WARHOL’S INNER SANCTUM

Hedi Slimone

Johnny Pigozzi Christo

PHOTO BY JOHNNY PIGOZZI PHOTO BY JOHNNY PIGOZZI Arianna Huffington, Johnny Pigozzi, Warren Beatty Anja Rubik, Diana Picasso

Jeff Bezos

PHOTO BY PATRICK MCMULLAN

Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn Margot Robbie’s Halloween Party with The Winklevoss Twins

P.Diddy

PHOTO BY PATRICK MCMULLAN the Russian avant-garde, and later added modern art into the mix. She did attract prominent buyers, and the gallery built a fine reputation.

The center of the German art world later gravitated away from Cologne to Bonn and Berlin, and many galleries relocated to Berlin or London. Galerie Gmurzynska had already opened a Swiss venue in Zug, in 2003, and had many Swiss collectors, so making that country their base made sense and they opened in Zurich.

Now, Bscher is planning a new space in New York, a 6,500-square foot town house on East 78th Street down the block from the gallery’s current location. Architect Drew Lang is helming the renovation, which they expect to complete in fall 2022.

It was Bscher’s grandmother’s lifelong dream to have a gallery in New York. “She wished that she had expanded to New York sooner, because she felt like she did so many important shows early on that were later taken up by museums. She felt that if she had done these shows in New York, more people would have gotten to see them. It was a dream of hers.”

Great grandfather saved Oppenheim bank

Bscher’s father came from a very old German family that had started out as cotton merchants. Her greatgrandfather Robert Pferdmengeswas a well-known banker, head of the banker’s union in Germany, and prominent in the Protestant church. He joined Oppenheim Bank, then the largest private bank in Europe, as a partner around 1930. Under Nazi law, Oppenheim’s Jewish owners were forced to step aside, and the bank was “Aryanized”, its name changed to“Robert Pferdmenges & Co.”

After the war, he returned control of the bank to the Oppenheim family. It was one of only two businesses seized from Jews that were given back to the original owners after the war. Oppenheim continued in business

Richard Meier, Christina Gmurzynska

PHOTO BY JOHNNY PIGOZZI

Prince Albert, Rebel Wilson

PHOTO BY JOHNNY PIGOZZI At Musso and Frank Grill in L.A.

PHOTO BY JOHNNY PIGOZZI At Nicolas Berggruen’s Halloween Party

‘‘ONE PIECE, DONATED BY FRANCESCO VEZZOLI, WAS A PORTRAIT OF ALBERT’S MOTHER, GRACE KELLY, THAT THE ARTIST DID SPECIALLY FOR THE AUCTION.’’

until 2010, when it was acquired by Deutsche Bank in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Pferdmenges then became influential in German politics, helping Konrad Adenauer, a close associate, to become the country’s first post-war chancellor. The Marshall plan for the reconstruction of Germany was designed at Pferdmenges’ house, and he cofounded the Christian Democratic Union, which was the party of Angela Merkel. He is often given credit for Germany’s post-war economic miracle.

Philanthropy: Prince Albert II Foundation, animal welfare

Environmental issues are a passion, and in recent years Bscher has worked with the Prince Albert II Foundation on saving the oceans. “I curated art for their auctions numerous times, and we were able to get great artists to donate work to raise a great deal of money.” One piece, donated by Francesco Vezzoli, was a portrait of Albert’s mother, Grace Kelly, that the artist did specially for the auction.

Bscher also supports animal welfare organizations; she often brings her beloved Maltese, Lolly, with her on her travels.

Upcoming shows

In addition to Anh Duong and Stallone, upcoming exhibits include photographs by Ezra Petronio, founder of Self-Service magazine, in Zurich. “Ezra is one of the great art directors of our time; in fashion he’s an absolute legend,” says Bscher. In art he’s well known for his Polaroids, which are in the tradition of Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol. “Self Service magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary, so we’re doing a show that was previously at the Dallas Contemporary Museum of Art.” P

THE BIG REVEAL WARHOL ’S inner sanctum

NO TRUE DISCIPLE, NO SERIOUS ACOLYTE OF Andy Warhol will ever forget where they were when they first heard the shocking news of February 22, 1987 - Andy Warhol was dead. I didn’t find out until that wintry morning of the 23rd when I went to a familiar newsstand by the West 4th Street station off Sixth Avenue to pick up my morning New York Post only to almost faint on the street after seeing the blaring headline that changed everything. It was such a jolt to the psyche of any creative kid in New York City. I know it was. Andy was dead and we were bereft with grief.

