Warhol imagined the ultimate movie star
Andy Warhol’s ultimate movie star had the hairline of Greta Garbo, the eyes of Joan Crawford, the nose and cheeks of Marlene Dietrich and the lips of Sophia Loren. How do we know this? He showed us, in a composite celebrity visage he worked and reworked through sketches, photo montages, prints and paintings he made in 1962.
That’s the same year this shy movie fan from Pittsburgh, born Andrew Warhola, rose to international fame as an artist.
His celebrity composite series is viewable at TIFF Bell Lightbox, along with nearly 1,000 other artifacts, art pieces, films and videos, as part of the Andy Warhol: Stars of the Silver Screen exhibition running Friday-Jan. 24.
The show provides a revealing glimpse into the Hollywood obsessions of the man whose Pop Art of the 1960s and beyond “kick-started our current age of global consumerism, of celebrity and of social media,” says Geralyn Huxley, the film and video curator of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, who helped curate the exhibit and who attended a Wednesday press preview.
“Andy Warhol loved the stars throughout his life . . . an important part of his Pop style had its genesis in images of the stars.”
As a child and teen in the 1930s-40s, he kept a scrapbook of film and music stars, pasting into it celebrity photos he’d snipped out of movie magazines given to him by his mother.
Warhol and his brothers made weekly trips to see films playing in the three cinemas near their family home, and he’d avidly seek celebrity autographs; a photo from a legendary child star is signed, “To ‘Andrew Warhole, from Shirley Temple.’ ”
To create his composite celebrity series of ’62, Warhol carefully scissored and glued photo strips of favourite facial attributes of actresses Garbo, Crawford, Dietrich and Loren into one intense image.
He used it as a basis for other composite celebrity visions, including a bright watercolour painting that appears unfinished: the face lacks eyes and a nose.
Warhol took a similar handmade approach to his colourful takes on Marilyn Monroe, another of his celebrity fixations, whose face is throughout the exhibit — including in a large tapestry, rarely seen, owned by Toronto collectors Marla and Larry Wasser.
The exhibition also includes newspapers Warhol squirrelled away with headlines of Monroe’s sudden death in 1962.
Warhol’s art depicting Elizabeth Taylor, yet another star muse for him, also graces the exhibition.
Films featuring her and/or Monroe are the subject of Liz & Marilyn: Black and White in Colour, a sidebar retrospective at the Lightbox, running Nov. 7-Jan. 7.
Warhol’s own films get their own retro with Nothing Special: Andy Warhol’s Star System, running Friday-Jan. 24.
The artist made hundreds of movies between 1963 and 1968, snippets of which are in the exhibit.
These include the Screen Test series where subjects — among them Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono and The Velvet Underground’s Nico — would stare for three minutes into his unblinking Bolex camera.
(You can make your own Screen Test, as I did, via the exhibit’s fun Screen Test Machine. The result is emailed to you.)
“I did this because people usually just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like,” Warhol explained at the time.
He just wanted to gaze rapturously at celebrities, even as he was rapidly becoming one himself.
He hosted parties at his Factory studio hangout in New York (recreated in the exhibit) and rarely missed a chance to hobnob with the rich and famous.
Huxley cites another Warhol quotation with another motivation for his Screen Tests: “I just wanted to get real people to do the things that they want to do . . . and that would be the movie.”
Adds Huxley: “He really liked people and he really liked watching them and seeing what they would do. He was kind of a voyeur.”
A voyeur for certain, but Warhol was also the most loyal of fans, from the beginning to the end of his life.
A photo of Frank Sinatra was pasted into his childhood celebrity scrapbook.
After Warhol died in 1987, claimed by heart failure in his sleep following gallbladder surgery, a copy of a Sinatra biography was found by his hospital bedside. More details on the Warhol exhibit, and the accompanying TIFF film series Liz & Marilyn: Black and White in Colour and Nothing Special: Andy Warhol’s Star System, are available at tiff.net. phowell@thestar.ca
Trips to see films playing in the nearby three cinemas near their home was a weekly tradition for Warhol and his brothers