For many of the ambitious young people who circled around Andy Warhol, the enigmatic pop artist opened otherwise inaccessible doors, but also cast an inescapable shadow.
Last month, photographer Paige Powell, an old close friend of Warhol’s, listed a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting from her collection for sale at Art Basel. Powell, who returned to her native Oregon in 1994, is still defined by her time in New York, arriving in late 1980. A few months later, she began selling ads for Warhol’s Interview magazine. There she met Basquiat and was his girlfriend for a little over a year.
In her photographs, Powell captured the legendary New York of the 1980s, at a time when her connections gave her front-row access to the leading artists and scene-makers. Her photos are included this year in a Basquiat-Warhol exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and in a group exhibition that just opened at the ILY2 gallery in Portland. However, her reputation lies in her relationships with famous men: Basquiat, and especially Warhol.
The association with Warhol is even more striking for Brigid Berlin, an outsized personality from a privileged Upper East Side background, who died in 2020 at the age of 80. She arrived at Warhol’s Factory in 1965 and stayed until Warhol’s fatal gallbladder surgery in 1987. They were best friends and called each other Mr. and Mrs. Pork. Berlin, whose socialite mother introduced her to amphetamines in hopes of slimming down the overweight girl, was known in that circle as Brigid Polk, a reference to her penchant for poking herself and others with a speed syringe.
“Brigid Berlin: The Heaviest,” through August 18 at the Vito Schnabel Gallery in Manhattan’s West Village, is the most comprehensive display of her work since a 1970 exhibition at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Cologne, Germany, and it explores her diverse pursuits. She is particularly remembered for documenting factory life with a Polaroid camera and a tape recorder – two tools Warhol used with avid dedication. It is uncertain who influenced whom.
“People at the factory say she was the first to do Polaroids and audiotapes, and Andy got it from her,” says Alison Gingeras, an independent curator who curated the Schnabel exhibit. “I’ve always been drawn to these women who are outside of canonized art history. This show is a holistic look at Brigid Berlin’s complex life and work, to show that her desk was so much bigger than how she was captured through Warhol’s lens.
Gingeras described both Powell and Berlin, saying, “They have the status of acolytes and their own agency and creation are not given their due.”
In very different ways, Powell and Berlin chronicled the people who crossed paths with Warhol. Powell’s approach was more conventional. She shot, mostly in black and white, first with a 35mm camera and then for a while with a medium format Rolleiflex. A generous selection of her work is included in a box set, “Beulah Land,” published in 2019. “Andy was really the one who inspired me,” said Powell. “He was just so encouraging. My pictures were natural. They weren’t about documenting. I felt inspired.”
Despite Powell’s disclaimer, many of her photographs, especially Warhol’s, are priceless documents: Warhol with Louise Bourgeois, Warhol with Basquiat, Warhol with Keith Haring dressed as Santa Claus. Others linger in the mind as human portraits, whether or not the subject is celebrated. A soulful shot of the art dealer Leo Castelli in 1986, elegantly dressed as always, sitting with folded hands and a copy of Interview on his lap, testifies to an unspeakable world-weariness, a melancholy that photography is ideally suited to convey. Art critic Edit DeAk poses in front of a 1934 Howard Chandler Christy mural at the Café des Artistes. Her hair in a fringe, her big eyes reminiscent of Christy’s water nymph, she looks as romantic as the art.
Berlin’s export is outré. As the title of the exhibit indicates, her constant struggle to shed pounds was a central concern, sabotaged by binges in which she could easily consume two Key lime pies with whipped cream in a row. Another obsession was her mother, Muriel “Honey” Berlin, wife of Richard Berlin, the powerful and wealthy head of the Hearst Corporation, who was bitterly disappointed that Brigid had not developed into the Upper East Side socialite she had been bred to be. In a scathing voice that could scorch the bark of a tree (a snippet of a phone call Brigid recorded is included in an audio portion of the show), she disparaged and berated her adult daughter for her corpulence and seedy lifestyle.
“It Is About the weight’, proclaims a cushion embroidered by Berlin. But it was also about Honey, whom Brigid, as she grew older, came to resemble in style, temperament, and conservative Republican politics. One wall of the exhibit is covered in the custom wallpaper Brigid installed in the East 28th Street apartment where she lived from 1986 until her death in 2020. salon, but cabbage roses have been replaced by cabbage in this understated witty design.
Other remnants of her genteel surroundings, including a shadow box frame she filled with the artfully placed collars of her beloved pugs, rival in the exhibit the work that sent Honey into convulsions of name-calling. From the 1970s, using her bare breasts as paintbrushes, Berlin made ‘tit prints’ in which her pigment-laden halos produced shapes resembling balloons and angelfish. Even more scandalous are three of the chapbooks in which she kept drawings that she persuaded artists to make their penises. The self-illustrators are Jasper Johns, Leonard Cohen, Dennis Hopper, Robert Smithson and Brice Marden.
Artistically, Berlin was ahead of her time as a woman who unabashedly satisfied her sensual desires. Not that she would have called herself a feminist. “You can argue that her work has feminist content, but her conservative background counters that,” said Gingeras. There’s so much internalized misogyny in her desire to be one of the guys and have that validation. She made the “tit prints” without thinking about burning her bra. What really matters is what’s in the work.”
Like Powell, Berlin documented the Warhol entourage in many of her Polaroids. But Gingeras puts those photos into context, as just part of Berlin’s lavish output, by arranging the Polaroids into three groups — one devoted to Warholiana, the other to self-portraits, and to photographs by leading artists, including Willem de Kooning and John cage. The show closes with homages to Berlin created by contemporary artists including Francesco Clemente, Jenna Gribbon and Jane Kaplowitz.
While both Berlin and Powell are now considered outside of their Warhol tie, they can never part with it. All the people in the Warhol constellation that he billed as “stars”, with the notable exception of Lou Reed, were real moons, illuminated by his reflected light.
In addition to access to New York’s bohemian elite, Warhol provided a philosophical underpinning for Powell and Berlin. Both women endorsed his idea, borrowed from Marcel Duchamp, that whatever an artist says is art is art. When I asked Powell if she saw herself as a photographer, she replied, “I’m an artist. I still do photography and video. I’m also an art curator. It’s like having artistic thoughts, thinking to make things happen.
While Powell and I were talking on the phone, a text came in from the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch about the Basquiat painting she had turned in, in which the artist portrayed herself and Powell as chimpanzees. The backstory is that before coming to New York, Powell had taught American Sign Language to chimpanzees, including the ones named Delilah and Leah, at the Portland Zoo, among other things.
“Jean-Michel was really fascinated that I was with chimpanzees,” she recalls. “He had a picture, not even one I took, of Delilah and Leah feeding each other. We always fed each other when we ate, with a spoon and a fork.” The painting shows Powell and Basquiat as monkeys grooming each other. Deitch reported to Powell that he sold it to a young collector for $5 million.
Powell was thrilled. “It’s $1.5 million less than we asked for it, but I can live with it,” she said. The photo was on long-term loan to the Portland Art Museum. “I decided to sell it because I wanted to buy a house where I could have a large room to build my archive on,” she explains. “Also just to get ahead.”
Though Powell didn’t say it, she proved herself to be a true Warholian artist, putting into practice one of the master’s most quoted aphorisms: “Making money is art, and work is art, and doing good business is the best art.” . ”
