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Possession Obsession
The Archive
that Got Away: Exploring Andy Warhol's Collections
By Graham Shearing
It's a rare collector who buys at the same time both rare
furniture and definitive specimens of the purest kitsch.
When Fred Hughes, Warhol’s executor, put the artist's
collection up for sale, he created funds for the Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts.
In Bruce Chatwin's 1988 novel, Utz, which explores the inscrutable mind of a collector of Meissen
porcelain, the writer observes that the act of collecting can often serve
as a cure for depression. The Emperor Rudolph II, who lived surrounded by
his bizarre and strangely beautiful collections in his castle in Prague,
is a case in point. Is this melancholic Hapsburg more interesting for the
state of his mind or the quality of his princely collections? Are both
elements inevitably linked?
It may seem strange that these esoteric matters should,
at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh,
surface in a discussion of the Prince of Pop Art. But Andy was a collector
too, and just like Rudolph, changed the way we look at collecting. On one
level he will surely be known for all time as the man who collected
hundreds of cookie jars, paying a few dollars for them in street markets in
Manhattan--jars which later
would sell at Sotheby's posthumous auction of his stuff for many thousand
of dollars. A selection of those jars will greet you at the entrance of
this exhibition, which assembles a telling fragment of the whole range of
Warhol's collecting obsessions.
Don't flatter yourself that the cookie
jars are all you need to know about this collector. John Smith, The
Warhol's archivist, has gathered together an overview of the entire
collection, some 300 items culled from the 10,000 lots (plus a few items
from the museum's groaning archive) sold at the legendary sale in New
York. American folk art, American furniture,
American photography, art deco, jewelry, Native American art, sculpture and
what are loosely described as "collectibles" make up the broad
categories.
Within each group Warhol is revealed as a discriminating
collector. In a catalog that accompanies the exhibition, specialists
enthuse over the range and quality. A sideboard, made in Philadelphia
by Joseph Barry about 1820, and a matching pair of knife cases, are
definitive models of their kind. A lacquer vase, circa 1925, by the French
maker Jean Dunand, typifies Art Deco. A somewhat unmanly collection of
jewelry (Van Cleef and Arpels, Boucheron and Tiffany), some from the
collections of Joan Crawford and Helena Rubinstein, reveal a developed
sense of style and a pronounced taste for fine diamonds. Nineteenth century
American folk art, which Warhol started to collect at an early stage in his
career, reveals a quirky sensibility: a carved and painted pine figure of
Mr. Punch, attributed to "Jersey Jim" Campbell,
and a painted pine shield anticipate the Pop Art movement.
These items were hoarded away in Warhol's town house.
"Show and tell" (that egotistical habit common to
many collectors) doesn't appear to have played a major role in the life of
Warhol. At one stage, probably under the influences of interior decorator
Peter Marino and the late Jed Johnson, his companion for a number of years
and a noted interior decorator, Warhol "did up" his house to
formal effect. Photographs survive of these immaculate, if cold, interiors.
But after Johnson and Warhol separated, the chaos of the incorrigible
collector took over. Was this a parallel to the Rudolphine depression? The
house became a warehouse. Few visitors were admitted.
The act of collecting was important to Warhol. It was
something to do. With his friend Stuart Pivar and others, he scoured the
street markets, the upscale dealerships and the auction rooms. Luckily the
age of the Internet auction had yet to arrive…one shudders to imagine its
effect on Andy. In Paris,
he began to collect Art Deco at a time when it was possible to buy cheaply.
Silver made by Jean Puiforcat, then undervalued, was avidly sought. On all
of his many travels he devoted time to antique hunting--time allocated by
his business manager, Fred Hughes, another collector.
In 1969 Andy Warhol was invited to curate a strange
exhibition. Raid the Icebox I
premiered at the Institute for the Arts at Rice
University, Houston,
where his friend Dominque de Menil was director. De Menil and her husband
had persuaded the director of the Museum
of Art at the Rhode Island
School of Art, Providence, to
allow Warhol to make a selection from the reserve collection in the
museum's basement. Warhol the artist-collector interfaced with the curator.
It was a radical move, and would have struck many as perverse. Warhol's
interest was not in "fine" art (in fact he is reported to have
despised it). Instead he displayed entire collections in chaotic arrangements, almost exactly as he had found them in the
basement. Shoes (a major subject
from his days as a commercial illustrator), were a minor feature of the
museum's collection, although it possessed a great quantity of them. Warhol
presented them all, even in the rickety case in which they were stored. The
museum curators supplied detailed labeling for each and every item. This
majestic egalitarianism (which breaks all the rules of museum practice) was
applied to other categories selected by Warhol…paintings, baskets,
ceramics, umbrellas, etcetera. The hierarchy of "stuff" was
abandoned. Andy had created an alternative museum.
