San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Guide Book
An eyeful of Andy Warhol at Stanford.
San Francisco philanthropist Denise Hale has hosted countless dinner parties over the years. But there’s one in particular, held in 1981 at the nowshuttered L’Etoile restaurant, from which she has a special memento: A photograph of her and the late Eleanor de Guigné flanking Andy Warhol.
The artist scrawled on the bottom of the black-and-white picture: “To Denise Love Andy.” Although the photo was taken with Warhol’s camera, the person behind the lens for that shot was Bob Colacello, former editor of Interview, the magazine that Warhol co-founded.
Warhol himself did, however, snap plenty of pictures that evening. And from Sept. 29 through Jan. 6, they will be on view at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center as part of an exhibition that includes 3,600 of his contact sheets, or roughly 130,000 exposures. “Contact Warhol: Photography Without End” encompasses his entire blackand-white photographic works between 1976 and his death in 1987.
Since then, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established posthumously, has gradually sold or donated its collection: Sales from the grant-making organization’s inventory have boosted its endowment; institutions worldwide — among them, university museums like the Cantor — have been gifted pieces.
Richard Meyer and Peggy Phelan curated the show, while Amy DiPasquale completed the task of digitizing, cataloging and archiving. According to the museum, 87 percent of the images have never been in the public domain or published. Soon, the contact sheets will be available through Stanford Libraries’ searchable online database.
With the opening of the exhibition approaching, Hale reminisced about her relationship with Warhol, whom she met through Colacello: “I really liked Andy because he was different,” she says. “I meet a lot of people and I’m easily bored. So I like people who are interesting, different. He didn’t
talk a lot, but I did not mind.
“Every time my husband (Prentis) and I were in New York, if we had time, we would go to the Factory for lunch,” she continued, referring to Warhol’s famed studio and hangout for creative types. “It was always fun because he was surrounded by the most wonderful characters.”
Apparently, Warhol was keen to stay in Hale’s good graces. In 2007, for the Modern Ball, event designer Stanlee Gatti invoked a Warhol theme for the SFMOMA’s gala fundraiser — right down to the custom jacket he wore. Stitched on the back was a quote by Warhol: “The only woman I fear in America is Denise Hale.”
“It seemed apropos and fun to include the quote, which I had read in ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ when it was released in 1989,” Gatti explains. “Denise was a friend so naturally it stuck with me.”
Gatti adds that “her loyalty runs deep,” but if you get on her bad side, it can be a lonely place. “Denise has access to people of power and fame, and her dinners are legendary. Access to celebrity and to relevant people was important to Andy, so I believe that is why he acknowledged his fear of her. He always wanted the access that only Denise could provide.”
Also on Warhol’s wish list? To have Hale sit for him. “Andy wanted to do my portrait,” she says. “He was dying to do my portrait. I really wanted to do it, but Prentis said no.”
When it came to Warhol’s work, she and her husband differed in their opinions. “He said, ‘No, this is not art,’ ” she recalls, noting that he was a collector of Impressionist paintings. “I regret that I didn’t go behind his back — since I could afford it — and just put it in storage. Then Andy and I would have been happy.”