Portraits

1963–1968

Warhol the filmmaker: hundreds of reels

From 1963 to 1968 Warhol shot several hundred reels: 472 four-minute portrait Screen Tests, dozens of short films and more than 150 narrative films, only 60 of which were ever released.

1968

Moderna Museet exhibition and the “Electric Chairs”

By then Warhol had largely stopped painting, but he soon resumed and produced the Big Electric Chair paintings for his 1968 exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

1968

The Factory becomes a business

While Warhol was in hospital, Paul Morrissey took over filmmaking and directed his first film, Flesh (1968). After the shooting Warhol set about making the Factory a structured business, crediting Morrissey with turning it into a “regular office”.

3 June 1968

The shooting at the Factory

The writer Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, who had appeared in his film I, a Man, shot Warhol and the art critic Mario Amaya; Amaya was lightly injured, while Warhol was seriously wounded and spent nearly two months in hospital. Solanas turned herself in to the police a few hours later, saying that Warhol had too much control over her life.

autumn 1969

Founding Interview magazine

Together with the British journalist John Wilcock, Warhol founded Interview magazine, at first published as inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal. It was revamped a few years later and came to reflect Warhol's social life and fascination with celebrity.

1970–1971

The retrospective from Pasadena to the Whitney

In 1970 the Pasadena Art Museum organised a Warhol retrospective that travelled on to Chicago, Eindhoven, Paris, London and, in 1971, the Whitney Museum in New York. At the Whitney the Cow wallpaper (1966) served as the backdrop for the paintings.