WI 1.1 | Warhol’s Time in Old Lyme

Andy Warhol travelled to the Becket Hill estate in Old Lyme, Connecticut on several occasions in the summer of 1963. He went to Old Lyme for pleasure more than business, but his social life and art career were so inextricably intertwined, even his holiday trips proved to be fruitful. On these short vacations, Warhol socialized with fellow artists, solidified his amicable relationship with an art dealer, nurtured his romance with John Giorno, and started to experiment with filmmaking.

Both Wynn Chamberlain and Eleanor Ward invited Warhol to Old Lyme that summer. ¹  Chamberlain—an artist, theater producer, film director, and novelist—had known Warhol since the 1950s. For five summers, he rented a farmhouse and barn studio from Frank and Hilya Mallett, a pair of “Buddhist nudists” who owned the Becket Hill estate in Old Lyme. ²  Eleanor Ward, the art dealer who ran the Stable Gallery in Manhattan, visited Chamberlain at the barn studio and found herself enchanted by the rustic charm and beauty of the area. She started renting the icehouse and other outbuildings on the same estate, decorating the spaces with pieces from her coveted modern art collection, including one of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. ³ 

In November of 1962, Ward gave Warhol his first Pop Art one man show in New York City. ⁴  While Warhol had exhibited his work in New York before, his 1950s exhibitions took place in smaller galleries and featured his more obscure pen and ink drawings of shoes, fairies, crushes, and lovers. Those exhibitions brought him neither financial success nor critical acclaim. In seeking a venue for his first Pop Art paintings, Warhol needed to go all the way to the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles to find someone willing to show his Campbell’s Soup Cans. After the success of his Ferus exhibition in July of 1962, major New York dealers like Ward began to recognize his potential. Ward mentioned in multiple interviews that she was sunbathing on the lawn in Old Lyme when the idea suddenly popped into her mind to use Warhol to fill a gap in her exhibition schedule. ⁵ 

At the opening of the Stable Gallery show, Chamberlain introduced Warhol to his friend John Giorno. ⁶  At the time, Giorno worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street by day and wrote avant-garde poetry by night. Giorno was handsome, talented, charismatic, and loved Pop Art. Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elvis Presley, as well as the paintings of soup cans and dollar bills, made an instant impression on Giorno; “I had an instinctive flash that this was one of the moments that change history.” ⁷  Giorno and Warhol continued to run into each other at film screenings and art openings. Early in 1963, a dinner party hosted by Chamberlain helped ignite the romance between the two men. ⁸ 

That spring, Warhol and Giorno attended dozens of underground film screenings together, most of them organized by Jonas Mekas, cofounder of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Giorno later wrote that, “These films had an enormous impact on Andy. It was where he got the idea to make movies. He saw what film was, what it could be.” ⁹  In May of 1963, Warhol finally got the opportunity to start making movies of his own.

Warhol shot his first films on a 16mm 1929 Bolex camera that belonged to the father of Sally Stokes, then girlfriend and future wife of Chamberlain. ¹⁰  Ward’s Old Lyme icehouse became one of his first subjects. “Country” begins with exterior shots of the vines covering the icehouse and the pile of firewood near the entrance.

Once inside the icehouse, Warhol and his camera explore the many jars and vessels on the kitchen shelves, evidence of his well-known fascination with the contents of pantries. In between shots of antique dishware and glimpses out the window, savvy viewers may recognize works from Ward’s art collection, including Untitled (Hôtel de l’Etoile), 1954, a box construction by Joseph Cornell. ¹¹  After capturing a few more small jars and returning multiple times to a vase filled with flowers on the table, Warhol revisits the vines and the firewood outside, concluding with overexposed and often blurry shots of Old Lyme foliage.

By 1963, his passion for the mundane had already manifested in several early Pop Art paintings of food products and furniture. With “Country”, we see that even when Warhol first started experimenting with motion pictures, he didn’t feel the need to document anything that might actually move. Instead, by toggling back and forth between kitchenware and artworks with Warhol’s typical nonchalance, he shows the viewer that he does not see much of a distinction between the two.

The film [Wynn Chamberlain, John Giorno, Robert Indiana, Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1963] also begins as a quiet interior study. Warhol initially focuses his camera on the shoes of his boyfriend, Giorno. The camera gradually pans up to the wrinkled sheets of the bed that the two men shared. Despite empty shoes and an empty bed, Warhol shows us indications of Giorno’s presence in his life. These shots convey that Warhol appreciated the textures of unmade beds and, as Bruce Jenkins describes them in The Films of Andy Warhol, “the sculptural traces of bodies that had previously occupied the space.” ¹²  Although this portion of the film, like “Country”, consists only of shots of inanimate objects, it provides a window into Warhol and Giorno’s intimate relationship.

After a minute of shoes and sheets, Warhol finally shows us some human subjects. A shirtless Robert Indiana, the Pop artist most known for his graphic depictions of the word “LOVE,” smiles in the sun and chats with someone off-camera. Then we see Giorno napping in the grass; Warhol’s camera slowly follows his outstretched arm up to his head and shoulders. This shot gives us a preview of what would become Warhol’s first major film work, Sleep, documenting Giorno sleeping in his New York apartment for five and a half hours. But here, Giorno’s slumber is brief.

Warhol abruptly cuts to a series of quick shots of Giorno and Chamberlain attempting to fly a kite. By the end of the film, the men have succeeded and the kite is airborne; Warhol’s camera trained on the kite sailing in the bright sky.

In [John Giorno, Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1963], Giorno also stays awake for most of the film, but we see even more connections to his future starring role in Sleep. Giorno reclines in a hammock throughout the film, wakeful but nonetheless in repose. Within thirty seconds, Warhol reveals Giorno’s full nudity; it takes almost an hour for the viewer to see as much of Giorno’s body in Sleep. Over the next two minutes, Warhol’s camera lovingly studies Giorno’s figure, panning from toe to head and back, capturing the shadows of the leaves from the trees overhead. In the last fifteen seconds, we see that Giorno has fallen asleep after all, his head peacefully resting against his arm.

During Warhol’s experimentation with filmmaking in Old Lyme, he used both black-and-white and color film. In [Wynn Chamberlain, John Giorno, Robert Indiana, Marisol, Ted Sandler, Eleanor Ward, Old Lyme Connecticut, 1963], the pink light of a summer’s day illuminates a larger cast of Old Lyme visitors: Indiana, Giorno, Chamberlain, Ward, the interior decorator Ted Sandler and the Pop Art sculptor Marisol. ¹³  Warhol records the group laughing, smoking, and drinking on the lawn, then cuts to a series of individual shots of faces and feet. Most of their shoes are wet with dew.

His camera lingers the longest on Marisol, a friend and fellow artist from Ward’s Stable Gallery. Earlier in 1963, Marisol had finished a nearly five-foot-tall sculpture of Warhol sitting in a chair, to which Warhol donated an old pair of shoes. Marisol would appear in a number of Warhol’s films through 1964, including Kiss and two Screen Tests. On the day he filmed [Wynn Chamberlain, John Giorno, Robert Indiana, Marisol, Ted Sandler, Eleanor Ward, Old Lyme Connecticut, 1963], Warhol and Marisol were at play rather than at work. Seen with her dark hair, blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick, she evokes the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor that Warhol painted that same year.

The other color film that Warhol shot in Old Lyme, [Eleanor Ward’s 55th Birthday Party, Old Lyme, Connecticut, July 6, 1963], is much less vibrant than [Wynn Chamberlain, John Giorno, Robert Indiana, Marisol, Ted Sandler, Eleanor Ward, Old Lyme Connecticut, 1963]. The film stars Ward’s birthday cake, whose candles provide the only light in an otherwise darkened room. The low lighting of the footage does not allow the viewer to see the cake in detail or get a sense of its size.

At some moments, Warhol shows us complete blackness, contrasting with the orange glow of the candlelit cake. In many of his early movies, Warhol rejects filmmaking conventions such as narrative and character development. In [Eleanor Ward’s 55th Birthday Party, Old Lyme, Connecticut, July 6, 1963], he even denies the viewer a clear setting, instead taking advantage of the overwhelming darkness of the space.

Tragically, Warhol’s most infamous Old Lyme film has been lost for more than six decades.

Jack Smith, an underground filmmaker who greatly inspired Warhol, spent a weekend in August of 1963 in Old Lyme to shoot a scene for his unfinished magnum opus, Normal Love. Smith’s large and eclectic cast—which included Marisol, drag queen Mario Montez, poet Diane di Prima, and musician Tony Conrad—journeyed to Old Lyme to shoot a scene consisting of an unchoreographed dance sequence atop a twenty-foot-wide cake sculpture made by Claes Oldenburg. ¹⁴ 

Warhol both participated in the scene and shot a newsreel entitled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love.” Warhol later wrote about what he learned from observing Smith’s shoot, “I picked something up from him for my own movies—the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored.” ¹⁵ 

Jonas Mekas organized film screenings which included Smith’s 1963 film Flaming Creatures, clips of Normal Love, and Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love.” On March 3, 1964, NYPD detectives raided one of the screenings, arrested Mekas and a half-dozen other attendees, and confiscated all of the films involved. ¹⁶   Mekas and one of his colleagues were convicted of violating obscenity laws, but they received suspended sentences and the United States Supreme Court eventually dismissed their appeal because they no longer faced the threat of imprisonment. ¹⁷  While the filmmakers managed to avoid jailtime, the NYPD did not return Warhol’s film. ¹⁸  As Warhol had not made any copies, Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love” was never to be seen again.

Warhol’s description of the Old Lyme scene in his 1980 book, Popism, sounds more chaotic than the peaceful moments we witness in his films: “Since there were as many as forty people out in Old Lyme every weekend, there were never enough beds; but most of the guests didn’t sleep anyway.” ¹⁹  He also points out that the Old Lyme summer established a precedent for the scene that he went on to cultivate at the Silver Factory the following year, “That summer out in Old Lyme was a prelude to all the craziness later. People were up all night wandering around the grounds smoking dope or playing records back at the house. Every weekend was a nonstop party—no one broke the weekend up into days, everything just flowed into everything else.” ²⁰  The films that Warhol shot in Old Lyme also “flowed into everything else” in that they feature people and aesthetic choices that show up later in Warhol’s movies and visual art.

Giorno, Chamberlain, Indiana, Smith, and Marisol all appear in other films that Warhol shot in the 1960s. He worked with Ward again in 1964 on the debut exhibition of his Brillo Boxes and other box sculptures. He used unorthodox, anti-narrative filmmaking methods and in-camera editing techniques in several subsequent movies. Warhol’s first forays into filmmaking show us his memories, his relationships, and the subjects he valued. The inspiration he found during his time in Old Lyme manifested in countless other projects after that fateful summer.