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)

Click on Sections, Interviews and Archive or type an enquiry in the box at the top of each page.

Dedicated to William S. Wilson

2024 - I started warholstars.org 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-manifested themselves recently in books about the artist.

For instance: The first exhibition of Warhol's famous 32 Campbell's Soup Cans took place not in New York but in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery (see July 9 - August 4, 1962). They were not silk-screens, they were hand-painted and they weren't painted at Warhol's famous"Factory" because the Factory didn't start until January 1964.

Other 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 Wood, Warren 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.")

The Factory wasn't an art factory where paintings were churned out in a mechanical fashion. 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 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, 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.

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I continued to do the site for two decades and I try to keep up with it now, health permitting. As most of you know I've had quite a battle with health issues over the years. I am kept alive by probably the greatest health system in the world, the NHS, without whom I am sure I would be dead. (I actually was dead for a few minutes and in a medically induced coma for two months).

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 below. 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?

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.)

Gary Comenas

Contact: garycom.now@gmail.com.

I am cited in the following:

Wikipedia citations

Other Citations