There’s a 5-foot-tall papier-mâché elephant on the fourth Floor of The Andy Warhol Museum that was painted by two Pop icons, though neither of them was Warhol. Originally stained pink, the elephant was a prop that Warhol purchased and donated for use in a costume exhibition in 1974 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was moved to Warhol’s studio afterward where, about a decade later, his protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat began tinkering with the sculpture, giving it white toenails, doodles on its ears, and a large shock of hair at the top of its trunk. But Warhol’s longtime business manager, Fred Hughes, decided it would be improved by handing it over to another frequent Warhol collaborator, Keith Haring. Hughes had it repainted white so that Haring could cover it in his iconic “action figures,” which remain today.
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