Andy Warhol News - April 2020
to December 2019 - February 2020
R.I.P. Peter Beard
The front cover of Taschen's large format monograph on Peter Beard (published on April 22, 2020)
April 21, 2020: Peter Beard, the photographer who brought the man-made destruction of African wildlife to the attention of the public in his book The End of the Game (1965), has died.
During the 1970s and '80s Beard was also part of New York's wild life - he was married to supermodel Cheryl Tiegs from 1982 to 1986 and is mentioned more than thirty times in Andy Warhol's Diaries. The diary entry for Sunday, January 22, 1978, reads:
Sam Beard was giving a fortieth birthday party for his brother Peter in his apartment on 92nd and Park. It was an exciting party. Jackie O. and Caroline were there. Caroline asked me what I thought of totalitarianism and I couldn't pronounce it so I tried to joke about it and she said "No. I'm serious." Mary Hemingway was there, and Jonas Mekas filmed her being a lion attacking Peter Beard...
Then we all went over to Studio 54, and they had an elephant cafe for Peter come down from the ceiling because Peter took all those great African elephant pictures. Arnold Schwarzenegger was there.
I left around 2:00 just as Halston and Bianca [Jagger] were coming in. The were both in elephant masks....
On October 14, 1986, Warhol refers to Beard and his "entourage" at the opening of Nell's nightclub - the club, hosted by "Nell" of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, which replaced the Mike Todd Room at the Palladium as New York's main V.I.P. hangout. Beard was also often mentioned in the pages of Interview magazine.
A short documentary on Peter Beard by Lars Bruun can be found on You Tube.
Beard suffered from dementia in his later years and went missing from his property in Montauk on March 31, 2020. His decomposing body was finally discovered on Sunday, April 19, 2020 by the East Hampton Town police after a local hunter reported finding an article of clothing that matched what Mr. Beard was wearing when he disappeared.
Taschen is publishing a large-format edition of their monograph about Peter Beard and his work on April 22, 2021.
The Nation's Nightmare
The Nation's Nightmare on You Tube
April 16, 2020: I've added a page on The Nation's Nightmare and updated the information about Warhol's graphics for the Radio program. The actual broadcast can be heard by clicking on the above graphic.
Xavier Hufkens launches full length documentaries online including Alice Neel and Robert Mapplethorpe
April 10, 2020: At last! A gallery is showing some decent stuff online at no cost to the viewer to compensate for the gallery being closed because of Covid-19. Thank you Xavier Hufkens!
Today (April 10th) the gallery, whose artist roster includes Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, George Condo, Williem de Kooning, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and others, is showing the Alice Neel documentary by her grandson Andrew Neel. It's a fascinating film about the artist whose subjects included Frank O'Hara, Red Grooms, Jackie Curtis, Rita Redd, Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. (Not everyone is happy in the Neel documentary - her son, Richard Neel rails against bohemian culture - "innocent people are hurt by it.") Includes appearances by Chuck Close, Robert Storr and Alex Katz.
Next up is the documentary about Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff, Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, which will be available from April 10 to April 24, 2020.
Also on view is Walter Swennen, The Crimson Tongue, until April 17, 2020 and upcoming is Tracey Emin, Where Do You Draw The Line? (2018) which will be available April 17th to May 1, 2020.
All of these films are excellent - subscribe to the gallery's newsletter for updates.
The "tour" of the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Modern is now online
April 7, 2021: The Tate Museum's tour of their Warhol exhibition is now online but can't be accessed through the main page for the exhibition. The trailer on that page is not the tour. You need to go to a separate page on their website.
Lasting 6 minutes and 59 seconds, the "tour" is more like an extended trailer of the show. It approaches Warhol biographically, but if you've ever read any of the biographies that are already out there, you'll probably already be familiar with most of the information.
The tour-givers, curators Gregor Muir and Fiontán Moran, manage to sound both simplistic and pedantic at the same time. Referring to the Sixty Last Suppers, for instance, Gregor notes, "It's that sense of us being processed through life and us being, in a way, no different from anyone or anything else." Is "being processed" through life, the same thing as living?
If you are searching for intellectual approaches to Warhol work's there is meatier stuff from the past. Taking a cursory glance at my bookshelves from where I'm seated, I recommend a 1989 publication edited by Gary Garrels - Number 3 of the Dia Art Foundation's "Discussions in Contemporary Culture," titled The Work of Andy Warhol. with essays by Trevor Fairbrother, Nan Rosenthal, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rainer Crone and Simon Watney. (See the sources section of this site for other possiblities.)
Marianne Faithfull has been hospitalised with COVID 19
April 6, 2021: Marianne Faithfull's manager, Francois Ravard, confirmed on April 4th that Faithfull was being treated for the virus in a London hospital.
End notes for new Warhol biography are now online
April 5, 2020: The publisher of the new Warhol biography, called Warhol: A Life as Art in the UK and just Warhol in the U.S. (not to be confused with David Bourdon's biography of the artist, which is also called Warhol) has put the endnotes for the book online. The notes were put online because of the size of the biography - nearly one thousand pages. They can be downloaded here. Although the notes are numbered on the website, they aren't numbered in the UK versions of the book. Presumably the U.S. version will be printed with the numbers.
Andy Warhol Tate exhibition goes online
April 3, 2020: Because the Tate Modern has had to close because of the CO-VID 19 virus, they will be doing on online tour of their current Andy Warhol exhibition led by Gregor Muir, the Director of Tate's Collection of International Art, and Fiontán Moran, Assistant Curator.
Unfortunately, there is no announcement about this on the Tate website, but it is mentioned in an article in Forbes magazine.
to December 2019 - February 2020
Sections and essays
Andy Warhol: From Nowhere to Up There
From Abstract Expressionism to Pop
Selected Andy Warhol Exhibitions
Jonas Mekas and the Film-makers' Cinematheque