

COLORADO CONNECTION

Mark Sink's memories -

 

Video -  https://youtu.be/QkukCqYCsZg 

Days before Andy Warhol’s death in February 1987, his friend John Powers sent him a certificate from the Colorado Board of Stock Inspection certifying its approval of Warhol’s personally designed livestock brand: ‘A/W’, with a sideways ‘W’. It was a bittersweet final link in the chain connecting Warhol to Colorado, and specifically to Aspen: one that spanned 30 years, from his earliest days as an exhibiting artist through the height of his fame.

The first record of Warhol in Aspen is in December 1956. Still working in advertising, and just beginning to land gallery shows in Manhattan, he was enjoying early national exposure and would soon have a two-page spread in Life magazine. An exhibition of early blotted line drawings by his friend Patricia Moore was held at Aspen’s Four Seasons Club that winter before touring across the west. Exhibition notes uncovered by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik — whose voluminous archival research also unearthed the artist’s cattle brand — indicate that the show, which was almost certainly Warhol’s first outside New York, did very badly indeed and that the tour sold almost nothing. One of the few works that did sell, however, went to Elizabeth Paepcke, wife of Aspen city father Walter Paepcke, founder of the Aspen Skiing Company and the Aspen Institute, and originator of the utopian ‘Aspen Idea.’

In 1964, Phyllis Johnson, then resident in Aspen, used the city’s name — ‘a symbol of the freewheeling life’, she believed—for the title of a new publication: Aspen, a pioneering magazine in-a-box. In 1966, it was none other than Warhol who designed Aspen’s third issue. Dubbed ‘the Fab issue’, the contents included a flip book of Warhol’s film Kiss (1963); coverage of an LSD conference in Berkeley, California; a report on local off-grid living; and a 12-card selection of pop and op art paintings from the collection of Carbondale-based collectors John and Kimiko Powers. Among these were works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg and Warhol’s 200 Campbell Soup Cans (1962), alongside artist interviews and commentary by Powers himself.

Powers remained a champion of Warhol’s work in the decades that followed. His partner, Kimiko, was the subject of one of Warhol’s earliest and best-known society portraits, photo- graphed and first printed in June 1972. Works from their collection will be exhibited at the Powers Art Center in Carbondale this winter, concurrent with ‘Andy Warhol: Lifetimes’ at the Aspen Art Museum. Along with supporting his work, Powers also helped Warhol put together a local land purchase — 40 acres in Missouri Heights—acquired in 1972. (Jasper Johns owned plots adjoining Warhol’s, and Robert Rauschenberg had one too). Warhol told The Aspen Times, in September 1981, that he had come to Aspen ‘many times’ to see his land, but that he had no intention of building on it, as it was ‘too pretty.’

Warhol visited Aspen regularly in the first half of the 1980s, often to celebrate New Year’s Eve, each time diligently logging the names and his impressions of people he met in his diaries. The first trip of this period was in August 1981, when he visited the Powerses in Carbondale and went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which was hosting a solo exhibition of his work. Warhol’s retinue included his boyfriend Jon Gould, artist Christopher Makos, Bob Colacello, editor of Warhol’s publication Interview — who found time to personally lobby Carl Bergman, of Carl’s Pharmacy in Aspen, to start carrying the magazine — and the group also called in on two of Aspen’s boldest-faced names of the moment: Jack Nicholson and John Denver. That winter, Warhol returned with Gould, Makos and Denver- based photographer Mark Sink to celebrate New Year’s Eve, staying in Castle Creek Valley at the home of ‘Baby’ Jane Holzer, a former Warhol superstar. During the trip, Warhol made his first attempt to ski. ‘It was easy,’ he wrote in his diary of the Powder Pandas lesson with instructor Gary Bonn, ‘all the two-year-olds skiing with me, and if you start when you’re two you can really go with the waves and relax and become a good skier, but I was so tense. I fell three times.’ Warhol’s Aspen visits became increasingly celebrity-heavy: even in 1981, he noted that visiting the era-defining disco, Andre’s, ‘was like trying to get into Studio 54.’ Indeed, Dean Sobel, professor of art history and museum studies at Denver University, observes in One Hour Ahead: The Avant-Garde in Aspen 1945– 2004 (2004) that Warhol’s visits were ‘strangely symbolic’ of how the town had changed since the mid-1960s, when earnest young pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg came to Aspen for Powers-sponsored artist residencies. In a recent interview, Sobel added that, by the 1980s, Warhol ‘was still the grandfather of pop art and a really famous person, but he was really more of a People magazine celebrity’.

