The film is Burns' cinematic argument that Warhol was the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century. (Picasso is credited with having that honor in the first half of the 20th century.)
In one segment, Burns compares Warhol's portraits of such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with the icons of saints that Warhol saw in his boyhood Byzantine Catholic parish, where he spent many hours as a child.
Burns follows Warhol through his meteoric rise in New York's commercial art world during the 1950s. Burns cites 1962, the year Warhol first exhibited his soup can paintings in Los Angeles, as the turning point in Warhol's career.
Burns also describes in detail Valerie Solanas' near-fatal shooting of Warhol in 1968.
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
New York: A Documentary Film is an eight-part, 17½ hour, American documentary film on the history of New York City. It was directed by Ric Burns and originally aired in the U.S. on PBS. The film was a production of Steeplechase Films in association with WGBH Boston, Thirteen/WNET, and The New-York Historical Society.
John Cannizzaro Jr., better known as John Canemaker, is an American independent animator, animation historian, author, teacher and lecturer. In 1980, he began teaching and developing the animation program at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts', Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Department. Since 1988 he has directed the program and is currently a tenured full professor. From 2001-2002 he was Acting Chair of the NYU Undergraduate Film and Television Department. In 2006, his film The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, a 28-minute animated piece about Canemaker's relationship with his father, won the Academy Award for best animated short. In 2007 the same piece picked up an Emmy award for its graphic and artistic design.
Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by."
Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He has been described as a key figure of theatre and opera from the last 50 years.
Jazz is a 2001 television documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns. It was broadcast on PBS in 2001 and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. Its chronological and thematic episodes provided a history of jazz, emphasizing innovative composers and musicians and American history.
Blue Movie is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States, and is regarded as a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn. It helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon, in which porn was publicly discussed by celebrities and taken seriously by film critics, in modern American culture, and later, in many other countries throughout the world. According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris, an internationally controversial erotic drama film starring Marlon Brando and released a few years after Blue Movie was made. Viva and Louis Waldon, playing themselves, starred in Blue Movie.
Chelsea Girls is a 1966 American experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films. It was shot at the Hotel Chelsea and other locations in New York City, and follows the lives of several of the young women living there, and stars many of Warhol's superstars. The film is presented in a split screen, accompanied by alternating soundtracks attached to each scene and an alternation between black-and-white and color photography. The original cut runs at just over three hours long.
Isabelle Collin Dufresne, known professionally as Ultra Violet, was a French-American artist, author, and both a colleague of Andy Warhol and one of his so-called Superstars. Earlier in her career, she worked for and studied with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Dufresne lived and worked in New York City, and also had a studio in Nice, France.
Sleep is a 1964 American avant-garde film by Andy Warhol. Lasting five hours and 21 minutes, it consists of looped footage of John Giorno, Warhol's lover at the time, sleeping.
Henry Geldzahler was a Belgian-born American curator of contemporary art in the late 20th century, as well as a historian and critic of modern art. He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, and for his social role in the art world with a close relationship with contemporary artists.
Taylor Mead was an American writer, actor and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol's underground films filmed at Warhol's Factory, including Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of (1963) and Taylor Mead's Ass (1964).
Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.
Peter Mark Brant Sr. is an American industrialist and art collector. He is married to model Stephanie Seymour. He was also a magazine publisher until 2018 and a film producer.
James Sanders is an architect, author, and filmmaker in New York City, whose work has garnered him a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy Award, and elevation to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects, among other honors.
Brian Keane is an American composer, music producer, and guitarist. Keane has been described as "a musician's musician, a composer's composer, and one of the most talented producers of a generation" by Billboard magazine.
Steeplechase Films is a documentary production company founded in 1989 by filmmaker Ric Burns. They produce films focusing on events and people in American history, mainly for the PBS series American Experience. Ric and his company are best known for the eight-part, seventeen-and-a-half-hour series, New York: A Documentary Film, which premiered nationally on PBS to wide public and critical acclaim when broadcast in three installments in November 1999, September 2001, and September 2003.
The 55th Street Playhouse—periodically referred to as the 55th Street Cinema and Europa Theatre—was a 253-seat movie house at 154 West 55th Street, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, that opened on May 20, 1927. Many classic art and foreign-language films, including those by Jean Cocteau, Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, and Orson Welles, were featured at the theater. Later, Andy Warhol presented many of his notable films in this building in the late 1960s. Other notable films were also shown at the theater, including Boys in the Sand (1971) and Him (1974).
Dos Cabezas is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982. The double portrait resulted from Basquiat's first formal meeting with his idol, American pop artist Andy Warhol.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is a painting created by American artist Andy Warhol in 1982. Warhol made multiple silkscreen portraits of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat using his "piss paintings."
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
