Warhol’s beauties and celebrities come to life in Istanbul

HATİCE UTKAN

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

Displaying works that captured the beauty of the glamorous in the everyday, Istanbul’s Galerist is hosting a much-anticipated exhibition of iconic 20th-century artist Andy Warhol throughout June.

The show centers on the famous artist’s films and polaroids, which are coming to Turkey’s largest city for the first time

“The films and film portraits were very important for Warhol’s career,” Geralyn Huxley, curator of film and video at New York’s Andy Warhol Museum, as well as the curator of the Istanbul show, told the Hürriyet Daily News last week. “He spent five years totally concentrated on filming people. It was during the 1960s, when he first started the change over from commercial art to fine art.”

“I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and talk about what they usually talk about,” Warhol once said. Duly, the artist filmed famous people, aiming to show them as beautifully as they were in their daily lives while doing everyday activities.

In fact, the “real,” inner meaning behind the legendary Warhol works, such as of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, unravels itself. The videos, which reveal the hidden aspect of Warhol, also show the viewers how the artist’s interest in celebrities rose over time. Warhol transformed celebrities and created unique works with his film portraits.

“As a child, around the age of 8, Andy started to collect photographs of movie stars,” said Eric C. Shiner, acting director of the Andy Warhol Museum, told the Daily News.

“He sent letters to Hollywood studios and contacted Shirley Temple. Temple sent her photograph to Andy Warhol,” he said.

Warhol had a book of movie stars and celebrities, whom he adored; as a result, he fed his hunger for celebrities by painting and filming them.

Musician Lou Reed, writer Susan Sontag, socialite Edie Sedgwick, poet Allen Ginsberg, artist Dennis Hopper and others are featured in the films.

Warhol’s iconic works, such as Soup Cans, Elvis, and Marilyn started to gain fame as Warhol began working on his film projects. The films show a different aspect of Warhol’s art, according to Huxley.

Whereas the people and his paintings were iconic and glamorous, the people in his films were natural. Beauty had a deeper meaning for Warhol; while he valued beauty, his understanding was different than the beauty of the stars he filmed. He liked them to talk and to do everyday activities.

“Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something. Which isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that I don’t know what it is they’re being,” Warhol said in the book “The Philosophy of Warhol.”

“I really don’t care that much about ‘Beauties.’ What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love,” he said.

In such a way, Warhol was able to rediscover the stars’ real beauty – the beauty that viewers had become acquainted with before.

Noting that his videos not only showed beautiful celebrities, Huxley said: “People were still beautiful in Warhol’s videos but you could see them doing everyday activities like eating at a restaurant, cutting their hair, or talking. The films showed another aspect of Andy Warhol’s interests.”

It is possible to see Edie Sedgwick, Mario Montez and Gerard Malang in Warhol’s movies as they act normally, talk, smoke and hang out.

Galerist’s branches in Galatasaray and Pera are featuring such Warhol films as “Lupe,” starring Sedgwick and made in 1965; “Empire,” a 16-millimeter film from 1964; “Blow Jo,” another 16-millimeter film from 1964; “Camp” from 1965; “Horse,” also from 1965, and “Mario Banana No.1” from 1964.

The exhibition will continue until July 9. k HDN

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