Though this performative aspect to Warhol’s time in Aspen can’t be denied, Gopnik argues that the artist’s Colorado trips can’t be simply reduced to this. Art, he notes, was always at the core of these visits — whether it was time spent with collectors like the Powerses, or the numerous photographs and Polaroids Warhol took of the local landscape and architecture, skiers and après-ski. In Aspen, as ever with Warhol, art, celebrity, life and performance are inseparable. ‘There’s the cliché that Warhol was his own greatest work of art,’ Gopnik said when I interviewed him recently. ‘And that cliché dates back to almost the day he began making Pop art. But it’s more than just a cliché, it’s also a central element in the most important conceptual art of the 1960s on, that you can eliminate the barriers between art and life’.

Andrew Travers is Arts and Culture editor at The Aspen Times.

Photos Mark Sink, use with permission by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc.

Aspen Art Museum  637 East Hyman Avenue  Aspen, Colorado 81611

https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/warhol/warholinaspen

The Andy Warhol Diaries - Netflix - Ryan Murphy

Almost exactly 35 years since the famed pop artist died, Netflix has released The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new documentary that scratches beneath the surface of the artist’s enigmatic life and work. Ryan Murphy’s six-part series is steered by the best-selling book of the same name, compiled by editor Pat Hackett via a series of transcribed calls with the artist over more than a decade. 

https://youtu.be/aeC76ncf66w

The New York Post - March 9, 2022

When Harriet Woodsom Gould died in 2016 in her nineties, she left behind a trove of family heirlooms dating back to the 1700s in her Amesbury, Mass., home. Yet in her attic, she had a secret veritable shrine to pop art.

There, she had stashed her late son Jon Gould’s belongings for decades since his death in 1986 from AIDS. He had vases painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, works by Keith Haring and dozens and dozens of gifts — photos, valentines, sketches, letters and more — from pop god Andy Warhol.

“My mother kept everything,” Jon’s twin brother, Jay Gould, told The Post. Jay knew his brother “had some type of relationship” with Warhol in the 1980s, though Jon always remained discreet about it. “We were very close, identical twins, but we never talked a lot about his sexuality,” Jay, now 68, explained. “It was a different time.”

Yet, he was still stunned to read the poetry and love notes Jon wrote to the older artist. “I didn’t realize the relationship was as deep as it was.”

Andy Warhol Snowmobiling with Jon Gould on new year’s day, January 1, 1983 in Aspen, Colorado.  

Gould and Warhol on New Year’s Day in Aspen, Colorado, in 1983. Photo Mark Sink

Actually, no one really knew. Gould was Warhol’s last romance, a young Paramount executive with floppy hair and preppy good looks who died tragically at 33. And though Warhol frequently mentioned him in his famed diaries, published posthumously in 1989, the artist’s dashed-off musings gave the impression that Jon was more of a crush than a genuine partner. (Plus, few could get past the diaries’ droll, often mean, takes on the rich and famous. Poor Liz Taylor was described as looking “like a — belly button”!)

The new six-part Netflix series, “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” however, aims to change that. Premiering Wednesday, it digs beneath the diaries’ surface and into Warhol’s later romantic relationships and their impact on Warhol’s life and work. In doing so, it paints a more vulnerable portrait of the artist, who often presented himself as a cold, asexual weirdo.

“He was a man full of desire, full of humanity, and that comes through in his queer longing and in his search for spiritual meaning,” the series director Andrew Rossi told The Post. 

‘They were really in love’

The New York Post 

By Raquel Laneri and Nicki Gostin

March 9, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/the-andy-warhol-diaries-reveals-artists-secret-love-life/

‘WHAT REALLY KILLED BASQUIAT?

 

‘WHAT REALLY KILLED BASQUIAT?

