WARHOL LIVE

For the first time in the published history of Andy Warhol’s career, the spotlight is being turned on the vital role of music and dance in the artist’s oeuvre. Conceived of and organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Warhol Live will first be presented at the Museum, and will then travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, and to The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, our partner in the organization of this major project.

The exhibition Warhol Live was sparked by fresh insight: that music, far from being a peripheral interest for the artist, was in fact a basic component of his art, illuminating all aspects of it and apparent in all the mediums he favoured. Over six hundred objects, including recognized masterpieces and unpublished writings, have been brought together to give substance to this new reading of Warhol’s oeuvre.

Eclectic Musical Tastes
Beneath the carefully cultivated façade of the enthusiastic eternal teenager, the credulous, easily pleased fan, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was actually a knowledgeable music lover, a true connoisseur of the music of his day. Those close to him attest to the eclecticism of his tastes, those of a passionate lover of music. His archives offer abundant proof of this. The collection includes records by Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Eartha Kitt, tickets to the opera and Rolling Stones concerts, books by John Cage, revealing a musical taste that embraces Wagnerian opera, Hollywood musicals and hit songs by pop groups, as well as avant-garde music. Warhol’s ability to appreciate every kind of music, unusual at a time when tastes were a function of social class, went hand in hand with his ambition as an artist to explore all forms of art.

Music and Dance
Warhol made his mark in almost all the fields of artistic expression: graphic design, illustration, drawing, painting, prints, sculpture, film, photography, stage design, installation and performance. He published texts in various genres: diaries, a novel and a philosophical treatise. He recorded thousands of hours of conversations of all kinds. He founded a magazine and produced television programmes. He even directed music videos. But he never composed or recorded music. Music and dance are absent from the catalogue of his creative oeuvre. And yet, music and dance are as omnipresent in his work as in his life, from the drawings of musicians and bands in the late 1940s to the portraits of the pop stars of the 1980s, such as Debbie Harry and Grace Jones, which in a way foreshadow the electrified self-portraits towards the end of his life. He made numerous portraits of Mick Jagger, but also of dancers like Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Rudolf Nureyev and many others. However, the record covers, of which he illustrated over fifty, from Tchaikovsky to Diana Ross and the Rolling Stones, are a relatively little-known area of his output.

The exhibition Warhol Live follows the various roles music played in Warhol’s work chronologically and thematically. Four themes structure the trajectory.

Tuning In
The first theme explores the foundations of the artist’s musical education. Born of a working-class family of immigrants from Ruthenia (now Slovakia), his first exposure to music was in the Pittsburgh of the 1930s. As a boy, Andrew Warhola discovered music in Saint John Chrysostom Church, full of icons, and at the cinema, where he went regularly. It was the first golden age of musicals, the era of Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, the heroine of The Wizard of Oz in 1939, whom young Andrew adored. His later portraits of Elvis, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe bear witness to this star mania.

Sound and Vision
The second theme highlights Warhol’s fascination with contemporary music and dance. Late in 1962, he embarked on a series of canvases revolving around the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, who was also the partner and collaborator of the most influential composer and musical theorist of the day, John Cage. In April 1963, Warhol attended the premiere of Sleep by choreographer Yvonne Rainer, a former student of Cunningham’s, in which a dancer lies supine on the ground, gazing into space. In September, at the Pocket Theater, he attended, according to his own reports, the complete version of Erik Satie’sVexations, consisting of a single phrase repeated 840 times, played under conductor John Cage by ten pianists, including Cage himself and John Cale. The latter, another leading figure of the music avant-garde of the period and a founder with La Monte Young of the experimental rock band the Dream Syndicate, became a member of the Velvet Underground. In 1964, Warhol commissioned music from La Monte Young to accompany extracts from his films Eat, Sleep, Kiss andHaircut, to be screened by four Super 8mm projectors. Though rarely discussed, and though Warhol’s answers to questions on the subject were inconclusive, the similarity of structure between Warhol’s “Pop” works and contemporary developments in music and dance – especially the use of repetition, serialism and continuous frequency – is obvious.

Producer
The third theme examines the new role Warhol assumed as leader of the Silver Factory and producer of the rock group the Velvet Underground. In January 1964, he opened a new studio on the fourth floor of an industrial building at 231 East 47th Street in New York. The Silver Factory, so called because of the silvery decor designed by Billy Name, became the setting for all the parties of a motley crew of artists and superstars. It incarnated the holistic vision of the Fluxus movement – with which both La Monte Young and Cage were involved – to merge art and life. The Silver Factory was the place where everything that happened, visually but also audibly and tangibly, was capable of becoming art, was art. It was also where, in December 1965, at his invitation, the Velvet Underground took up residence. To the original group, formed when Brooklyn-born rock musician Lou Reed met John Cale, Warhol added a singer, Nico, a German model with a graveyard voice. All these components came together to make Warhol’s studio a place for a Dionysiac convergence of several forms of art – film, painting, dance, music – and the laboratory for creating the Warholian total artwork Exploding Plastic Inevitable. With this multimedia show, conceived to showcase the performances of the Velvet, he revived and made manifest the idea of the complete or integrated artwork, theGesamtkunstwerk first proposed by the German composer Richard Wagner. 

