WILLIAM JOHN KENNEDY The Lost Archive: Photographs of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana
What you have is the perfect storm of someone with great talent and access taking photographs of what will one day become some of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art. Eric Shiner, Former Director, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
INDIANAROBERTINTRODUCTIONFOREWORDINDIANA+WARHOLANDYWARHOLEPILOGUE CONTENTS 121655531139
Kennedy’s portraits of Andy Warhol are his most important work. Amazingly, the prints and neg atives sat in a cardboard box in the back of a closet for nearly fifty years as Kennedy pursued a successful career as a commercial photographer, creating advertising images for the likes of IBM, American Express, and Xerox. The forgotten photographs in their lowly box can be seen as mirror ing Warhol’s famous Time Capsules, a fascinating and at times vexing mega-artwork that Warhol and his assistants created as a means to wrangle with Warhol’s ever-growing accumulation of “stuff.” During daily trips to the antique stores lining the route from his home to his studio, Andy would shop. And shop. And shop. These weekday sprees were augmented by weekend trips to Manhattan’s famous flea markets.
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As evidenced by the contents of the more than six hundred Time Capsules that Andy and his crew would eventually construct, Warhol’s collecting strategy was beyond eclectic. He seemed to be interested in everything from fine jewelry (often concealed under his turtlenecks, or sometimes stashed in the canopy above his bed) to bric-a-brac (ranging from cookie jars to movie memora bilia) to dinnerware pilfered during transatlantic flights on Concorde. This marvelous mishmash was augmented by whatever arrived in the day’s mail, including business correspondence (now a trea sure trove for scholars); source material for artworks; and a seemingly endless pile of nightclub and gallery invitations. Poignantly, the Time Capsules also contain the most personal of objects, such as Andy’s wigs and a wide array of beauty potions intended to shore up his fragile self-image.
FOREWORD
At The Andy Warhol Museum, our visitors tend to be remarkably young compared to the public at most American museums. Why do these young people continue to be fascinated by an artist who, if he were living today, would be in his nineties? I believe it is because, even today, America in the 1960s still represents a seemingly pure vision of a life that was rebellious, effortless, and, most of all, cool. Kennedy’s photographs capture those qualities and elevate them.
There are many ways to describe William John Kennedy’s photographs of the leading lights of the Pop movement in the 1960s. In one sense, they are documentation in the best sense of the word, capturing the work and workplaces of an extraordinary group of then-emerging talents. On the other hand, they are surprisingly intimate portraits of a group of people who embraced image while resisting intimacy. But, finally, these beautiful photographs are time capsules, portals, a kind of time machine transporting the viewer back to an era of promise and transformation in American culture.
16 above Fashion shots taken by Kennedy in 1957. opposite Portrait by Kennedy of the art collector and gallerist Holly Solomon, c.1970.
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Robert Indiana sitting in front of Year of Meteors at his Coenties Slip studio in Lower Manhattan, NYC, c.1963.
I met the artist Robert Indiana at an art gallery opening, and he invited me to visit his Coenties Slip studio and photograph him. My photo sessions with Bob resulted in a series of very creative, colorful shots.
Robert Indiana
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friendintroducedwork.showmeIndiana,photographedheinvitedtoanartgalleryofhislatestAtthisshowBobmetohisAndyWarhol.
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During one visit to the Factory when I was looking around for props for photo ideas, I noticed a four-foot by three-foot montage of fifteen photographs of the same man’s head. I had Andy hold up this montage in front of his body, with one portrait cut out, so that his own head appeared, looking out through the space where the man’s head should have been.
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During the 1960s, Kennedy increasingly transitioned to color photography, employing it in an experimental fashion for both commercial and personal projects. He continued his photographic practice right into the mid-2000s, and some of his most effective explorations of color’s potential for abstraction and atmosphere were taken on the streets of New York and Miami, or during his many international travels. Saturated tones emerge from dark backgrounds, creating enigmatic layers of pattern that only gradually reveal their subjects.
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What you have is the perfect storm of someone with great talent and access taking photographs of what will one day become some of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art. Eric Shiner, Former Director, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh WILLIAM JOHN KENNEDY The Lost Archive: Photographs of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana ISBN: 978-1-78884-166-5 www.accartbooks.com£30.00/$40.009 781788 841665 54000
