Andy Warhol absolutely wanted to be famous when he decided to become a freelance artist; he had already built a career as one of the best-paid advertising artists in America. It is well known that he, the offspring of an immigrant from a humble background, achieved world fame. Keith Haring also wanted to be famous, and to achieve this he took a lot from the admired Warhol, who was thirty years his senior. Haring noted in his diary that Warhol’s work and way of life had made his work possible in the first place, and created the conditions. And what were they? Make yourself a brand, create an unmistakable style for this purpose and bring your work to people in an aggressive manner, including through the media.
At Haring’s birthday parties, Madonna sang many songs for the first time
While Warhol’s “Factory” produced silkscreen series almost like a factory, Haring’s “Red Dog” sculpture is currently standing guard outside Munich’s Brandhorst Museum, which is highlighting the artistic friendship between the two self-promotion geniuses with its “Party of Life” exhibition.
The title comes from Keith Haring’s birthday parties, which were a real spectacle – and not just when Madonna sang her “Like a Virgin” live for the first time. Celebrating life, turning up at hotspots with a dazzling entourage and bathing in the excited crowd in the legendary clubs Studio 54 or Palladium was not only fun, but also about cultivating your image and being seen. Social media didn’t even exist yet – Warhol would have loved it, but he always had his instant camera with him, and his Polaroids tell a eloquent story about New York’s nightlife and queer community.
With around 120 works, the Brandhorst Museum has the largest Warhol collection in Europe. The fact that the majority of these are late works, from the 1980s, is a good fit for the double appearance, as it concerns the time when art student Keith Haring came to New York and soon met Warhol, the admired star.
The fact that both men came from Pennsylvania, were both raised in strict religion and were both gay were not necessarily similarities that would lead to friendship. Rather, Haring took Warhol as a role model, whose Pop Art had helped to counter abstract art, which was perceived as out of touch, with an “art for everyone”, with the Campbell’s soup cans and all the other motifs borrowed from the consumer world and the mass media.
Warhol had left the established art spaces with photography, films and his own TV shows – many of which are shown in the exhibition curated by Franziska Linhardt. Haring did the same; he went out into the streets to draw on walls and, above all, the New York subway. The fact that the “Subway Drawings” later ended up in high-end collections and were traded at high prices was not really his plan.
Warhol loved the company of young people who adored him; he needed them as a source of inspiration and certainly as a fountain of youth. His morbid “Death and Disaster” series, the screen prints of the Electric Chair, of traffic accidents and suicides, were long ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, as were those of his pop icons, be it the giant “Mao”, the mourning “Jackie” or “Marilyn” in all colors. In the 1980s, Warhol is said to have complained about his lack of creativity. The fact that he now had commissioned portraits of the rich and famous produced almost indiscriminately in his “Factory” and who were prepared to pay $25,000 per piece did not go down well in the art world.
He was very pleased with the collaboration with the young African-American Jean-Michel Basquiat, initiated by the Swiss gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger. The collaboration with Keith Haring was an exchange. Even though the two gave Madonna and Sean Penn a wedding present in 1985 with pages of the “New York Post”, which had previously printed nude photos of the singer, but after the artistic collaboration, the headlines were “So What” and “I’m not ashamed”. READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>
Warhol portrays Haring in a deep embrace with his lover Juan Dubose, while Haring satirizes Warhol’s lucrative reproduction strategy with the figure of “Andy Mouse” surrounded by dollar signs – Warhol as Mickey Mouse. While the method is comparable, the motivation of the two artists could be very different. Haring ran a “pop shop” with merchandise, where anyone could buy art, for example on T-shirts or posters, and a large portion of the proceeds went to charitable organizations. Haring created posters for nuclear disarmament, against apartheid, homophobia and for AIDS awareness, the disease from which he himself died in 1990.
Warhol paid his drag queen models a modest $50
Warhol’s political involvement remained limited, even though he designed an election poster for the Green Party for Joseph Beuys. However, motifs such as the hammer and sickle on a large canvas can hardly be dismissed as mere decoration. He, whose art liked to keep criticism and applause in the context of capitalism in suspense, was anything but uninterested in money. When the Turin gallery owner Luciano Anselmino asked him to create a series of portraits of drag queens, he chose not sparkling scene and stage stars as models for “Ladies and Gentlemen”, but underground queens. He paid these mostly penniless people around 50 dollars for the sessions in the Factory, which did not put him in a good light, even though he received almost a million dollars for the series.
Warhol was a collector, a keen consumer who went shopping every day and filled his house with antiques, art and junk. Whatever else came along, mail, small gifts, and found objects, he threw into cardboard boxes that were sealed at the end of the month, dated and stored; 610 “time capsules” were collected over the years.
You can see that someone here wants to be recognized by reflecting himself in his time, his entourage and his exciting everyday life. Real treasure troves of an ego convinced of its importance open up. Research is grateful to him for it. Time capsule number 522 contains, among other things, a record by Liza Minnelli, for which his friend Warhol designed the cover, identity papers of his mother Julia Varhola, Basquiat’s birth certificate, ties, a hotel shower cap, a sweater painted with a grimace by Kenny Scharf “for Andy”, chic invitations, Christmas cards from illustrious people, photos, letters and many drawings by Keith Haring.
By taking the two pop stars into the wild, highly creative scene in New York in the 1980s, oscillating between sex, drugs, underground and glamour, the exhibition itself resembles a time capsule.
Keith Haring & Andy Warhol, Party of Life. At the Museum Brandhorst, Munich; until January 26, 2025. The accompanying magazine costs 16 euros.
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