Andy Warhol’s famed Screen Tests are ready for their closeup. Christie’s and the Andy Warhol Museum will stage an exhibition of eight silent films by Warhol at the auction house’s Beverly Hills galleries, timed to coincide with the opening of Frieze Los Angeles.
In keeping with the artist’s complex relationship with fame, mass media and celebrity culture, the selection brings together films that feature pop culture icons such as Dennis Hooper and Bob Dylan, as well as New York downtown fixtures Edie Sedgwick, Donyale Luna and Jane Holzer, as well as Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle. “Hollywood was everything to Andy from the time he was a boy in smoky, gritty Pittsburgh and would escape to the cinema and the land of make believe,” says Patrick Moore, the director of the Pittsburgh-based Andy Warhol Museum.
Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, 1965. 16mm film, color, silent, 4.4 minutes at 16 frames per second. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum
At just over four minutes, each film portrait shows a singular subject staring at the camera with a deadpan expression, in almost complete stillness. “Andy’s project was to create his own studio with his own stars drawn from both high society and the fringes,” Moore says. The non-selling exhibition will afford some screentime to a part of Warhol’s oeuvre that has remained relatively inaccessible to a wider audience. Unlike his wildly popular prints and silkscreened canvases, the 16mm black and white films he produced mostly in the 1960s have remained comparatively obscure. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York screened some of them as part of its 2018 retrospective, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again.
The exhibition at Christie’s Los Angeles, Andy Warhol Screen Tests (27 February-14 March), will mark the first time the films featuring Holzer and Segwick have been screened outside the Andy Warhol Museum. “In today’s digital world, these films have largely become inaccessible, viewable only though technology that is quickly becoming obsolete,” says Sonya Roth, Christie’s deputy chairman.
Andy Warhol, Lou Reed (Coke), 1966. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum
The museum hopes the show will draw attention to its Film Initiative, which preserves the artist’s films for future generations and new technologies. The films are “a treasure trove and a key part of Warhol’s legacy”, Moore says. They are being digitised as part of the museum’s efforts to make Warhol’s moving image works more widely available. Collaborative exhibitions during the extensive transferring process of hundreds of films will help the museum “remind people of the importance of the films”, Moore adds.
For Christie’s, hosting the show concurrently with Frieze Los Angeles (29 February-3 March) and the 2024 Academy Awards (10 March) not only activates its local facilities but also makes “a powerful tie-in with the entertainment industry”, Roth says.
Christie’s last made headlines with Warhol in 2022, when the artist’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold to dealer Larry Gagosian for $195m (including fees) at its New York salesroom. The result set a new record for the most expensive 20th-century work ever sold at auction.