WI 1.3 | The Summer Warhol Joined the Avant-Garde

Today, Andy Warhol is such a famous artist that it’s easy to forget how long it took for him to shoehorn his way into the world of fine art. For more than a decade after arriving in New York from Pittsburgh, in June of 1949, he was known for his success as a commercial illustrator—a success that didn’t carry much weight among New York’s “serious” artists.

It took thirteen years for him to get his first solo show of Pop Art, in July of 1962, when his Campbell’s Soup paintings went on view at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—not much of a coup, by the standards of New York’s much bigger, more influential scene. (Warhol didn’t bother crossing the country for his own show.)

Things picked up for Warhol over the year that followed, with coverage as part of the nascent Pop movement and a survey of his most recent work at Eleanor Ward’s prestigious Stable Gallery.  But there’s not much sign he’d carved a real place in New York’s avant-garde: When his portrait appears in the press, the setting is often his fancy townhouse, 80 blocks north of New York’s hip Downtown scene.

That’s changing by the summer of 1963, and we get to watch the change happen thanks to footage Warhol shot of his new milieu. The movie camera involved—a compact 16mm machine, beautifully engineered by the French company Bolex—came to Warhol from the artist who ushered him into bohemia: Wynn Chamberlain, an iconoclastic, bisexual, leather-jacketed painter who lived with his partner Sally in a classic artist’s loft on New York’s skid row, south of the city’s numbered street grid. The ushering happened, or at least was recorded, at a scruffy summer place Chamberlain was renting on farmland in Old Lyme, Connecticut, almost three hours from New York on the north side of Long Island Sound.

That’s changing by the summer of 1963, and we get to watch the change happen thanks to footage Warhol shot of his new milieu. The movie camera involved—a compact 16mm machine, beautifully engineered by the French company Bolex—came to Warhol from the artist who ushered him into bohemia: Wynn Chamberlain, an iconoclastic, bisexual, leather-jacketed painter who lived with his partner Sally in a classic artist’s loft on New York’s skid row, south of the city’s numbered street grid. The ushering happened, or at least was recorded, at a scruffy summer place Chamberlain was renting on farmland in Old Lyme, Connecticut, almost three hours from New York on the north side of Long Island Sound.

Ward, Warhol’s dealer, also rented buildings on that farm, and between invitations from her and from Chamberlain, Warhol ended up with several stays in Old Lyme that summer.

Using a movie camera for the very first time—the one he borrowed had belonged to Sally Chamberlain’s father, ¹  but Warhol soon got a Bolex of his own—the artist recorded lovely summer days surrounded by the kinds of successful avant-gardists he’d revered since art-school days.

On Independence Day weekend, ²  when a little crowd gathers at Old Lyme, Warhol points the Bolex at the Venezuelan New Yorker known simply as Marisol, whose sculptures had been borrowing from popular culture for several years before the Pop movement itself came together. As far back as 1958, Marisol had earned a solo exhibition with Leo Castelli, the intrepid dealer who Warhol himself had already tried and failed to show with. Warhol’s Bolex captures Marisol’s striking artistic persona—the “mysterious reserve and faraway, whispery voice, toneless as a sleepwalker,” that built the “Marisol legend,” as the New York Times described it. ³  We don’t hear that voice, of course, in Warhol’s silent footage, but he lets us watch, in gorgeous closeup, in color, as Marisol quite clearly and actively fails to talk, speaking with her huge dark eyes instead. Over the next few years, the whispery, mysterious persona Warhol himself constructs and adopts clearly owes a debt to Marisol’s.

The painter Robert Indiana, Warhol’s colleague in Pop, is also seen in a few of the three-minute reels Warhol shot in Old Lyme. Indiana’s solo show at Ward’s gallery had sold out right before Warhol got his slot there—merely to fill a sudden hole in Ward’s schedule—and Indiana had been part of New York’s official bohemia for some time before that. Since the mid-1950s, Indiana had lived and worked in one of the vast, cold-water lofts of Coenties Slip, a romantic setting far, far downtown, by the East River, that was also home to long-time Warhol heroes like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. (Like Warhol, all three men were gay, which gave them a special importance for him.) Warhol’s camera captures Indiana as an all-American beauty, tall, dark, and handsome.

But in some sense, Marisol and Indiana were reminders of the work Warhol still had to do to shore up his place in the art world. That winter, both had works on prominent display in a show of recent acquisitions at MoMA, whereas the museum’s new Warhol stayed in storage. ⁴  Marisol and Indiana—but not Warhol—were both in a prestigious MoMA survey of new American art that was on view just as the three were relaxing in Old Lyme that July. ⁵  Warhol might not yet be able to see his work alongside Marisol’s and Indiana’s at MoMA, but the Bolex let him show that he could now keep company with them.

The next month, Warhol recorded another new setting that stood for his first steps into New York’s deepest underground, where he’d play a central role in coming years. Chamberlain had arranged for the truly radical filmmaker Jack Smith to shoot a set-piece for his new movie, “Normal Love,” out on the farm in Old Lyme. A reel from Smith’s never-finished film shows Warhol in drag, dancing atop a 20-foot cake designed as a set by the Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Warhol’s fellow dancers include such certified Downtowners as the publisher Diane di Prima and the underground actors Taylor Mead and Ondine. (Both went on the be vital players in Warhol’s own countercultural scene, once he’d shaped it.) Warhol used his Bolex to shoot Smith’s shoot—and thereby register his presence at it—but the footage was lost when the police grabbed it while raiding a Smith screening.

But the most important relationship that Warhol recorded in Old Lyme, at least in terms of his future art, was with John Giorno, a gorgeous young poet Warhol had been dating for something like six months. One three-minute reel explores Giorno’s body as he stretches out in a hammock, naked except for a watch. (Warhol gives us glimpses of his bare crotch, prefiguring the frank homoerotica he’d start shooting the next year.) In another reel, Giorno is shown shirtless and flying a kite with Chamberlain and Indiana, or—most significantly—lying fast asleep. By the end of the summer, Giorno is starring in Warhol first work of real filmic art, and one of his most important, Sleep.

If that seems quite different from the entirely casual reels Warhol had shot in Old Lyme, which are more like home movies than considered artworks, it has vital roots in them. Both Sleep and the home movies are much more about pointing out notable things in the world (philosophers call this “ostension”) than about giving those subjects some evidently artistic treatment. “Sleep” does nothing but register someone sleeping, just as the Old Lyme reels register, quite directly, the avant-garde world Warhol has entered—and both Sleep and the reels continue the “ostensional” project Warhol had begun with his Campbell’s Soups.

When Warhol had first shown his soup paintings in L.A., many critics saw them as completely transparent to the subjects they showed—as doing nothing more than pointing (“ostending”) toward a bunch of soup cans, without adding any kind of “artistic” content or quality or commentary.

The least prepossessing of all the reels Warhol shot in Old Lyme may most clearly reveal the simple pointing-out that Warhol was perfecting, vastly influential for so much later art. The footage documents a walk Warhol took, alone, around and inside the old stone house that Ward was renting. He simply points the Bolex here and there, at things that catch his interest: A pile of firewood; spices on a window sill; an occasional artwork on the wall or table, given no more attention than the spices. There’s no rhyme or reason; just one object after another.

Not a bad definition of Warhol’s art, at its most radical.

Art critic and biographer Blake Gopnik is the author of Warhol, a comprehensive life of the artist (Ecco, 2020) and of The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and his American Dream (Ecco, 2025).

 

Text © Blake Gopnik