Photo: Andy Warhol, Sylvester Stallone, 1980. Photograph: Polaroid Polacolor Type 108 print.
Picture it: New York City, 1966. Photographers Nat Finkelstein and Larry Fink take Andy Warhol and his entourage down to the Lower East Side and take a few shots on the street. Lo and behold the camera drives kids crazy. Everyone wants to get in the picture, and it makes Warhol feel some type of way. He asks Finkelstein what’s it all about. “They just want to be famous for fifteen minutes,” Nat Finkelstein says.
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Fifty years later, Warhol is long gone—but his legacy is everywhere, continuously referencing itself, driven by the passion of culture for the comforting familiarity of fame. More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Warhol’s Prints and Photographs now on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, through July 31, 2016. The exhibition features 35 works from the Museum’s collection, including new acquisitions that speak to the theme of the show: Sunset (1972), Joseph Beuys (1980/1983), Alexander the Great (1982), Brooklyn Bridge (1983), and Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull from the series Cowboys and Indians (1986).
Andy Warhol, Sitting Bull, 1986. Color screenprint. Photo: Peter Jacobs.
After he was shot, Warhol lead a far more insulated life, and the days of hitting the streets of the hood for a social experiment with cameras had gone by way of the past. Warhol’s work became directed toward the clientele he served, whether in the creation of portraits or series drawn from popular iconography. Warhol had a taste for the known, yet was looking to exalt his subjects, to make symbols of status yet never remove their folksy charm.
More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Warhol’s Prints and Photographs also features Warhol’s totems of American life: Vegetarian Vegetable from Campbell’s Soup II (1969) and Electric Chairs (1971). Warhol comfortably captured the strange banality of an increasingly mechanized life, one that used screenprints to recreate the many ways it occurred in our world. The warm and friendly Campbell’s can stands in marked contrast to the electric chair, which used as its source a 1953 press image showing the chamber at Sing Sing prison, New York, where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted as spies, were executed. This work was part of the Death and Disasters, which he had begun in the early 1960s and revisited throughout his life.
Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, 1980/83. Color screenprint.
Also included in the show are selected Polaroids and black-and-white photographs 1980s icons including Pia Zadora, Sylvester Stallone, Bob Colacello, Caroline, Princess of Monaco, and Mariel Hemingway, among others. Warhol firmly believed that “repetition adds up to reputation.” He would take over a hundred Polaroids of his subject before selecting the final image to transfer onto canvas or paper. Taken as a whole More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame gives us a broad look at Warhol’s obsession with fame, and the way in which it imbues its subjects with a sense of the eternal, long after we stop speaking their name.
All artworks: Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
