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Andy Warhol's Art, Films and Superstars by Gary Comenas

Dedicated to William S. Wilson

Gary Comenas by Andy Warhol

Photograph taken by Andy Warhol of site author Gary Comenas (with drink), James Breese (blonde) and James Curley at an Interview magazine party, the Ritz, NYC, December 1980 (Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. to Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University) (Contact sheet no. 2014.41.452) (Gary Comenas can be contacted at garycom.now@gmail.com - Scroll down for a brief explanation of the website.)

Gary Comenas' essays and articles on Andy Warhol are cited in the following books (scroll down for site history):

Jon Sauvage book that sites Gary Comenas
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Wikipedia citations

Other Citations

2025 - If anyone had told me that I would still be doing this website more than ten years after coming out of a medically-induced coma I wouldn't have believed them. I should have died ten years ago. In fact, I did. I was clinically dead for a few minutes but was resusitated - not unlike Warhol's situation after being shot by Valerie Solanas. I wasn't shot, I had suffered a series of heart attacks while taking a break from writing an obituary on Ronnie Cutrone. (The New York Times had published their obituary on Cutrone (Ronnie Cutrone, A Warhol Assistant, Dies at 65) and they mentioned my website so I thought I would do a warholstars obituary.

I never finished it. I woke up two months later in hospital - I think I had twelve heart attacks in total and a cardiac arrest. While in hospital I caught sepsis and pneumonia. (I already had HIV, COPD, Osteoporosis and Hepatitis C and had had a stroke years earlier.)

The first memory I have after "waking up" from the coma was a cardiologist telling me that he was sorry but had to tell me that my prognosis was "not good." His words went in and out of my brain. I just assumed I would recover and was already looking forward to returning to the gay scene on Old Compton Street.

There were numerous hosptial visits after that and operations - I had an ICD implanted in my chest that communicates to a hospital through a box in my front room. The ICD contains a pacemaker and a defibrillator with an alarm, so that if I have another heart attack or cardiac arrest, it will zap me back into life. I can remember trying to walk outside with a cane as part of physio and freaking out whenever a car alarm would go off, thinking it was my device. (When I finally did hear the ICD alarm, it was so quiet that it would have been impossible to hear it outside.)

Cardiac stents were tried and failed - no reflow. I'm on nineteen pills a day which causes it's own problems. I had to have a kidney stent implanted, then removed and the kidney problem wasn't picked up until my fifth ambulance to the hospital and the condition had become "life threatening." (I cannot begin to describe the pain I was in during that period.) And still, I'd get enquiries about the site, questions on Andy Warhol for other people's projects, and suggestions of changes and additions. With a book, it is published and that's it. A website is forever - like a chronic disease.

I digress - the memories are piling up. I never returned to the gay scene on Old Compton Street which largely disappeared over the years anyway (hello to everyone who used to hang out at Old Compton Cafe) but I did return to this website. Every day that I wake up I am grateful for the care I receive by the NHS and although even something as sedentary as writing can sometimes be a difficulty, it is probably one of the things that helps me stay alive. I may not be able to stand for long periods of time but I can sit and write and rest, and sit and write and rest...

I started warholstars.org years before the coma - over twenty years ago - soon after the web began - in an effort to make sense of the plethora of contradictory information about Andy Warhol at the time. Some of those original inaccuracies have re-appeared recently in books about the artist. For instance, his original Campbell's Soup Can paintings are still occasionally referred to as silkscreens even though they were hand-painted. And not at Andy Warhol's famous "Factory" because the Factory didn't start until January 1964.

Although Warhol would forever be linked to New York, the exhibition of his most famous Campbell's Soup Can paintings first took place in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery (see July 9 - August 4, 1962). (They are currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

Other Andy Warhol paintings that were not painted at the Factory include the Advertisement paintings, Before and After paintings, Comic strip paintings, Newspaper advertisement paintings (including Icebox), Consumer product paintings (such as Typewriter and Telephone), Coca Cola paintings, Dance Diagram paintings, Dollar Bill paintings, Trading stamps and postage stamp paintings, Do It Yourself paintings, News headline paintings, Label paintings (such as shipping and coffee labels), car paintings, Teen Stars (including Natalie WoodWarren Beatty and Tab Hunter), Troy Donahue, Marilyn Monroe, Early Elvis paintings, Robert Rauschenberg portraits, early Elizabeth Taylor paintings, optical paintings, early suicide paintings. (See "The building in which the Soup Cans were created is being sold.")

Sometimes The Factory is characterized as an art factory where paintings were churned out in a mechanical fashion. That is so wrong. Andy Warhol had only one paid art assistant, Gerard Malanga, during the sixties, although Billy Name (the only person who actually lived at the the Factory) sometimes helped. Warhol had considerably less art assistants than classical artists like Michelangelo or the artists of today - such as Damien Hirst. (I corresponded often with Billy - he was very encouraging when the site first went up and I was able to get information from him that hadn't appeared before.)

Other inaccuracies include the continuing reference to all of Andy Warhol's paintings as "silk-screens." That would make them prints. Andy Warhol used the silk-screening process in his paintings but there was also hand-painting involved. You can see the brush strokes in his "Death and Disaster" paintings, for instance, when you view the originals.

In regard to his "superstars," Andy Warhol is sometimes accused of taking advantage of Edie Sedgwick or getting her hooked on drugs. But she was already taking drugs by the time she arrived at the Factory. Her Warhol career lasted less than two years. It was her decision to leave the Factory, not Warhol's. She never managed to achieve the same level of fame on her own that she had achieved with Warhol. She did, however, appear in a fascinating non-Warhol film Ciao! Manhattan before she died.

It's sometimes reported that Edie Sedgwick died of a heroin overdose. That is incorrect. It was an accidental overdose of pills - see Edie, A Mystery Solved.

It should also be noted that during most of the sixties, Andy Warhol made less money than he had made as a commercial artist. When his paintings were later sold at auction for large amounts, the owners of the paintings got the money, not him.

* * * * *

Warholstars has been a labour of love for me. I have never made money from this site. My reward has been the acknowledgements I have received in more than fifty books, the odd documentary and hosting a panel discussion as part of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery over ten years ago with Holly Woodlawn, Mary Woronov and Bibbe Hansen. (R.I.P. Holly. Love to Mary and Bibbe.)

Some of the publications which have cited my essays on Andy Warhol and Abstract Expressionism appear above. Others are on the citations page. Wikipedia also quotes extensively from my site and those credits can be found by typing my name or website name into the Wiki search engine.

I think I can safely say that after studying Warhol for twenty years and being in touch with so many Warhol scholars, his surviving colleagues and family members, I probably have a better sense of the artist and his world than most people writing about him. And yes, I did meet him a few times in New York in the early 1980s - but didn't everybody? He was a gay man. He went to the clubs that other gay men went to.

If you really want to know about Andy Warhol and his work, the extensive Catalogue Raisonné is essential - the Warhol Foundation has produced one of the best artist Catalogue Raisonnés that I have come across in regard to any artist.

Gary Comenas (London, England)

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