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February 2012
New book on Andy Warhol's films to be published in April
A new book on the films of Andy Warhol will be published by the University of California Press in April 2012 - The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol. The author, J.J. Murphy, is Professor of Film and Affiliate Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin.
Details on the Amazon page here.
Andy Warhol online: The Davis Museum collection of photographs by Andy Warhol
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College
(Photo: Soe Lin using a SONY HX9V)
Photographs by Andy Warhol owned by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College are now online. Subjects include Mark Sink, Jon Gould, Fred Hughes, Pat Ast, David McDermott, Ali McGraw and an assortment of unidentified men, women and children.
Go to: http://mobius.wellesley.edu/info.php?s=andy+warhol&type=exact&t=objects.
Laura Rubin copyright for sale
"Candy Darling Close" by Laura Rubin
Photographer Laura Rubin is selling the copyright to some of her images of Warhol's superstars. The negatives are currently held by The Warhol museum. Laura says "I will transfer the certified copyright to the new owner - 'Candy Darling Close' $4,050; 'Holly on Roof' $2,050; and 'Mario Montez' $3,050. Interested parties can contact me thru my site."
Laura's site is at: http://laurarubinphotography.com/.
"Holly on Roof" by Laura Rubin
"Mario Montez" by Laura Rubin
Andy Warhol in Hull and and Sheffield
The schedule for the Artists Rooms series in the U.K. for 2012 has been announced. "Andy Warhol Self-Portraits" will be at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield 7 April - 1 December 2012; and "Andy Warhol" will be at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull 2 June 2012 - December 2012.
The full schedule for the Artists Rooms can be found at:
http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/31082011-artists-rooms.
Max's Kansas City Alumni Reunion 2012
A Max's Kansas City reunion will take place at The Bowery Electric, with performances by Jayne County and others. Full list on their Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/events/355578337788099/.
MOCA refocuses on the '60s
"Refocus: Art of the 1960s" opened at MOCA Jacksonville on 28 January 2012 and continues until 8 April 2012. Artists include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Details at: http://www.mocajacksonville.org/current/60s.
Billy Name in Lid #13
Two faces of Lid # 13
L: Marisa Berenson by Gian Paolo Barbieri/R: Grace Jones by Kate Simon
Billy Name is featured in the current issue of Lid magazine - Lid #13 - which has an eleven page spread of Blake Boyd's photobooth shots of Billy in costume and make-up. Lid's editor, Dagon James, will also be publishing a series of books featuring Billy's archive of the silver Factory. Silk screen prints of Billy's photos from the '60s will also be shown at "The Warhol Effect" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the autumn 2012 (which will also include work by Deborah Kass and others).
Lid #13 is available at: http://lidmagazine.net/shop.html.
Interview with Mark Sink
Andy Warhol
(Photo: Mark Sink)
I have added to the site an interview with Mark Sink. Sink was the subject of a number of photographs by Andy Warhol (often with his pants down) and went on to work for Interview magazine, spending time in L.A., N.Y. and Colorado with Warhol and his associates. Mark was with Warhol during Warhol's Aspen snowmobile accident and was able to photograph it. Mark's take on what happened is considerably different than Warhol's fear, expressed in the diaries, that "Jon [Gould] was trying to kill me." (AWD477)
Andy Warhol
(Photo: Mark Sink)
Sink was particularly close to Warhol's business manager, Fred Hughes, and he recalls his friendship with Hughes during the interview. Mark's studio was used for part of the opening segment of Chuck Workman's film, Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol, and he still has the Self-Portrait acetate used in the silk screening process during the segment. He also has tapes of telephone conversations between himself and Warhol.
Coincidentally, his connection to Warhol goes back to before he actually met the artist. His great-aunt was Frances Breese Miller who lived in a modernist home called The Sand Box in Bridgehampton. The 1967 guest book for The Sand Box shows the signatures of Warhol, Rolando Peña and other Warhol associates. A press clipping from The Hamptons Voice dated 14 July 1967 is reproduced in the interview which shows that Warhol was filming a movie at the time.
The Sand Box guest book
The full interview can be read at: http://www.warholstars.org/marksink/marksink_andywarhol_1.html.
Mark's website is at: http://gallerysink.com.
The Velvet Underground are suing the Andy Warhol Foundation
(Updated 25 January 2012)
The Andy Warhol record covers catalogue raisonné
by Paul Marechal featuring Warhol's banana illustration
Paul Marechal (author of the Andy Warhol record covers cat. rais.): "Warhol designed the cover [of The Velvet Underground album] as an autonomous artwork. The proof lies in the very noticeable signature of its creator. Warhol completely disassociated the image from his proteges' musical content, which had nothing to do with a banana. After all, Warhol was known, not the band."
A complaint was filed 11 January 2011 in the federal court of New York by The Velvet Underground against the Andy Warhol Foundation over the Foundation's licensing of the banana image that Warhol designed for the front cover of the Velvets' first album. The lawsuit seeks a court declaration that the Warhol Foundation has no copyright rights in regard to the banana design and requests an award of the Foundation's profits from the image "with interest." It also seeks damages "trebled together with interest," and the reimbursement of full costs incurred by The Velvet Underground in bringing the lawsuit, including attorney fees.
