POPism: The Warhol Sixties

A cultural storm swept through the 1960s-Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, “happenings,” underground movies, the British invasion and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol Warhol knew everybody-from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens — and everybody knew Andy.

His studio, The Factory, was the place: where Warhol created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined “Pop Art,” where one could listen to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick, where The Chelsea Girls and other Warhol underground film classics were shot, and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant garde.

Anecdotal, funny, frank, POPism is where Warhol, in the same detached, back-fence gossip style he was famous for, tells it all—the ultimate inside story of a decade of cultural revolution. And no one escapes his notice: the famous of the art world (Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), the infamous of the drug culture (Pope Ondine, the Duchess), rising stars (Viva, Ultra Violet, the Rolling Stones), and fading stars (Judy Garland, Nico) are all on display here. But it is Warhol who has the final word.