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William John Kennedy

The Warhol: Museum Edition

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The Warhol Museum

The five photographs of Andy Warhol (1928-1987) selected for this body of work were created by American photographer William John Kennedy (1930-) in the year of 1964. The negatives remained in storage for nearly half a century.

This Limited Edition portfolio, signed in the colophon by William John Kennedy, is comprised of four hand-printed gelatin silver photographs and one chromogenic print. It is assembled in a custom designed hand-made archival aluminum box, accompanied by 6 smaller archival aluminum boxes that include a Foreword, Introduction, and 5 Essays. The portfolio is produced by KIWI Arts Group in a 22” x 28” size exclusively created for The Andy Warhol Museum, and is limited to an edition of 50 with 5 artist proofs.

Homage to Warhol's Marilyn, 1964
Homage to Warhol's Marilyn, 1964
East 47th Street Factory, New York City
Silver Gelatin Print
Homage To Warhol's Birmingham Race Riot, 1964
Homage To Warhol's Birmingham Race Riot, 1964
East 47th Street Factory, New York City
Silver Gelatin Print
Homage to Warhol's Marilyn, 1964
This portrait by William John Kennedy was shot in early 1964 on his very first photo session with Andy Warhol at the Factory on East 47th Street. Kennedy recalls, “I was looking for the best possible place to photograph Andy and discovered the natural light streaming through the open fire exit door. Among the clutter was a thick roll of large plastic sheets leaning nearby, I asked about them.” Warhol replied, “These are the acetates used in my silkscreens.” Kennedy continues, “Andy stood in the doorway of the fire escape as he peeled off the first one from the roll and held it before him with the light flooding through the image—it was Marilyn Monroe. As Andy peered through, I immediately captured the moment.” As Kennedy and Warhol spoke about the late star, Kennedy came to feel that Marilyn personified for Warhol the dual nature of celebrity, embracing both glamour and tragedy. The resulting photograph is an aesthetically engaging and complex visual composition in which Kennedy physically integrates the artist with his work. The image is also a thought-provoking and revealing portrait of the artist’s conflicted and brilliant personality—one which Warhol carefully protected from the public eye throughout his lifetime by developing a deliberate public persona of studied detachment and aloofness. In this image, is Warhol hiding behind Monroe’s beauty or showing off his genius, like a giddy child, for having chosen her as a subject? Very self-conscious about his physical shortcomings—skin conditions, premature baldness, an inelegant proboscis and maladies too personal to mention in polite society—Warhol admired the beauty of Hollywood stars. Soon after Monroe’s shocking death in 1962, he created portraits of the tragic actress which are considered to be among his best known and most iconic works. Warhol would return to Marilyn’s image repeatedly over the following decades in several series of prints and paintings. The acetate he holds in this photo is from the 1964 series of large square canvases, each measuring 40 inches. The paintings in this group of just five works are perhaps Warhol’s most spectacularly beautiful. The 1964 Marilyn series achieved notoriety after two of them were shot through the forehead with a small caliber gun. While visiting the Factory, artist Dorothy Podber asked Andy if she could ‘shoot’ the paintings. Warhol believing she meant to photograph or make a film of the paintings, agreed, but Podber instead took a gun out of her bag and in an impromptu performance, fired a bullet through the recently finished paintings stacked against a wall. While only two of the paintings were damaged, four of the five became known as the ‘Shot Marilyns.’ By Matt Wrbican, Chief Archivist The Andy Warhol Museum
Homage To Warhol's Birmingham Race Riot, 1964
Warhol’s Race Riots occupy a unique position in the artist’s oeuvre. While they form part of the seminal Death and Disaster series that was a major preoccupation for Warhol throughout 1963, they are the only works in the series that depict an event of an explicitly political nature. The source images—which derived from a group of Charles Moore photographs published in a Life magazine article in May of 1963 during civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama— were first used by Warhol in four paintings executed in mid-1963 and then reprised in 1964 for a series of six paintings known as the Little Race Riots. In William John Kennedy’s photograph we find Warhol ‘wearing’ his Little Race Riots. Shot only months after Pink Race Riot 1963 had its debut in Warhol’s Death in America exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Paris (his first exhibition in Europe), Kennedy’s image zeroes in on a work of real poignancy; it portrays a politically motivated action that had appeared in the mass media only weeks before Warhol first produced the Race Riots and is thus of an entirely different order to the more generic images of car crashes and suicides that also formed part of the exhibition. An arresting image, Homage to Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot wasconstructed with Warhol posed at the window of the Silver Factory (the foil with which Billy Name famously wallpapered the interior is visible at the edges of the window frame), while Kennedy positioned himself on the fire escape above. The acute angle of the composition pulls the gaze precipitously downwards, focusing it squarely on Warhol’s face staring blankly back into Kennedy’s lens. Framing Warhol so carefully in the window, Kennedy exploits the transition between the natural light outside and the shadowy interior of the studio, playing upon Warhol’s own use of contrast in the Death and Disaster paintings. By Nicholas Chambers, The Milton Fine Curator of Art The Andy Warhol Museum
Homage to Warhol’s Flowers, 1964
