Andy Warhol's possession obsession

Even more bizarre than his collecting fetish was Warhol's habit of saving everyday objects, which he packed into 608 cardboard-box "time capsules."(See story below.)

Sokolowski attributes those habits to his Depression-era, "wrong side of the tracks" upbringing in Pittsburgh. Advertising and marketing were about consumption, but the Depression and, subsequently, World War II taught people to save.

Warhol museum archivist John Smith, who was curator for "Possession Obsession," says Warhol loved being a consumer, but could not let go of his acquisitions.

Warhol himself never mentioned the idea of creating a museum for his works or his collections. That idea was a collaboration of the New York-based Dia Foundation (now the Dia Center for the Arts), the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Institute. To form the museum, the Dia and Warhol Foundations provided the art, and the Carnegie and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania provided most of the cash.

When it opened in 1994 in Pittsburgh, instead of New York, the museum caused some art-world consternation, because Warhol had never looked back after leaving his hometown.

But "I really feel that ... until you've gotten a sense of this place, you don't understand why he left it and how much it touched his art," museum director Sokolowski says.

He suggests the museum could be subtitled "the Museum of the American Dream." He reasons that if a child of the Depression, from an old-world, blue-collar culture, could reinvent himself and become what Sokolowski calls "the single most important cultural figure in the second part of the 20th century," isn't that the embodiment of the American dream?

There are people who think they're pack rats. And then there's Andy Warhol.

The man apparently couldn't throw away a gum wrapper. Warhol saved everything: Not just letters, doodlings, and tchotchkes, but unopened bills and even a pizza. He also collected native-American art, Man Ray photographs, art-deco furniture, fancy jewelry, cookie jars, and tacky world's fair souvenirs.

About 300 of these pieces are on display in an exhibit called "Possession Obsession: Objects from Andy Warhol's Personal Collection" that just opened at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

The museum also holds his 608 cardboard-box "time capsules," into which he pitched all the ephemera of his life. The boxes are slowly being opened by museum archivists, who, like archaeologists, must laboriously catalog every item.

Among the surprises discovered so far were a piece of Caroline Kennedy's wedding cake, a dress that probably belonged to Jean Harlow, $14,000, and the pizza.

Assistant archivist Matthew Wrbican insists, "The weirdest thing in the time capsules has got to be a mummified foot."

Regardless of the oddities or inanities within, the boxes are regarded as invaluable windows into Warhol's life and times. Despite his reputation for kitsch, Warhol was considered a canny collector whose attraction to something like Fiestaware actually drove up the market and inspired its maker to begin production again.

"He really had an eccentric, really interesting eye," says exhibit curator John Smith. Mr. Smith wants this exhibition to break down misperceptions that Warhol was dispassionate about what he collected.

Warhol's five-story house in New York City was packed so full of objects large and small that he wound up living in two rooms. Friends were never entertained there, and when estate executors entered the place after his death in 1987, they found indescribable clutter.

Almost priceless or nearly worthless, the objects were all treated the same – just like the subjects of his singular art.

• 'Possession Obsession: Objects from Andy Warhol's Personal Collection' runs through May 19. For more information, call (412) 237-8300 or visit www.warhol.org.

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