Valerie Solanas claimed she had shot Warhol in the name of feminism although, as has often been pointed out, Warhol makes rather a poor symbol of macho male patriarchy. Solanas also claimed she did it because Warhol was controlling her life. This was not literally true, and yet there were those who thought that Warhol had reaped what he had sown. If, for your own amusement, you surrounded yourself with strange, potentially dangerous, unstable people, there was an inevitablity, perhaps even a certain justice, in one of them turning against you.
Ultimately Solanas received only a three-year jail sentence. It might well have been longer, but Warhol refused to be a witness in her prosecution.
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Warhol recuperates
Warhol’s recovery was long and slow, and he remained in intermittent pain for the rest of his life, yet by August 1968 he was at home painting again. Crucially, the price of Warhol’s work rose dramatically after the shooting. In 1970 a soup can painting sold at auction for $60,000, which at the time was a record for a work by a living American artist. That same year a travelling exhibition of Warhol’s work started a long, international tour that included London, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago and eventually New York. This greatly enhanced his reputation in America and abroad.
After the shooting Warhol changed his social allegiance to what the art historian John Richardson describes as High Bohemia*.
≡ Term used to describe Warhol’s working and social environment, which included movie stars, fashion designers, various heiresses and members of the European aristocracy.
He wanted a safer environment, and his working and social life would now centre around movie stars, fashion designers, as well as various heiresses and members of the European aristocracy. He even had dealings with the likes of Imelda Marcos and the Shah of Iran.
In 1969 he founded inter/VIEW magazine (which later changed its spelling to Interview) and used his celebrity contacts to fill its pages with images of and interviews with his new acquaintances. Often photographs from the magazine would form the basis of portraits. Warhol was rich by now, but the Factory was still an extremely expensive operation to run. In order to make money, Warhol set himself up as a society portraitist, and got his assistants to work very hard to get portrait commissions. At this time just about anyone with $25,000 could have their portrait done by Warhol. So as well as creating portraits of stars and celebrities, he also made portraits of many wealthy, anonymous industrialists and their wives.
Warhol’s High Bohemia reached critical mass with the brief advent of Studio 54, the notorious New York nightclub, of which Warhol was a regular habitue. As with the original Factory it was a place steeped in sex and drugs, though this time the music of choice was disco rather than rock and roll. Again it was a place where high and low life met, but Warhol’s involvement was now far more peripheral. He was a visitor, not an inhabitant. His 1979 book of photographs, Exposures, records this world with wide but far from innocent eyes.
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Warhol in decline
Warhol had always been an avid collector but his increasing wealth now meant he could acquire seriously on a large, not to say obsessive, scale. He and his mother moved into a townhouse on New York’s East 66th Street and he turned it into a sort of private museum, one in which most of the rooms were kept locked and where nobody, not even Warhol, ever viewed the collection.
He continued to work hard. He did a series of portraits of athletes, collaborated successfully with the artist Jamie Wyeth. He created two series of images, one called Skulb, one called Shadows, that today look like some of his most important work. He also made paintings using sexual imagery, one called Torsos, one called Sex Parts, the latter being extremely explicit.
At this point in the late 1970s, Warhol’s high profile and his unashamed commercialism began to breed a certain contempt. There was a growing tendency to think of Warhol as at best irrelevant, at worst absurd. The 1970s ended for him with an exhibition of 56 pairs of portraits, of the likes of Bianca Jagger, Sylvester Stallone, Yves St. Laurent and Liza Minelli. Critics complained that these works of art were as shallow as the people they depicted, that Warhol had fallen under the spell of glamorous banality.
Those who felt he was a spent force had their prejudices further reinforced by a series of works he made in 1980 called Reversals, which revisited some of his most famous images, but now he silk-screened them ‘in negative’. This may have looked like a backwards step at the time, but today these works look impressively powerful.
His credibility was hardly helped when he also worked for Mercedes Benz, producing Warholesque screenprints of their cars. And it plunged even further when he worked as a model for hire, appearing in ads for companies such as Sony, TDK, Coca-Cola and Golden Oak furniture.
In the early 1980s he was commissioned to create Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, which included Einstein, Kafka and Golda Meir. Then he collaborated with the younger artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring, in a more or less successful attempt to prove that he was still relevant and in touch with the contemporary scene.
Also in the early 1980s he produced a cable show called Andy Warhol’s TV although it was never a very successful or profitable venture. Later he did another show called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes for MTV which didn’t do much better. He would always say that the failure of these television shows was a cause of great disappointment to him.
In 1986 he began a series of works based around Leonardo’s Last Supper, over 100 in two years, and in January 1987 he had his first exhibition as a photographer. We now know that at this time he was regularly attending Mass and becoming increasingly serious about the Catholic faith that he had never entirely abandoned. He even served meals to the homeless at New York’s Church of the Heavenly Rest.
However, as far as the world at large was concerned, at that point in the late 1980s Andy Warhol was a working artist, with successes and failures, with supporters and enemies, with a reputation that was constantly being reassessed, rising and falling with the vagaries of public and critical taste. In any case, he apparently had a long working life still ahead of him.
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The death of Warhol
In February 1987 Andy Warhol was diagnosed as having an infected gall bladder and was advised to have it removed. With some reluctance he agreed. He was admitted to hospital and the routine operation seemed to go smoothly enough, but Warhol died the night after the operation.
There is some suggestion that the private nurse employed to attend him left her post at some time in the night. Certainly when she checked on him at 5.45 a.m. he had turned blue. A resuscitation team failed to revive him and he was pronounced dead at 6.31 a.m. on the morning of 22 February 1987.
In the aftermath of his death there would be endless legal wranglings concerning his treatment by the hospital, the value of his estate, and the fate of his paintings. His cultural importance was quickly confirmed, however, when the New York Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective in 1989, and in 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum was opened in his native Pittsburgh, an enduring monument to the man and his art. His reputation has only increased with the years.