BY GEORGE WAYNE

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHS: DAVID GAMBLE

Andy Warhol: Revelation is the title of the latest Warhol art retrospective which opened November 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum and focuses on Andy’s strong Catholic faith. But nothing at that show will match this Warhol Retrospective or revelation from David Gamble.

“WHENEVER ANDY WOULD SEE ME HE WOULD SAY, - “OH HELLO GEORGE!’’ AND I WOULD QUIETLY SHRIEK WITH INNER GLEE AT THE FACT THAT ANDY WARHOL WAS FINALLY REMEMBERING MY NAME!’’

This is the moment Warhol’s kitsch collided with the Warhol creep factor. Right here in his living room with that neon-green cardboard cut-out effigy prominently placed in the middle of his main parlor on what seems like Tutankhamen’s throne. The trigger, however, is clearly the gilt frame, old-school portrait of what seems like a midget ballerina. Andy was all about highbrow and lowbrow as in the kitsch versus the classic. Coca Cola meets a classic marble siren.

As a fifteen-year-old boy in boarding school in the West Indian bush of Jamaica and reading Interview magazine for the first time in my life,it was my Eureka moment. It was at that precise moment I knew what my life’s work and calling had to be. From that day on in my dorm room at Munro College, ‘the Eton of the West Indies’, I began dreaming of one day living in New York City and meeting Andy Warhol and working at The Factory. And guess what? I managed to achievethat early dream.

I always found it personally fascinating that my first apartment in Manhattan, when I finally got here in 1985, was just down the street from St. Marks Place and where Andy Warhol first lived when he arrived in town at the age of twenty-one in 1949. The shock of it all was the fact that I was just really getting to know Andy Warhol when he died. I went out every night in New York City, at every art gallery opening on the Lower East Side and every night spent at the Michael Todd Room of the Palladium nightclub with the single goal in mind of getting to know Andy better. And it was working! By 1986 whenever Andy would see me he would say, “Oh hello George!’’ And I would quietly shriek with inner glee at the fact that Andy Warhol was finally remembering my name! And then, just like that, he was gone forever-- and the city, the zeitgeist, the culture, the scene was plunged into a cataclysmic pallor of grief that truly crescendoed when Jean Michel Basquiat-- Warhol’s last somewhat muse-- died suddenly too, just a year later. Basquiat never got over Andy’s death and his tragic descent into heroin abuse was made more profoundas a result. A year or so later after Andy’s passing I got my first paying job at a magazine when the first Editor in Chief of Interview (after his death) Ingrid Sischy hired GW as a junior writer working with Glenn O’Brien. And as I sat to prep to write this story I felt the urge to trove my archives and diaries from my black books of1986and the very last time I saw Andy Warhol alive.

“Andy was a deeply devout Catholic and this crucifix was once in his bedroom right beside his bed and that Maxwell Parrish painting next to it was just up for auction at Sotheby’s. How uncanny!”

August 21, 1986 The Michael Todd Room: Palladium

It was nothing but a kissy, kissy night tonight at the Todd Room. It’s Thursday night and the room is buzzing! Dianne Brill is kissy, kissy with Keith (Haring) and kissy, kissy with Anita (Sarko) and kissy, kissy with club-kid Bella Karolyi and kissy, kissy with Walter S. from New York Talk magazine.

James St James and Michael Musto just strolled by wearing dresses. Billy Idol just walked in the room! The paparazzi are going nuts! I’ve never seen so many paparazzi in the Todd Room. Steve Rubell must be in a good mood.

Andy is still not here but when I see Basquiat I’ll know he’s in the room. Inseparable of late, those two. Oh shit! There is Baryshnikov! The paparazzi are ecstatic! Paul, the doorman tells me he is “bottled.” I have no idea what he means.

Rudolf Pieper tells me Andy is finally here and I believe him. Because - as is always the case when Andy shows up anywhere - the energy and electric charge in the room takes on a whole new level! There he is by Anita Sarko’s DJ booth with Jean Michel and Tina Chow!