William John Kennedy, aware of Warhol’s new Flowers series, was searching for a creative way to incorporate him with his new work. While driving near the grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, Kennedy spotted a large patch of six-foot tall, wild black-eyed Susans growing in an abandoned field. Excited about the concept of using the location as an immersive set to photograph Warhol and his Flowers paintings, Kennedy headed to the nearest public pay phone to call him with the news of his discovery. Warhol loved the idea and responded, “Pick me up!” Kennedy, always with camera on hand, immediately headed to the Factory on East 47th Street where Warhol, actor/poet Taylor Mead and Kennedy’s wife, Marie, squeezed into Kennedy’s tiny Volkswagen. With a rolled-up freshly painted and un-stretched Flowers canvas between them, they headed back to Queens. The painting served as a makeshift backdrop, held up by Mead and Marie, with Warhol (wearing Kennedy’s sweater) posing waif-like in front of the large canvas holding a handful of the wild flowers. In rapid film-like sequence Kennedy shot the compliant actors, creating a series of more than 50 color portraits. At times with a bottle of gin in hand, Mead engaged Kennedy’s lens with remarkably fluid motions, while Warhol laughed and frolicked in the flowers. According to Marie Kennedy, “Bill always made everyone so comfortable. It was truly a magical moment. While Taylor was the court jester, Andy completely let his guard down and loved every moment of that remarkable day in 1964.” Later that year, the Flowers paintings were shown in Warhol’s first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his new art dealer. Warhol had tried unsuccessfully to join Castelli’s revered stable of artists for the previous three years. In 1962 Henry Geldzahler, then a young curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, prompted Warhol to create first the huge Death and Disaster series and, later, the Flowers paintings. The Death and Disaster series depicts American social dysfunction, hypocrisy, and its mass consumer fascination with violence, tragedy and glamour. Targeting vicious attacks on peaceful protesters fighting American racial segregation, airliner tragedies, car crashes, suicides, wanted criminals, capital punishment or the numerous portraits of American Glamour icons Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, Warhol portrayed both impersonal disasters and victims of personal tragedy. The Flowers exhibition, viewed as a coda to Warhol’s huge Death and Disaster series, marked the end of 1964. By Matt Wrbican, Chief Archivist The Andy Warhol Museum
Homage to Warhol’s Self-Portrait, 1964
Homage to Warhol’s Self-Portrait, 1964
East 47th Street Factory, New York City
Silver Gelatin Print
Homage to Warhol’s American Man, 1964
Homage to Warhol’s American Man, 1964
East 47th Street Factory, New York City
Silver Gelatin Print
Homage to Warhol’s Self-Portrait, 1964
Warhol’s use of photo booth machines was one of the key developments in his practice during the 1960s. Not only did he use them in numerous portrait projects beginning with his commissioned portrait of the collector Ethel Scull for which he famously took his subject into an automatic photo booth on 42nd Street—their sequential format also influenced his approach to the composition of other works, such as his 1964 portraits of Jackie Kennedy which derived from news media images. The idea for Homage to Warhol’s Self-Portrait occurred to William John Kennedy as he approached the East 47th Street entrance to Warhol’s studio and saw a man wearing an advertising sandwich board. Regarding Warhol as ‘the ultimate self-promoter,’ Kennedy set about constructing a sandwich board with the artist’s iconic photo booth self-portraits, which had likely been completed only weeks earlier. Kennedy shot numerous images of Warhol wearing this curious prop, as though he were preparing for a hyperbolic act of street front self-promotion—one that feels strangely prophetic of the artist’s appearances on New York sidewalks a decade later handing out copies of Interview magazine. With Kennedy positioned on the stairs above, Warhol was posed tilting the canvas so that it sat almost perpendicular to his face, as if using it as a mirror to cast his reflection upwards toward the camera. Capturing Warhol in sharp focus and with natural light, the artist’s appearance contrasts starkly with the idealized self-portrait—suggestive of a perceived dissemblance between Warhol and the self-image he projected to the world. By Nicholas Chambers, The Milton Fine Curator of Art The Andy Warhol Museum
Homage to Warhol’s American Man, 1964
Perhaps the most striking feature of William John Kennedy’s photographs of Warhol is the manner in which they seek to elide the artist and his work; as Kennedy himself described, he sought to “involve [Warhol] totally, physically with his artwork.” Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Homage to Warhol’s American Man, where we find Warhol’s head integrated into one of his most significant commissioned portraits of the 1960s, The American Man (Portrait of Watson Powell) 1964. Warhol’s painting came about in May 1964 when Watson Powell Jr. commissioned a portrait of his father, the head of the American Republic Insurance Company, that was ultimately intended for display in the company’s corporate headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. The completed painting comprised 32 canvases arranged in a vertical grid, its format closely resembling the structure of several important works from 1963 and 1964 including Warhol’s portraits of Ethel Scull and Jackie Kennedy, as well as the small flower paintings shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in December 1964, all of which employed gridded accumulations of smaller canvases to create mural-sized paintings. In recalling the construction of Homage to Warhol’s American Man Kennedy described seeing test prints of the Watson Powell image on the studio floor and suggesting to Warhol that they staple them to a cardboard support creating, in effect, an alternative horizontal arrangement of the famous commissioned portrait. Leaving a rectangular space for Warhol to position his head, Kennedy created a bizarre juxtaposition of two influential American men: a corporate chief and an avant-garde ‘factory’ owner. The photograph also points to the manner in which Warhol acted as a conduit between ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’; the Factory, as Kennedy observed, functioning as a meeting place for an increasingly diverse cross section of American society. By Nicholas Chambers, The Milton Fine Curator of Art The Andy Warhol Museum
Museum Edition
Foreword

