The last stop on our trip after the Scrabble Players Championship was Pittsburgh. It had totally escaped my mind that this city was the home of the Andy Warhol Museum and I was only reminded of this when Mark told me about it before we embarked on our trip. A visit to the museum was a must and we planned to go after 5 p.m. on Friday, July 26 since admission was half price that night and the museum stayed open till 10:00. I figured that was ample time to see the art exhibits yet I would have to curtail my time in the film viewing room.
The entrance to the museum featured a couch that was such a prominent feature of the 1960’s Factory. I confirmed with the front desk staff that it was not the original couch. (I doubted it was the original before I even asked them.) It couldn’t possibly have been in such good condition after more than sixty years and all the goings-on that took place atop it. Mark took this photo of me as we left the museum:
Visitors are instructed to start the tour from the seventh floor and work their way down. The top floors dealt with Warhol’s childhood in Pittsburgh and earliest artworks. The floors below that dealt with Warhol in the sixties, then the seventies and eighties.
My lacklustre shots are poor representations of what I saw. In three instances below I found better images on-line of the photos I actually took, since my own shots were either blurry, impossible to fit into the frame, or marred by an unavoidable reflection. However I have been unable to find the image below without the reflection:
Blue Close Cover Before Striking
Do It Yourself (Sailboats)
Three Campbell’s soup cans. The museum displayed the photograph upon which the third painting was based.
Flowers
Elvis (Eleven Times)
Skull
The Last Supper / Be a Somebody with a Body
Some of the famous Brillo boxes, among other brands
John Cale and Edie Sedgwick from Andy Warhol’s Index (Book)
Guest list for the Velvet Underground performance at Rutgers including Donovan and Peter Fonda, 1966. The red slips are tickets for “Rutgers Film Society presents Andy Warhol’s Underground New York” at Rutgers University, March 9, 1966.
5 Deaths
Self Portrait
The fourth floor of the museum had the viewing room, where visitors could sit and watch many of Warhol’s films, TV appearances and videos in their entirety on TV screens. Comfortable headsets were provided. The entire Warhol oeuvre was not available and I wonder if the curators rotate the films to allow all of them to be seen. The first film I selected was Lupe, but since time was of the essence and I still had the lower floors to see as well as the Warhol store, I had to watch mere excerpts. I did however watch the colour short Mario Banana. The entire eight hours and five minutes of Empire was available for viewing, yet I only sat around to watch the reels where the building’s evening floodlights went on and then jumped to the point when they were shut off, and then jumped to the end of the movie. You can watch the entire movie here:
I also watched clips from Chelsea Girls and, for the first time in 41 years, I revisited The Loves of Ondine. I never forgot the scene where people pour food, liquids, flour and other packaged contents over a nude man. That scene was disgusting and indelibly etched into my then sixteen-year-old memory. I watched it again, and my goodness the mess that had to be cleaned up afterward! The scene must have taken place in someone’s actual kitchen. I spent my final moments in the viewing room watching various screen tests.
The lowest floors were devoted to Warhol’s hoarding and his collection of “time capsules”, boxes of accumulated items that he packed away and never looked at again. I first read about these time capsules when I read The Andy Warhol Diaries. These boxes, labelled “TC XXX” (where the X’s represent a number) were stored in a chilly room, locked but visible to visitors. Some of the contents were on display and included greeting cards, newspaper clippings, family photos, books, business papers, trinkets and even Warhol’s own artworks, some of which, unknown to curators during Warhol’s lifetime, were put on display only after his death. My photos showing Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) and the Velvet Underground guest list and tickets are from the time capsule room. I met Mark, who arrived at the museum around 9:00, on one of the lower floors and he resumed his own tour while I progressed downward until I got to the gift store.
I spent 45 minutes in The Warhol store, and was glad I had that long because I spent every minute looking around. I bought a double DVD on the Velvet Underground, a documentary by Todd Haynes:
Several live recordings by the Velvet Underground were for sale as LPs. I bought the Velvet Underground live at The Gymnasium, recorded on April 30, 1967:
I resisted buying any fridge magnets for myself, even though they were reasonably priced. I did get this one for my friend June (actual size):
Since my personal library already has numerous Warhol books and retrospectives, I didn’t need to buy anything new. I did buy two books which I wrote about here.
The next day, July 27, we left Pittsburgh for home yet made a stop first at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park to pay our respects at Andy’s gravesite:
Andy’s parents
Andy’s brother and sister-in-law
The reverse of the above gravestone. Neither Andy’s nor his parents’ stones had engraving on the other side.