Andy Warhol would have been 85 today, and while the Andy Warhol Museum is celebrating by livestreaming his grave, we're going a little less morbid and looking at his stretched out 15 minutes with 15 fun facts. Did you know...
- His first commission was from Glamour Magazine—he did the illustration accompanying an article called Success Is A Job In New York. It appeared in the September 1949 issue.
- He was a Mad Men man—he started out in advertisements, winning the Art Director’s Club Medal for a shoe advertisement in 1957. Here he is as a young man in the 1950s:
- He was hanging out at Serendipity 3 on East 58th Street back in 1954, when it opened. It was his favorite sweet shop.
- He was rejected by MoMA around that time.
- He once said: “If you want to know all about me, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
- He was really into WWF wrestling.
- He had a show on MTV:
- He wore those glasses because he had lazy eyes, they had a tiny pinhole for him to see through.
- He was the producer of the first Velvet Underground album, and he painted the cover art, too. You know the one.
- In 1966, he took out an ad in the Village Voice that read: "I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK ‘N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY; love and kisses Andy Warhol."
- He took out a lot of ads:
- The East Village's Polish National Home was turned into the Dom Restaurant in the '60s, and Andy Warhol sublet the ballroom upstairs, turning it into a nightclub called the Open Stage. The Velvet Underground was the house band. In 1967 this became the Electric Circus (as seen on Mad Men).
- The IRS first audited Warhol in 1972, and they did so every year through his death in 1987.
- He had a lot of famous guests stay at his five-home Eothen estate in Montauk, including Keith Richards.
- He did one of those dope Braniff Airlines commercials:
