Pop artist ANDY WARHOL’s secret Time Capsules have just been opened AND in one, a rare vintage ENQUIRER – preserved for all mankind.
If he wasn’t one of the most acclaimed popped tarts of the art world, Warhol might have been just another hoarding kook.
At the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh over 610 boxed contents which Andy had referred to as 'Time Capsules' have just been unsealed, and are in the process of being catalogued.
And in Andy Warhol, Time Capsule 25, amid the remnants of 1960s nuclear age JFK Dead!, Marilyn Monroe, snapshots, thumbtacks, Leo Gorcey and The Bowery Boys, is a vintage National ENQUIRER from the early 1960s.
Of course, The National ENQUIRER and Andy Warhol go waaaaay back.
One of the earliest examples of the nascent artist’s pre-fame was his own hand-drawn version of The ENQUIRER – drawn in ballpoint pen, its fraying newsprint decomposing but now permanently displayed under glass.
And for several of his famous photobooth series from 1963 he used Susan Hochman making different expressions as she perused the now-classic copy of The ENQUIRER with the headline “KILLER I HIRED STRANGLES MY HUSBAND!”
"All the times I was helping him packing and sealing them, it's not like he'd just throw stuff in,” Warhol’s former personal assistant Benjamin Liu divulged. “The Time Capsule (was) a source-material for a lot of his work. Even the personal stuff that people sent to him, he might look at it and go: 'Maybe that could be so-and-so'."
And certainly, nothing put the pop in POP ART like The National ENQUIRER – then, now, and always.
The "Andy Warhol, Time Capsule" exhibit at the Warhol Museum opens Sept. 28th. http://www.warhol.org/museum/