Fame
The fourth and last theme of the exhibition, rightly perceived as one of the mainsprings of Warhol’s work, is closely linked to music. “His ear was his eye. I think Andy saw music,” explains Glenn O’Brien to Matt Wrbican in the exhibition catalogue. Mick Jagger was the star who best embodied for Warhol this fusion of image and rhythm. From their first meeting in 1964, there developed a friendship that took various forms over the years: invitations to Stones shows, the band rehearsing on Warhol’s estate at Montauk, Long Island, private parties… More than once, Jagger asked Warhol to illustrate record covers for the Stones – Sticky Fingers (1971) and Love You Live (1977). Warhol made many portraits of Jagger, his idol of youth; his artist’s eye lingers on elements of the body – hip, arm, torso – as if in a kind of erotic or fetishistic metonymy. Warhol’s obsession with the interwoven worlds of celebrity and “the beat” reached its apogee at Studio 54, the legendary nightclub opened in 1977, where he established himself as one of its best-known patrons. Ten years after his experience with the Velvet Underground, he found once again, this time as a participant rather than an orchestrator, fusion in the excess of all the art forms – music, dance and lighting effects – together with fashion, glamour and celebrity. Across the Studio 54 dance floor moved all the beautiful people: musicians, millionaires, actors, models, fashion designers… At the heart of this intoxicating, extraordinary gallery of portraits, with names like Truman Capote, Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli, Warhol acted as mirror to the vanities, the tragic conscience. His last self-portraits, dated 1986, modelled on those of Debbie Harry and Grace Jones, show him as an electrified rock star.

A World Premiere: All the Album Covers Designed by Warhol

An interview with Paul Maréchal, lender of a most original collection

In the course of his career, Andy Warhol illustrated more than fifty album covers, many of them unforgettable images. To learn more about the importance of Warhol’s graphic contribution to the record industry, we spoke with Paul Maréchal, a notable collector and the author of the catalogue raisonné of the album covers designed by Warhol and published by the Museum for the exhibition Warhol Live, where the album covers will be prominently on display.

What intrigued, inspired or touched you about Warhol’s general approach to art?  
P. M. Not only his ability to anticipate trends we still see today, including the apotheosis of pop music and the cult of celebrity, which was in itself a considerable talent, but in addition the talent to reinterpret them and imbue them with his own sensibility, using a wide range of mediums: painting, film, book publishing, album covers, sculpture, music videos and so on.

Why album covers in particular?
P. M. The variety of musical styles that we find in the albums for which Warhol designed the covers also sparked my curiosity and increased my desire to collect them; it was a way of steeping myself in the many different musical styles that appear throughout his life. The album covers alone enable one to follow the whole course of his career as an artist, almost step by step, and this is almost unique among great artists. Although they did not appear in museums or art galleries, the album covers benefited from the parallel distribution network represented by the record dealers. Warhol fully understood this remarkable channel for disseminating his art. Most of the covers he created were designed for that purpose and not, as is too often the case, existing works recycled as record jackets.

How did you happen to start collecting album covers?
P. M. It was in August 1996. In a record store, I came across a record by Paul Anka with a cover designed by Warhol. I already knew of his two most famous album covers, the “peelable” banana sleeve for the Velvet Underground (fig. 1) and the zippered sleeve for the Stones’ Sticky Fingers (fig. 2). From then on, the challenge of discovering how many covers Warhol had created became the great challenge of acquiring them all, together with the records. The advent of the Internet has greatly aided collectors of rare albums. Without the Web, I would have found it almost impossible to track down all the albums illustrated by Warhol or to find information relating to them. Consulting a number of Web sites devoted to the artists featured on the albums has also enabled me to learn much more about them.

And the idea of publishing a catalogue raisonné of the album covers? 
P. M. The wish to share what I have learned, the lack of references available and the general ignorance about the album sleeves were the main factors in the decision to create a catalogue raisonné.

What are your hopes for this exhibition and the catalogue raisonné?
P. M. I wanted this exhibition to reveal a little-known but important side of one of the twentieth century’s foremost artists, and to demonstrate the vital part that music played in his inspiration; because he was a visual artist, this area of his life has been neglected. The abundance and diversity of Warhol’s oeuvre is so great that we can always discover a new aspect of it, as we can with great artists of all eras: our appreciation of their work continues to grow as we encounter ever more dimensions to it. I should like people to realize that this exhibition mounted by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which will travel to the United States, will raise our city’s profile as a place where creativity goes hand in hand with the advancement of learning. And, of course, beyond the importance of the part played by music in these works, I hope visitors will recognize Warhol’s amazing gift for designing record sleeves, and will perhaps discover a splendid idea for forming their own collections. Few works by great artists are available at such reasonable prices, especially nowadays...