It is tempting to look at Warhol's private collection in
the same way. The Sotheby's catalog lists everything in tidy categories,
and the neat sequence of distinct artifacts curated by John Smith at The
Warhol follows similar lines. It seems unlikely that Andy Warhol would have
done the same. Might one suggest that his early employment in Pittsburgh,
as a window dresser in Horne's department store, would have provided him
with fertile material for this exhibition's presentation?
It does no harm to remember that, although Warhol was
born poor, the son of eastern European immigrants, he became an astute
businessman, and, as the years passed, extremely rich, allowing him to
collect in the best shops the best possible quality material. Yet at the
same time, it's a rare collector who buys at the same time both rare
furniture and definitive specimens of the purest kitsch. Taste, for Warhol,
had an all-inclusive element. The
collection of his business manager Fred Hughes pursued similar aims (and
was sold last October at Sotheby's).
But Hughes could never afford to collect on the same scale as his
employer, notes archivist Smith.
On one other occasion in his lifetime Warhol revealed
his collecting interests. In 1977 an
exhibition pursuing similar aims, Folk
and Funk at the American Museum
of Folk Art, showed a small group of varied pieces of folksy Americana
that Warhol had acquired. Neatly displayed, the collection may have given
little idea of the lifestyle of the determined obsessive who had collected
them.
Collectors of folk art are often torn between the merits
of pristine condition and a well-used patination. Warhol liked the marks of
use and repair that more fastidious collectors reject. He saw his
collection as signifying material culture rather than fine art. This may
have led curators, particularly those who encountered him at Rhode
Island, to underestimate both his knowledge and
his intentions.
Inevitably, this exhibition provokes a discussion of the
psychological implications of the collecting phenomenon, for Warhol is an
interesting case study. Philippe
Jullian, in his witty book, The
Collectors (1967), hints at the foibles of collectors, and other
writers treat the subject more clinically. There are books by professional
psychologists who seek to pin down the subject more precisely. But in fact the best judges of collecting
are the collectors themselves; they know their obsession intimately and
they respond warmly to it in others. Even if driven to it by depression,
they make a happy, if competitive, crowd.
Artists traditionally make good collectors. Rubens’
collection was created on a princely scale. Warhol’s contemporary, Jasper
Johns has a superb collection. And Peter Blake, the English Pop artist,
best known in America
for his collaged Pop cover for the Beatles’ album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967), recently showed his own burgeoning collections in an exhibition at London’s
Morley College
(2001). Entitled A Cabinet of Curiosities, the show makes a direct connection
with historic collections of the past, even though filled with bizarre
artifacts picked up in London street
markets. The collection evidences popular culture and informs much of
Blake’s art. It is worth noting that it has its own
"archivist" rather than a "curator."
Only part of Warhol’s collection can be seen as directly
related to his art. The collection is wider than that and it takes sudden
and unexpected turns. Smith has not included in Possession Obsession Warhol’s collection of work by his
contemporaries, material also included in the 1988 Sotheby’s sale. Most
artists collect on those lines, a kind of up-market swap-shop, and Smith
hints that another exhibition dealing with that may materialize in the
future.
When Fred Hughes, as Warhol’s executor, made his decision
to put the collection up for sale, thus creating funds for the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, he probably thought he was satisfying the
requirements of Warhol’s will. With hindsight, and taking into account the
substantial funds raised by the sale of Warhol’s own art in subsequent
years, the decision might be thought questionable. The Time Capsules, that
vast collection of material boxed away by Warhol, are the archival key to
Warhol and are, in many ways, the gems of the Andy
Warhol Museum.
Archives, it has been said, authenticate institutions. Warhol’s collections--now dispersed into
countless museums and private holdings--might have been incalculably
valuable to that archive. But they
have gotten away. Still, at the
Warhol you can sense them, and more important, the remarkable artist who created
them. It's a rare collector who buys
at the same time both rare furniture and definitive specimens of the purest
kitsch.
Major support provided by PNC Advisors from the James F.
McCandless Charitable Trust.
Additional support has been provided by Mr. and Mrs. Milton Fine and
The Homer Laughlin China
company. Partial Funding for this
exhibition was provided by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state
agency funded by the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania and the
National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Special thanks to Celento Henn
Architecture + Design and Kendra Power Design & Communications, Inc.
for their very generous in-kind assistance.
Good Fridays
March 22, 7 p.m.
Allen Kurzweil lecture
Allen Kurzweil is a well-known contemporary novelist
whose works frequently revolve around the worlds of collecting, archives,
and history. He has written one of the lead essays for the catalogue being
published in conjunction with Possession
Obsession and his latest book was named on The New York Times “Notable Books of 2001” list.
March 29 and Saturday, March 30, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Pop Swap
Area pop culture memorabilia collectors and vendors will
set up in the museum’s entrance gallery to display and sell items from
Warhol’s era. Items include clothing, small furniture, books, movie star
collectibles, and other items associated with American pop culture,
creating a scene in the spirit of Possession
Obsession.
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