Warhol’s Saving Plan Pays Odd Dividends

PITTSBURGH — If you think Andy Warhol’s art celebrated the seemingly banal, you should just get a look at the stuff he decided to keep for posterity.

The man was an inveterate pack rat.

Memos and letters. Receipts. Junk mail and cigarette packs. In cardboard boxes stuffed full of clutter by the late pop-art icon and his workers, the flotsam of life--including cheap religious portraits, in-flight menus and boxing posters--mingles with items like a pair of Clark Gable’s shoes and Warhol’s own hand-crafted artwork.

One box contained a gift from Salvador Dali: wax paper palettes the painter had used. Another featured a Jean Harlow dress, shoved inside a manila envelope. A third held rancid pizza dough, crawling with bugs.

One held a gentle gold-leaf relief of a flower on paper, signed as an authentic Warhol (by his mother, who did such tasks for him in the 1950s).

And that’s only in the hundred or so boxes they’ve gotten around to opening at the Andy Warhol Museum here. There are hundreds more--in all, more than 600 boxes, files and trunks--the museum staff hasn’t had time to crack.

“Opening a box is a real pain,” said assistant archivist Matt Wrbican, who has opened his share and remembers a particularly tedious month spent cataloging the items in a box full of mail. “It could be another bug infestation. You don’t know what’s coming.”

That, apparently, was Warhol’s aim.

Sometime in the 1960s--and with much more regimentation by the mid-1970s--Warhol and his colleagues started putting part of the clutter growing around the artist at the Factory (his New York studio) and at his home into boxes. Most are dated; some have headings. On one, with ticket stubs, salt-and-pepper containers and little liquor bottles from the Concorde, is scrawled “Air France” by Warhol.

Most are labeled “T.C.”--for time capsule--suggesting that Warhol, who made his fortune and fame by turning seemingly banal marketing images of soup cans and celebrities into art, knew exactly what he was doing.

“I think of our time capsules as the Rosetta Stone of Warhol’s work,” said Thomas Sokolowski, the director of the museum, which got the boxes after the artist’s death in 1987. “We never know what we’re going to find.... It’s part lottery, that notion of the game.”

Warhol, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, was not just a pack rat but also a serious collector. In a recent show at the museum titled “Possession Obsession,” archivist John Smith put together some of Warhol’s prized possessions, many of which were sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 1988.

They ranged from the whimsical--more than 100 ceramic cookie jars, for example--to fine pieces of 19th-century American furniture, Art Deco silver and cigarette cases and Navajo blankets.

There is an enormous plaster bust of a young Napoleon, by Canova. There is also a painting of Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer who played an early movie Tarzan.

By the time of his death, Warhol’s collection of stuff had taken over his home; only a few rooms, such as the kitchen and bedroom, were usable. Although friends tried to focus his collecting habits, “he couldn’t resist going to the flea market,” said Smith.

“It’s that idea of always looking for a bargain” and of not being able to throw away anything.

Smith and Wrbican have a friendly disagreement about what Warhol intended to do with the time capsules, if anything. Wrbican believes--and can point to some discussions Warhol had with others to back it up--that the artist wanted to sell them, for as much as $5,000 a box. The buyer would put money down and get one of them, without knowing anything about the contents before opening it.

Surprise! Stale cigarettes.

But Smith doesn’t believe that because Warhol was a very private person, even given his public persona. To have given up these items, however mundane, would have violated that privacy.

“There’s so much more he could have sold,” he said.

In any event, it’s left to the archivists, when they have time, to get one of the boxes, don gloves and start going through what has been left, documenting each item.

It might be old magazines or a piece of cake from a Kennedy birthday. It might be a maid’s outfit or newspaper headlines. Or it could be the cover of a French porn magazine with a model clutching a Mickey Mouse doll to her bosom.

Warhol’s Great Dane Is Stuffed With Arsenic

Once documented, the stuff goes back into the boxes, unless it requires more careful preservation. Some of the items become part of exhibits; the museum typically keeps the contents of one of the boxes on display in the Warhol’s archive study center.

Standing next to “Cecil,” a stuffed Great Dane (filled with arsenic to keep insects from eating it) that belonged to Warhol, Wrbican describes how he recently opened a box apparently from the early ‘70s, not knowing if he’d find spoiled food or money or matchbooks inside.

What he found was a change-of-address announcement handmade by Warhol, and a series of hand-colored drawings of fingers clutching at flowers.

At the bottom of the box is a paper bag, and inside a cheap, plastic hologram image of the Last Supper, the subject of a series of works by Warhol.

On the bag itself is printed the words, “Thank you, please come again.”