That was the last time I ever saw Andy. And to this day, I just can’t getit out of myhead. The sudden death of Warhol rocked the Downtown demimonde to its core. The day Andy died was the day the nightlife went intoa depressive funk for years that followed.The scene was never the same again. Just think, as a young poet, a young writer, a young artist-- any young creative and free-spirited soul living their dream and moving to New York City in the big ‘80s when the first pandemic I survived -- the AIDS crisis was ravaging and decimating New York City. I was in my sexual prime and too scared to have sex with anyone. But I still went out every night hoping to meet Andy Warhol.I wanted to work at Interview magazine and The Factory.After surviving the groupie Valerie Solanas’ assassination attempt of 1968 when he was actually declared ‘dead’ on that first operating table only to survive - and truly thrive - after suffering the most gruesome injuries, we all felt Andy Warhol was that blessed deity that would live forever. (Ironically, he has) But for him to go into the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery and never make it back to his Upper East Side townhouse on 57 East 66th Street remains a confounding shock for many of us decades on.

Andy Warhol called himself “a deeply superficial person.” Fran Lebowitz called him “a vampire.”

Andy Warhol’s many biographers have never really told us how much of an alpha hoarder he really was. Blake Gopnik, Warhol’s most noted biographer did drop the bombshell that Andy was supposedly well-hung-as in very well endowed. But he barely ever mentioned how much of a hoarder Warhol was. Kenny Scharf would have been happy to note that his work never left Warhol’s home until the day he died.

NO ONE EVER SAW WARHOL’S HOME UNLESS HE WAS HAVING SEX WITH THEM. HE WENT OUT EVERY NIGHT, EVEN TO THE OPENING OF AN ENVELOPE, HE OFTEN QUIPPED-- BUT NO ONE KNEW WHERE WARHOL LIVED.

There are said to be some 12,000 works of Andy Warhol that exist today but none can compare to this. So what did ‘’Drella’’ stash in his bathroom cabinet? ‘’Drella’’ was the nickname Warhol legends like Lou Reed, John Cale and Holly Woodlawn called him behind his back. Think Dracula x Cinderella = “Drella.” It remains the greatest Lou Reed coinage-ever! The single-family townhouse he bought in 1974 at 57 East 66th Street almost every Warholian will tell you-should have been left intact for posterity. And turned into the perfect New York City Warhol Museum. His home just as he had left it for the last time.

What would that tell us about the ephemera, the decor, the contents of the mini-mansionAndy Warhol had lived in since 1974? Not many people can tell you what Andy Warhol’s home looked like because he rarely allowed anyone to visit. No one ever saw Warhol’s home unless he was having sex with them. He went out every night, “even to the opening of an envelope”, he often quipped-- but no one knew where Warhol lived.

And so, when the original gatekeeper of the Warhol Estate, Fred Hughes, commissioned the photographer David Gamble to document everything in the 8,000 square foot townhouse just the way Andy left it when he died was a seminal moment in pop culture history. For David Gamble, one must assume, it had to be the same exhilarating, eyepopping experience as it was for the archaeologist Howard Carter when he first set eyes on Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1925.

Many of these images of Warhol’s inner sanctum have been under lock and key for decades.

What you are about to see are images of Andy Warhol’s home as he left it, some of which are being published for the very first time. We live in a world today where Warhol is as iconic as Michelangelo and so this historic moment in the culture should not be lost on anyone.

Andy was a hoarder, we now realize. Anyone who has had the opportunity to view and detail many of these Warhol estate images from David Gamble will attest to that fact. He was also as odd at home as he was in public. For one, his kitchen was lined with nothing but Tupperware - everywhere. And he also kept a huge neon-suited cardboard-cut-out-image of himself propped prominently in his living room. As for the contents of ‘Drella’s’ medicine cabinet? (‘Drella’ -- the nickname given to Andy by his Factory acolytes back in the ‘70s.) Well, you will soon see for yourself and much more of the inner sanctum of ‹›the single most influential artist of the last century›› his biographer Blake Gopnik proudly declared.

And so, what better way to absorb these exclusive images than with a thorough oral history from this witness to pop history and the photographer who captured them, David Gamble, who remains one of the world’s leading authorities on Andy Warhol arcana. P