‘Andy Warhol and Friends’: Steve Schapiro’s Intimate Photos of Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick

Via Rolling Stone

December 21, 2022

Warhol at a New York party with Edie Sedgwick, 1965. “In the years that I photographed Andy, I never saw him out of his ‘character’ — except in this one photo,” Schapiro writes in the book. “He looks so charmed by his friend Edie. I find this picture to be very endearing. I call this image Andy Loves Edie.”

By 1965, Andy Warhol had already revolutionized the art world with his depictions of soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Brillo boxes. His interests grew to include rock & roll — he started managing the Velvet Underground and eventually produced their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico — and he began making even more films, which starred members of his retinue including Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, and Mary Woronov, among others. Seeing how he fascinated the world, Life magazine hired photojournalist Steve Schapiro to document Warhol's cultural ascension. Ultimately, the magazine never published the story.

Schapiro, who died earlier this year after a long and distinguished career which also included many well-known images from the Civil Rights Movement, excavated the negatives from his Life shoot for a book that's just been released. Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965 – 1966 includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol's life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come. Included are scenes from the artist's Silver Clouds exhibition in L.A. and many shots of the Velvet Underground at work, as well as an essay and captions by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. What follows are some of Schapiro's eye-opening images from Andy Warhol and Friends.

Full slide show here

COMPOSING THE ARTIST EXHIBITION REVIEW IN ARTNEWS

Steve Schapiro: Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965

Composing The Artist
Monroe Gallery of Photography

via ARTnews
Summer, 2011 Issue
This exhibition of black-and-white photographic portraits felt like a series of encounters with some of the great writers and artists of the 20th century. Steve Schapiro’s images of René Magritte are striking for the way they seamlessly and surrealistically frame the painter in front of—and thereby illusionistically within—his own paintings. One almost expects to see words in careful cursive spelling out “This is not a Magritte” across the surface of the print, so convincingly do these images embody the self-reflective paradoxes for which the Belgian Surrealist is known.

Carl Mydans’s shot of Vladimir Nabokov leaning out a car window, looking at us with eyes that are somehow both piercing and laconic and a slight grin on his face, inspired a new level of appreciation for the writer’s prodigious wit and perverse intelligence. Iconic portraits of David Hockney, Picasso, and Warhol were also on view here, but coming face-to-face with William Faulkner was a rarer treat.

The gallery’s pairing of a Martha Holmes picture of Jackson Pollock pouring paint and an Ernst Haas image of Helen Frankenthaler caught in the same activity exposes the contrasting temperaments of the artists. Pollock crouches, cigarette dangling, flinging strands of pigment from a besmirched bucket with an expression of intensity, while Frankenthaler carefully bends at the waist to spill a quantity of paint from a parkling stainless-steel pail. She is deliberate, even delicate in her approach.

-- Jon Carver
Summer 2011