Andy Warhol's Home Movies, Part I

When he wasn't painting soup tins, the Pope of Pop Art made movies that made a mockery of the mainstream. If his films were strange, the fact he became a Hollywood darling was surreal.

“Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall.
Andy Warhol silver screen
Can’t tell them apart at all.”
- David Bowie, ‘Andy Warhol’

You mightn’t have thought it to look at him but Andy Warhol was one of the modern art world’s workaholics. Not content with painting Brillo boxes and a certain brand of soup can, the man born Andrew Warhola Jr also found time to launch his own magazine, Interview, and produce The Velvet Underground’s eponymous debut LP. And then there were his movies.

Between 1963 and 1968, Andy Warhol made more than 60 films. That extraordinary total doesn’t include his signature ‘screentests‘ - black-and-white shorts he made whenever someone new visited his Factory studio. If it did, the number would be around the 600 mark.