The Foundation had been licensing the banana image for a considerable amount of time without the Velvet Underground demanding the Foundation's profits from such licensing deals in the past, so why now? According to the court complaint, the Velvets learned that the Foundation intended to license the image to Incase for a series of iPhone and iPad cases in an article in the New York Times and that spurred them into action. They contacted their lawyers.
If the Velvet Underground were to win their lawsuit in its entirety, however, Incase would be free to use the banana design without paying anything to the Foundation or the Velvets. The complaint specifically requests a declaratory judgment that the banana design is in the public domain. Presumably, if such a declaration were made, commercial companies such as Incase would be able to produce as much merchandise as they want featuring the banana design without having to ask permission of the Velvets or the Foundation and without having to pay either of them any sort of fee for the use of the image. If the Velvets have launched the lawsuit in order to protect their right to the image, it could actually have the opposite effect.
In one section of the complaint it asserts that the banana image was selected by Warhol from an element of an ad in the public domain, but in a footnote the complaint also appears to allege that the album design was the work of the art director of MGM records. Footnote #5 states "According to Paul Marechal, Andy Warhol: The Record Covers 1949–1987, Catalogue Raisonné... Andy Warhol designed more than fifty record covers starting in 1949, the earliest being amongst his earliest commissioned works, with most including a stylized Andy Warhol signature. The cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico album was, however, the work of and attributed to Acy R. Lehman, a noted graphics designer who as art director at MGM Records and RCA Records created award-winning album covers for many record albums, starting in 1964."
I have been unable to find a reference to Acy R. Lehman as the designer of the banana cover in the book cited which seems to claim otherwise in the section devoted to the Velvets' album. In that section Marechal asserts that "Warhol designed the cover as an autonomous artwork. The proof lies in the very noticeable signature of its creator. Warhol completely disassociated the image from his proteges' musical content, which had nothing to do with a banana. After all, Warhol was known, not the band." (Section no. 29)
Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale has previously referred to the image on the album cover as Warhol's design. He called it "Warhol's peelable banana" in his autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen, writing "We could not understand why Verve were not planning to release our album any time in the near future. They blamed the delay on problems with printing the sleeve, which featured Warhol's peelable banana." (p. 99)
Warhol discovered the Velvet Underground in December 1965 but had used bananas as (phallic) symbols prior to his involvement with the band in films like Harlot and Mario Banana 1 & 2. All three films featured Warhol's first superstar in drag, Mario Montez, slowly peeling and eating bananas. Shana Alexander mentioned Warhol's bananas in her comments about Harlot in the the January 22, 1965 issue of Life magazine:
Shana Alexander ("Report from Underground," Life magazine, 29 January, 1965 (Vol. 58, No. 4), p. 23)
"Though it was Warhol who urged me to attend the Harlot premiere that evening, the painter himself was too smart to waste the time. So after watching the star nibble his or her way through three or four bananas I left, feeling confident that the picture's message had reached me loud and clear. The joke was a droll one, but not very."
Jonas Mekas also filmed Warhol in December 1964 giving Warhol star, Baby Jane Holzer, a banana in his (Mekas') well-known film Award Presentation to Andy Warhol. Holzer is filmed peeling a banana slowly and eating it - the slowness of the peeling achieved by shooting the movie in slow motion. The first Velvet Underground album featured Warhol's banana graphic with the instructions, "Peel Slowly and See."
Warhol continued to use bananas in his films after discovering the Velvets. Ronnie Cutrone, who assisted Warhol at the Factory, recalled bananas being used as weapons in a Warhol film based on the Kennedy assassination (presumably the 1966 film Since.)
Ronnie Cutrone (Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, p. 345): "We loaded the camera, and we decided that each character would be played by two people. And I played [Lee Harvey] Oswald with Gerard [Malanga]. Gerard and I were Oswald. For weapons we had bananas. Andy was doing the big, long bananas then. So that fit in."
Warhol also produced banana prints which do not reference the Velvet Underground, a number of which have been sold by Christie's.
Billy Name:
"Andy had done a series of peeling bananas on white plexiglass and subsequently I recall when Andy decided to use the same image on the album cover 'The Velvet Underground and Nico.' The peeling bananas on white plexi had nothing to do with the album cover initially and not until we decided a similar image would be used for it." (BN240112)
Despite the fact that bananas were associated with Warhol prior to the Velvets' album and despite the fact that Warhol actually signed the image that was on the front cover of the album, the Velvets assert in the court papers that "the [banana] symbol has become so identified with The Velvet Underground and its members as a group... that members of the public, particularly those who listen to rock music, immediately recognize the Banana design as the symbol of The Velvet Underground."
Further details about the lawsuit can be found at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/11/velvet-underground-protect-banana-design?
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