The reactions elicited by William John Kennedy’s remarkably intimate portraits of Andy Warhol are not entirely explained by their formal beauty or the innovative perspectives Kennedy uses. The true power of the images comes from Kennedy’s ability to capture, in an authentic way, both Andy as a private person and a very public artist. Much photographed but little understood on a personal level, Andy intentionally created a mask with his deadpan blankness, wig, and sunglasses. Kennedy’s insight was to reveal Andy by embedding Warhol in Warhol artworks. In each of the images included in this spectacular edition, Warhol is literally seen through his work.
In Self-Portrait and Race Riot, Warhol wears his work as a sandwich board, the traditional garb of a street hawker. In American Man, Warhol is seen in silhouette through a hole cut into a grid of photographs of the archetypical businessman, Watson Powell, with whom Andy shared a love of commerce but few other qualities. In Flowers, Warhol looks unusually comfortable and relaxed in a field of black-eyed Susans, behind which one of his Flower paintings has been casually hung. And in Marilyn, Warhol’s face can be seen, almost transcendent, lit by sunlight flooding into his studio, as he holds in front of him a huge acetate of Marilyn Monroe.
Kennedy knew intuitively that the only way to truly see Warhol was to see his art. In uniting Warhol the man with Warhol the artist, Kennedy has given us some of the most joyous and insightful images of Andy Warhol ever created. Remarkably, Kennedy kept his archive in storage for nearly 50 years. Now, The Andy Warhol Museum is delighted to be involved in bringing these images to a wider public.
By Eric C. Shiner, Director The Andy Warhol Museum

Museum Edition
Introduction

Andy Warhol’s Factory, the famous studio and gathering place that he established at the beginning of 1964, soon became the haunt of a remarkable roster of photographers. There is as a result an exceedingly rich visual record of its inhabitants and day-to-day life. Thanks to that record, the cast of charismatic characters that Warhol drew around him—Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, Taylor Mead, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Ultra Violet, Nico, and Viva, to name only a few—possess to this day the vivid presence of their youthful selves, as if no time had intervened.
It was unusual, however, for any photographer to draw Warhol into breaking with his regular routines: one typically sees him at work, on the telephone, or simply standing noncommittally alone or in a group. William John Kennedy was exceptional, however, in his ability to draw the artist into scenarios where he dropped his mask of feigned indifference long enough to reveal something of his personal investment and identification with the work.
In the previous year, Warhol had largely devoted himself to a series he called Death in America. His dealer at the time, Eleanor Ward of the Stable Gallery, declined to show them, despite his earlier show with her having been a considerable success. But police attacks on civil rights demonstrators, horrific car crashes, and electric chairs made for stark contrast with the film star portraits and consumer miscellany that had dominated the earlier show. Only Ileana Sonnabend proved willing to take them for an exhibition at her gallery in Paris, where a French audience more readily grasped Warhol’s corrosive portrayals of American mayhem, conflict, and social dysfunction.
Temporarily to transform two of his Race Riot canvases into a sandwich board, as he did for Kennedy’s camera, abruptly takes the work out of a neutralizing gallery context and returns the imagery to the sphere of public controversy from which it originated. When he draped a second sandwich board carrying his self-portrait over the top of the Race Riot, Kennedy posed him behind a fire escape railing, his photo booth likeness taking on the plain connotation of a jailed prisoner’s mug shot.
By Thomas Crow

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