Tuesday, June 20, 2023. Yesterday was a beautiful end of Spring/beginning of Summer day in New York. The Juneteenth holiday establishing a new long weekend. The city was quiet from my location although there were lots of people out walking, sunning, skootering, skating, with temps reaching up to 80.
I had dinner on Friday night with Mary Hilliard, the great social photographer whose work has graced these pages. Mary actually retired this year (although she doesn’t look like she’s old enough) and is in the process of archiving her vast collection of forty years of assignments including weddings and debuts, and cocktail parties and major philanthropic events. Although it still seems like it was just a few days ago.
Anyway, Mary’s archiving is an excellent activity for establishing her work for what it is: An Art of the times we’ve been living in. Today we are running one of those precious moments historically.
This moment, which took place on April 1, 1987, consisted of a memorial mass and a memorial lunch for Andy Warhol given shortly after his sudden death from gall bladder surgery. He was in his 59th year in February 1987. The day, as you will see, brought out the crème de la crème of the social world in New York. And Mary’s photos will remind you of the time.
In 1963/1964, I was fresh out of college and living in New York when a girl I knew invited me to an “art opening” in a small gallery in a townhouse in the East Seventies. It was for an artist I’d never heard of before: Andy Warhol. I believe the gallery might have been that of Leo Castelli but, as it was with Warhol, I’d never heard of him either. I later learned that Warhol did have a good professional reputation as a commercial artist, well known and commercially sought after for his fashion illustrations in particular.
The gallery was in the ground floor of a townhouse. It was an astounding exhibition for this kid who’d never heard of the artist. Entering the gallery on the ground floor reception — at the end of the room was a wall piled high with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. On either side of that wall were entrances to two rooms. On the left was a room stacked high with Brillo boxes, and to the right was a room, the floor of which was diagonally laid out with Campbell’s Tomato Juice boxes. That was the exhibit.
At first I thought it was some kind of joke. I was confused, having come from college Art History classes and knowing nothing despite that classic experience. This was Art? Later, of course, I learned. The artist was way ahead of us.
There probably isn’t a reader among you today who can’t easily picture that, because Andy became like his boxes — beyond fame and into the collective unconscious. At first sight for this kid, who was never an art historian, or had real interest in Art History, but just wanted to Go Out in New York, it was absurd. I’d seen those likenesses all my life growing up. On the breakfast table, in the kitchen sink and in the cupboard. How could that be Art? He asked.
After the exhibit we were all invited to a party at the artist’s loft, the Silver Factory, which was in the East 40s near the East River. I was still new in New York and had never been in a loft before, and I daresay most New Yorkers had never seen a loft (unless they worked in one). Lofts were once commercial and industrial, but as an artist’s space it offered a new way of living and working. It was a huge space — all painted silver including the ceiling along with its support poles and columns wrapped with tin foil (including the toilet bowls). It wasn’t sleek or chic but it was creative and different and an artist’s studio. The crowd was diverse but included a lot of young artists — almost all of whom I’d never heard of but with names like Lichtenstein, Poons, Dine, Rauschenberg, Johns, etc. In retrospect, they turned out to be some of the most important artists of the 20th century.
And there were photographers gathering the artists together to get shots of their presence. Most prominent and most famous, however, was a fashion model named Jean Shrimpton. She was the center of all attention, especially of the photographers. Also in the mix was the already legendary Gloria Vanderbilt. She was even more famous that Shrimpton. This kid was agog. Photographers were taking pictures of the two women with several of the artists mentioned above.
At one point while the mass photographing was going on one end of the large space, Ethel Scull, a blonde woman of unremarkable presence, not beautiful, not unattractive, but easily identifiable as maybe a suburban housewife, finally took the floor in the center of the room, surrounded by nobody (everyone was crowded around Jean Shrimpton), and yelled to no one in particular but within everyone’s earshot: “I’m paying for this fucking party, when the fuck are they gonna take a picture of me??!!”
She was mad. But no match for Shrimpton or Vanderbilt in this kid’s mind. Although Mrs. Scull would become famous herself with her (and her husband’s) collection of the early Warhols.
Andy himself had a very agreeable personality, not remarkable. And so, to me, like his art which I had just seen and left with the impression that it was ordinary (everyday), he seemed to have almost no personality. He was courteous, he was pleasant but otherwise … Ha! on me. I should say. It took me quite some time in life to see what I was looking at, and even longer to realize that that this very seemingly unassuming man wearing what looked like a white wig (I thought it was his real hair …!) would one day be a museum!
I should add, in self-defense: like many others, I came to understand Warhol, who was his art, who lived his art and knew what he was assuming. It was he, more than anyone, who was the influence on my own work as a writer. The media was his art. also.
Before we show you Mary’s snapshots of Andy Warhol’s Memorial Service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the luncheon that followed, I was of course reminded of Charlie Scheips’ and Christophe Von Hohenberg’s Andy Warhol: The Day the Factory Died (Empire Editions; 2006).
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a beautifully presented paperback book in the form of a hip little Smythson diary, which captures a veritable time capsule of the social swirl of the era that Warhol had such an enormous role in shaping. Von Hohenberg beautifully and candidly captured the elite of New York at Warhol’s last “happening.” Warhol would have liked all of it.
Now, here’s Mary’s version of that important day in history …
