"I wish I hadn't made so many images," Andy Warhol fretted to a reporter from The Times in 1970, the day before his first big survey exhibition opened to the public at the Pasadena Art Museum. "I wanted the Pasadena show to be one image--the wallpaper with the cow's heads. One image. That would be nice."
In hindsight, it's easy to see why the celebrity-mad Pop artist thought it would be so nice to devote an entire museum retrospective exclusively to that one image. The wallpaper features a shocking pink bovine repeated against an electric yellow background. The jaunty cow might at first look like Borden's Elsie, but the wallpaper is really a cinematic self-portrait of Warhol. How it is, and why that meant so much to him, are questions whose answers take a bit of explaining.
Raised Byzantine Catholic, Warhol understood the power of an icon. He had shown the wallpaper in a room by itself at New York's Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, and in 1968 he had used it to cover the entire facade of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden. But Los Angeles was different. For Warhol, L.A. was Mecca. It was Hollywood, where Marilyn, Liz and Elvis--stars of his paintings in the 1960s--lighted up the silver screen.
In 1965, just as his Pop art career was exploding internationally, Warhol had famously announced in Paris that he was giving up painting to focus on making movies. Warhol had become a star, but what he really wanted was to direct.
His work in underground films was flourishing. Cheeky pictures like 1964's "Empire," in which the ironic subject of an eight-hour motion picture was an utterly immovable object--Manhattan's phallic Empire State Building--created a stir in the small arena of avant-garde cinema. His 1966 epic, "The Chelsea Girls," became a bona-fide art-house sensation, receiving wide distribution and national press. An unscripted mix of documentary narratives about the eccentric denizens of Manhattan's low-rent Chelsea Hotel, its reels are projected in random order on two screens simultaneously, side by side. "The Chelsea Girls" is Warhol's "Grand Hotel," playing out in real-life reel life the famous epigram of that 1932 Hollywood masterpiece: "People come, people go. Nothing ever changes."
