Andy Warhol may have predicted the way we curate our lives today

By 1966, Andy Warhol was such a household name in the US that the Campbell’s Soup Company produced a paper dress in tribute to his screen prints, available to purchasers of two cans of soup for $1. By 1971, his name was familiar enough on the other side of the Atlantic to pop up on David Bowie’s Hunky-Dory album. Following his death in 1987, Warhol’s fame has continued to rise thanks to a steady stream of biopics, record-breaking auctions, bad photo filters and the ubiquitous presence of the works themselves, seemingly on a never-ending parade through the world’s great museums.

Is Warhol still exciting? Raf Simons thinks so. In 2016, when the Belgian-born designer became chief creative officer of Calvin Klein, he brokered a deal with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, giving him three years of unprecedented access to the archive. Warhol’s likeness currently appears on CK hoodies and high-tops, and his screen-printed portraits of Dennis Hopper and Sandra Brandt on leather bags. Forty eight of Warhol’s 1978-9 Shadow paintings have just gone on show in a gallery beneath the Calvin Klein headquarters in New York; the company has paid for the restoration of all 102 canvases in the series, which will eventually be displayed at Dia: Beacon, an hour north of the city.

Is Warhol still interesting? The Whitney Museum in New York thinks so—its upcoming exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again” (until March 31, 2019) is the first major retrospective since 1989. The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is also investing in Warhol. Its show “Contact Warhol: Photography Without End” (until January 6, 2019) draws on a treasury of 130,000 photographic exposures contact sheets and corresponding negatives—shot by Warhol on the portable Minox 35EL camera he bought in 1976.

What unites all three shows is a renewed focus on Warhol’s late career. “Was Warhol a prisoner of his early success? I think that is true even today,” says Donna De Salvo, chief curator of the Whitney Museum. “Even the critical community has focused more on his work of the 1960s. His work of the 1970s and 1980s was never as well regarded. I hope this show shifts that view.”

The Whitney exhibition is encyclopedic, examining Warhol’s early years as a commercial illustrator right through to his late career collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, his final exhibition and works not exhibited in his lifetime. “There’s still so much more with Warhol—he remains a figure of great interest and controversy. Is there still something to learn? I believe so,” says De Salvo. “It’s been 30 years since the last retrospective in the US—there’s a new audience, and people are reading the work differently.”

Although more widely shown in Europe, Warhol’s later work was not well received in New York. Supporting a large studio as well as his Interview magazine, he relied on his popular silk-screen portraits to keep everything afloat. Nevertheless, Warhol remained extraordinarily productive. “As an artist, he doesn’t stop. He’s incredibly inventive, but you sense the disappointment, and maybe that he’s tired of making portraits of people to pay the bills,” says De Salvo. “Had he lived longer, possibly a reappraisal of his work might have happened.”

The black and white photographs in “Contact Warhol” “were never meant to be exhibited as art in the US during his lifetime”, says Richard Meyer, co-curator and author of the Cantor Arts Center exhibition and its accompanying book. Four years of research into the contact sheets have pieced together a Warhol-eye-view of New York: street life, nightlife and sex life. It has also provided a backstory to the candid, gossipy photos that Warhol selected for his books Exposures (1979), America (1985), and Andy Warhol’s Party Book (1988).

In Exposures, Warhol describes a good photograph as “one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing unfamous things”—an ideal epitomised by his widely published snap of Bianca Jagger casually shaving her armpits while on the phone. Meyers traced the image to a contact sheet, which revealed that Jagger was seated in the designer Halston’s living room with an entourage in attendance. “When I realised it was staged, it became even more perfect,” recalls Meyers. “The idea of posing as if you’re doing something very unglamorous and every day is very Warholian.”

A fixture by 1976 among New York’s high society, Warhol had access to the beautiful, wealthy and fame-hungry. “He was a participant observer,” says Meyer. “He was invited to the parties. He was a member of this elite group and documenting them. Having a camera was a way to step back and also engage.” His documentation was by no means flattering: Warhol was obsessed with ageing and imperfection, capturing the detritus of consumer culture alongside New York’s decaying aristocracy.

Shooting a roll of film a day, Warhol used the act of taking a photograph as a punctuation point. “When he reviewed his day in his mind, he asked himself ‘What did I photograph?’” says Meyer. “It’s like cell phone photographs—I think Warhol predicted the way we curate our lives today.”