The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced it will transfer an expansive archive of Andy Warhol’s cinema to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Since 1984, the museums have worked together to research and catalogue the entirety of Warhol’s cinema in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
The transfer will “ensure that information about his groundbreaking and now-iconic films will remain accessible to scholars”, according to the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown curator, Adam Weinberg.
The research project, formally known as the Warhol Film Archive, was spearheaded by the curator John G. Hanhardt, the former head of film and video at the Whitney. It includes a collection of 16mm films, manuscripts and other media assembled during the production of the first volume of the Warhol’s films catalogue raisonné, which was published by the Whitney in 2006 and focuses on the films Warhol made between 1963 and 1965.
Andy Warhol, Blow Job (1964). © 2021 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, a museum of the Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.
The second volume of the catalogue—which includes significant works like Blow Job (1964) and Outer and Inner Space (1965)—will be published this week. It includes information and critical analysis of more than 100 works from this significant period of Warhol’s career, as well as behind-the-scenes photographs and essays discussing Warhol’s influences, source materials, technical methods and his engagement with actors and performers.
“The publication of this second volume is immensely important,” Weinberg says. “The Whitney’s ongoing efforts to document, research and study Warhol’s remarkable film works—along with the preservation and digitisation initiatives of the MoMA and the Andy Warhol Museum—have brought them to a wider audience.”
The catalogue includes essays by the filmmaker Tom Kalin and scholars Jonathan Flatley, Elena Gorfinkel, Homay King, Ara Osterweil, Marc Siegel, Juan Antonio Suarez and Gregory Zinman, with an introduction by Hanhardt. The publication, titled The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 1963–1965, Volume 2, will be discussed in a virtual programme organised by the Whitney on 2 December.
