The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
Andy at the newsstand

'Tis a pity in some ways that the generally thought-provoking and rigorous essays and illustrations in the catalog from the recent "Warhol: Headlines" exhibition could not have pursued further the direction of some of H. Cotter's terrific insights in his review here: the "golden age of print journalism" of the 1940s, with the phenomenon of the lurid tabloid headline, that "shot of visual adrenaline that nailed the eye at every newsstand," making of each pedestrian a "sidewalk scopophiliac."

Not that TiR would want to impose on Headlines curator Molly Donovan its own ruminations on the sadly uniform CEMization (light on the printed matter, heavy on the Snapple) of the streets Warhol once walked (or, more likely, cabbed), ruminations of a kind captured well enough in any event a couple months ago by the typically brilliant Jeremiah Moss, here.


. . . . shame too that the catalog can't find a way to mention one of the greatest artworks inspired by a newspaper headline glimpsed on the street:
                  

          I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

Is Frank O'Hara's poem on its way to becoming an American classic? Type "Lana Turner" into Google, and the second option offered to you is "has collapsed."

David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde supplies the date of the New York Post headline that O'Hara glimpsed: February 9, 1962.

What was Warhol up to around then? A general chronology is here.


Regardless, the Headlines catalog is entirely redeemed by gorgeously large, double-page reproduction of a Bob Adelman shot that has now become TiR's favorite image of Warhol, viewable on Adelman's site here.

At which midtown newsstand was the photo taken? One wonders.

On what date was the photo taken? Some clues appear. For example, another shot on the photographer's site from the same shoot, here, announces Frank D. O'Connor's jumping into the mayor's race. Yet another photo from the same day shows Warhol reading yet another newspaper, the Voice, identified by the current issue of the same paper as the edition of May 6, 1965.

That publication's same current issue commemorates Warhol's death, which precedes by exactly 25 years this blog post.

[Slow blog month/year.

Less blogging = more "living"??

                                            Bah.]

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM