Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs that Warhol selected for his 1979 book Andy Warhol’s Exposures. The exhibition will feature over 70 unique vintage black and white photographic prints. It will be accompanied by a new book, Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures (Steidl/Kasher, 2010), edited and with an introduction by Bob Colacello (who was executive editor of the original book as well). Starting in 1976, Warhol shot several rolls of film every week and selected images for the 1979 book. He had intended to title it Social Diseases, but his concept was heavily watered down by his publishers at the time and many of the selected images were removed. Colacello writes:
There is a sense of intimacy as well as of voyeurism, of funny-looking, insecure, wistful Andy, through flattery and attentiveness, trying to connect. Yet, because he was not just any photographer but a famous artist, a star, there is often a sense that the looking is being done at the man with the camera as well as by him. In some cases, the subjects are clearly performing for their fellow luminary, or close friend, or boss. As spontaneous as these images may seem, they are intrinsically staged, with Warhol himself as both chronicler and catalyst of the moments he is documenting.
And what moments they are! Only Andy could get David Hockney in extra-brief running shorts, or Susan Sontag batting her eyelashes across a fancy restaurant table at Gloria Vanderbilt, or Halston’s Venezuelan window dresser and lover, Victor Hugo, sitting under Goya’s Red Boy in Kitty Miller’s Park Avenue parlor. Here’s Faye Dunaway smooching fashion designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo; Paloma Picasso spreading her hands to indicate the width of one of her father’s paintings; Margaret Trudeau, Canada’s First Lady, chatting up Milos Forman. Indeed, almost all the face cards of the late 70s scene are here, at ease behind the velvet rope: brash Steve Rubell and reticent Ian Schrager, Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller with Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger beside Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Diana Ross, Tatum and Ryan O’Neal, Liz Taylor deep in her Senator John Warner period, Arnold Schwarzenegger before politics, and O.J. Simpson when everyone still loved him. So are the footnotes of celebrity history: Elvis’s ex, Priscilla Presley, with her Scientologist model boyfriend, and Ruth Kligman, the woman who was in the car with Jackson Pollack when he crashed it into a tree and was killed. And let’s not forget—Andy didn’t—Don King, boxing impresario; little Edie Beale, Jackie’s batty cousin; Famous Amos, the cookie king, and Norman the neighborhood coke dealer, if your neighborhood happened to be the West Village. Enough! You get the picture. Andy always did.
Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures will be on view March 2 through April 3, 2010.