Annina Nosei is upset. A new play by Ishmael Reed, a leading Black literary figure in America, makes out the dealer who gave Jean-Michel Basquiat his first show in New York as a rapacious profiteer. It also has a lot of dark things to say about Basquiat’s relationship with his sometime collaborator, Andy Warhol.
The Slave Who Loved Caviar—structured as a CSI episode and promoted as satire—investigates wonders if what "really" killed Basquiat wasn't just a drug overdose but “foul play” at the hands of the corrupting New York art world.
Nosei, ever alert to depictions of the role she played in Basquiat’s life, attended a performance last December during the play’s three-week run at Theater for the New City, an East Village Institution. She walked out at intermission.
“I don’t hear very well,” the octogenarian dealer told me. “And I couldn’t understand what the actors were saying, so I left.” Crystal Field, who founded the Off-off Broadway theater in 1970, happens to be Nosei’s neighbor and sent her the script. Conceding that she read only “the parts that mentioned my name,” Nosei refuted them, point by point.

However, I discovered while watching a live-streamed performance—not the best way to experience a stage play, but Covid paranoia kept me home—Reed’s drubbing doesn’t come up till Act Two. Characters describe Nosei as a “slavedriver” who in 1981 locked the young Basquiat in her SoHo gallery’s basement (a “dungeon” in the play), and either paid for drugs to make him work harder or turned a blind eye to his use of them, while forcing sales of purportedly unfinished paintings to invasive collectors whom she brought downstairs.
All of this has been said so many times before that it’s practically folklore. Such is the power of myth, particularly in the age of social media, but Nosei would like the record corrected once and for all.
First, that “basement.” Though located below the gallery, it was a 2000 sq.ft-studio that had a skylight at the back and windows on the sidewalk that allowed passersby to see in. In other words, no dungeon. “I was never locked anywhere,” Basquiat told Marc Miller in a videotaped 1982 interview. “Christ! If I had been white, they would just say artist-in-residence.”
According to Nosei, the only collectors who went down there were Lenore and Herbert Schorr, early champions and friends of the artist who came at his invitation.
It was disappointing to hear Warhol demonised in the play as a vampiric artist who exploited other talents, and conceptual art as “the longest running con game in art history”—coals that burned out long ago. Reed, the author of nine other plays, as well as 30 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, consulted a number of published sources about both Warhol and Basquiat (he sent a bibliography). Perhaps owing to his characteristic, sometimes dazzling, mashup of historical and current newsmakers, including Richard Pryor, Jeffrey Epstein and Maurizio Cattelan, some of it came out equal parts fiction and fact.

For example, one character quotes Basquiat’s reference to his experience in Nosei’s basement as a “sick factory” that he hated. Only that’s what he said about a warehouse in Modena that the Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli rented for his use. Also, it was Mazzoli, not Nosei, who paid him thousands of dollars in cash that he subsequently spent partly on drugs, limos, and caviar. “I am against drugs,” Nosei said. “I don’t even like medicine.”

If so, Reed asks, why didn’t she intervene? (As if anyone could.) Nosei says Basquiat’s drug use was the reason that she kicked him out of the basement and rented him a nearby loft where he could do as he pleased without interference from her. “After that,” she insisted, “I didn’t have anything to do with him.” In the published version of the play, and subsequent productions, Reed promises to add lines indicating that, “Ms. Nosei disputes claims made by others.”
Reed says that he wrote the play to counter a “false narrative” about Basquiat foisted on Black people by the white art establishment, and by the artistic licence that Julian Schnabel took in his 1996 biographical film, Basquiat. He threads the plot with quotes from such archly conservative critics as Robert Hughes, who famously hated Basquiat’s work and was among the several white critics to disparage the artist as a wild savage, an uneducated street urchin, a monkey, and a primitive who merely “scribbled.”
To give such bigoted takedowns a different perspective is a legitimate and welcome pursuit. As one character in the play puts it, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.” All the same, to bring additional falsehoods to bear on the story doesn’t clarify anything, especially when it involves two of the most highly valued contemporary artists in the world.
Like Basquiat, fame found Reed early, with the publication of his first novel, Mumbo Jumbo. “I’d come to New York in 1962 with all of my belongings in a laundry bag,” he told me. “By 1967 I was a star. I left New York [for Berkeley, CA]. If I had remained, I would have perished from an overdose of affection. Maybe,” he added, “an older Black man could have given [Basquiat] direction. Instead, he admired degenerates like William Burroughs and anti-Semites like Kerouac. My play succeeded in challenging the nasty, anti-Basquiat attitude promoted by whites, a lot of it racist, and points to influences on Basquiat that [white critics] could not identify.
For my money, Reed’s play succeeds best at dramatising the construction of truth as dependent on whoever controls the narrative, which is always up for grabs. _Linda Yablonsky_ArtNewspaper   3.22.22