Boxes offer glimpse into Warhol's life

By Todd Spanfler
Associated Press

Famed artist Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, made mundane objects into art. Associated Press library photo • 1976

The man was an inveterate pack rat.

Memos and letters. Receipts. Junk mail and cigarette packs. In cardboard boxes stuffed full of clutter by the late pop art icon and his workers, the flotsam of life — including cheap religious portraits,

in-flight menus and boxing posters — mingles with items such as a pair of Clark Gable's shoes and Warhol's own hand-crafted artwork.

One had a gift from Salvador Dali in it — wax paper palettes the painter had used. Another featured a Jean Harlow dress, shoved inside a manila envelope. A third had rancid pizza dough inside.

One had a gentle gold-leaf relief of a flower on paper, signed as an authentic Warhol (by his mom, who did such tasks for him in the 1950s).

And that's only in the hundred or so boxes they've gotten around to opening at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. There are hundreds more — in total there are more than 600 boxes, files and trunks — the museum staff hasn't had time to crack.

"Opening a box is a real pain," said assistant archivist Matt Wrbican, who has opened his share and remembers a particularly tedious month spent cataloging all the items in a box full of mail. "You don't know what's coming."

Sometime in the 1960s — and becoming much more regimented in the mid-1970s — Warhol and his colleagues started taking some of the clutter growing around the artist at The Factory (his New York studio) and at his home and dumping it into these boxes. Most are dated. Some have headings on them: One, with ticket stubs, salt and pepper containers and little liquor bottles from the Concorde has "Air France" scrawled on it by Warhol.

Most are labeled "T.C." — for time capsule — suggesting that Warhol, who made fortune and fame by turning seemingly banal marketing images of soup cans and celebrities into art, knew exactly what he was doing.

"I think of our time capsules as the Rosetta Stone of Warhol's work," said Tom Sokolowski, the director of the museum, which got the boxes after the artist's death in 1987.

"We never know what we're going to find. ... It's part lottery, that notion of the game."

Warhol, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, was not only a pack rat but was also a serious collector.

By the time of his death, Warhol's collection of stuff had taken over his home.