Andy Warhol

Beskrivning

Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 1968. First edition. 654 pages, without pagination, 636 mostly full-page black-and-white illustrations. Factory photos by Billy Name, photographs by Stephen Eric Shore. (27 x 20 cm), glued binding, cover (front and back) is printed with flowers in 5 colours. Printed in letterpress on recycled paper. Moderate wear to spine, first page partly loose and with a short tear at bottom. This is a fragile art object. Typography by John Melin and Gösta Svensson, Stig Arbman AB. (John Melin till exempel pages 32-37, Lutz Jahre 21 – 1968). Exhibition: Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 10 February – 17 March 1968.

Warhol’s first solo exhibition in a museum took place in Stockholm. Four months before the artist was to be shot in the Factory, he was in Stockholm for the exhibition’s opening. The facade of the museum building was completely covered with Warhol’s cow wallpaper (Cow Wallpaper, 1966). There was snow and it was very cold. Temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius were measured on the museum island of Skeppsholmen. Held back by the cold, relatively few visitors came to the five-week exhibition.

The catalogue was a huge success, however, with three editions of around 20,000 copies in total. The concept was prepared in New York by Kasper König. The only text was statements by Warhol such as ”All is pretty”; the majority of the publication consists of mostly full-page illustrations. Around a third of the illustrations are reproductions of Warhol’s works, another third are Factory photos by Billy Name, and the photos in the last third are by Stephen Eric Shore. A catalogue with so many illustrations had rarely been produced before, and at the extremely low price of around one dollar. In the spirit of pop art and less for commercial reasons, T-shirts with Warhol motifs were also offered for sale at the exhibition. The famous Brillo Boxes in Stockholm were not the works printed in the Factory, but came directly from the Brillo soap factory.

Kasper König Born in 1945. Exhibition organizer, founding director of the Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt/M., and principal of the Städelschule:

”I met Pontus Hulten in the autumn of 1962 at an impromptu dinner in the apartment of Ursula and Rudolf Zwirner, to which the Bremen art dealer Michael Herz was also invited.

For Mr. Hultén, it was by no means a given that he would stop in Germany. He later reported that as young men, he and his friends made it a sport not to pee on German soil even once on the way from Stockholm to Paris. Michael Herz, an anti-fascist and man of the resistance, eased the tension in the situation with ironic, casino-like comedy; Erich von Stroheim’s spirit was present. The aesthetic attitudes of the random guests were diametrically opposed.

Poetic anarchism of the avant-garde versus the world view of the deformed creature, an elitist conservative communist view. I was interested in both poles – the humanistic, from literature, and the artistic, which led to a traineeship at the Zwirner Gallery, then Kolumba Kirchhof. Of course, I knew the Moderna Museet catalogues and was excited to get to know Pontus Hulten as a bystander.

The evening, however, had nothing to do with professional insider discussions; it was about Trotsky and Breton, about Bakunin/Kropotkin and the Russian Constructivists. My head was spinning – I spent the next few weeks in the library.

A few years later, I landed in New York and foresaw problems with the immigration authorities. The physicist Billy Klüver, the representative of the Moderna Museet in New York and a friend of many artists, gave me the tip to ask Pontus Hulten and the Stockholm Museum for help. My first job was assisting in the preparations for the Claes Oldenburg exhibition for the Moderna Museet. With help from Stockholm, I got a green card, and residence permit for the USA, and this privilege allowed me to propose concrete projects.

I saw the opportunity for an Andy Warhol exhibition through a rigorous cost-saving concept. Warhol was in the air, and after the first major Pop Art exhibition in Europe in Stockholm, after the Swedish American Oldenburg Warhol, the timing was right. The mythical Factory had moved from midtown to downtown in Union Square into large offices. The first thing I did was drive to the Brillo Factory in Brooklyn to reserve a small container of folded Brillo boxes; written confirmation from the company was my main argument for Stockholm. Ivan Karp of the Leo Castelli Gallery allowed me to use the photocopier and the archive for the layout design of the catalogue book; this is evident in the book. Everything was to be created especially for the exhibition in the Factory in order to minimize transport and insurance costs; the studio was the sole lender – many flower paintings, large electric chairs and copies of all the early silent films, etc. The package was accepted – my sly, naive suggestion was taken at face value. That was my key moment and the beginning of my work with Pontus Hultén. I used the flight ticket to go to Stockholm to set up and stay in New York – a fitting reward. The conceptual game in the collective was a good start. The Stockholm Warhol book was part of the production and distribution aesthetics, the significance of which only became clear to me later; with Warhol and Hultén, the penny dropped immediately.

This generosity and willingness of Pontus Hultén to fully commit to a radical artistic position and to pursue it professionally (and institutionally) was a decisive contribution by Hultén to art, and it always provided inspiration for decades.”