Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
name	Andy Warhol
birth name	Andrew Warhola
birth date	August 06, 1928
birth place	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US
death date	February 22, 1987
death place	New York City, US
nationality	American
field	Painting, Cinema
training	Carnegie Mellon University
movement	Pop art
works	''Chelsea Girls'' (1966 film)''Exploding Plastic Inevitable'' (1966 event)''Campbell's Soup Cans'' (1962 painting)
signature	Andy Warhol signature.svg }}

Andrew Warhola, Jr. (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and member of highly diverse social circles that included Bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy patrons.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame." In his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Andy Warhol Museum exists in memory of his life and artwork.

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled ''Eight Elvises.'' The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in ''The Economist'', which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.

Childhood (1928–48)

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 6, 1928. He was the fourth child of Ondrej Varchola (americanized as Andrej Warhola), who died in 1942, and Júlia (née Zavacká, 1892–1972), whose first child was born in their homeland and died before their move to the U.S. His parents were working-class Rusynemigrants from Mikó (now called Miková), located in today’s northeastern Slovakia, part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Warhol's father immigrated to the US in 1914, and his mother joined him in 1921, after the death of Warhol's grandparents. Warhol's father worked in a coal mine. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The family was Byzantine Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Andy Warhol had two older brothers – Pavol (Paul), the oldest, was born in Slovakia; Ján was born in Pittsburgh. Pavol's son, James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator.

In third grade, Warhol had chorea, the nervous system disease that causes involuntary movements of the extremities, which is believed to be a complication of scarlet fever and causes skin pigmentation blotchiness. He became a hypochondriac, developing a fear of hospitals and doctors. Often bed-ridden as a child, he became an outcast at school and bonded with his mother. At times when he was confined to bed, he drew, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars around his bed. Warhol later described this period as very important in the development of his personality, skill-set and preferences. When Warhol was 13, his father died in an accident.

Commercial art (1949–61)

Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (now Carnegie Mellon University). In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. With the concurrent rapid expansion of the record industry and the introduction of the vinyl record, Hi-Fi, and stereophonic recordings, RCA Records hired Warhol, along with another freelance artist, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and promotional materials.

Fine art (1952–67)

He began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. He held exhibitions at the Hugo Gallery, and the Bodley Gallery in New York City and in California his first one-man art-gallery exhibition was on July 9, 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked his West Coast debut of pop art. Andy Warhol's first New York solo pop art exhibition was hosted at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works ''Marilyn Diptych'', ''100 Soup Cans'', ''100 Coke Bottles'' and ''100 Dollar Bills''. At the Stable Gallery exhibit, the artist met for the first time poet John Giorno who would star in Warhol's first film, ''Sleep'', in 1963. It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory," his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method His work became popular and controversial.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products. He also used as imagery for his paintings. Newspaper headlines or photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings. He had this to say about Coca Cola:

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New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception. Throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.

A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit ''The American Supermarket'', a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical U.S. small supermarket environment, except that everything in it – from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc. – was created by six prominent pop artists of the time, among them the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is (or of what is art and what is not). As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career; in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory," Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint-lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, Billy Name, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape-record his phone conversations).

During the '60s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Nico, Joe Dallesandro, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some – like Berlin – remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and film-maker Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this time.

Attempted murder (1968)

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and art critic and curator Mario Amaya at Warhol's studio. Before the shooting, Solanas had been a marginal figure in the Factory scene. She authored the ''S.C.U.M. Manifesto'', a separatist feminist attack on males. Solanas appears in the 1968 Warhol film ''I, a Man''. Earlier on the day of the attack, Solanas had been turned away from the Factory after asking for the return of a script she had given to Warhol. The script, apparently, had been misplaced.

Amaya received only minor injuries and was released from the hospital later the same day. Warhol however, was seriously wounded by the attack and barely survived (surgeons opened his chest and massaged his heart to help stimulate its movement again). He suffered physical effects for the rest of his life. The shooting had a profound effect on Warhol's life and art.

Solanas was arrested the day after the assault. By way of explanation, she said that Warhol "had too much control over my life." She was eventually sentenced to three years under the control of the Department of Corrections. After the shooting, the Factory scene became much more tightly controlled, and for many the "Factory 60s" ended. The shooting was mostly overshadowed in the media due to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days later.

Warhol had this to say about the attack: "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

1970s

Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the 1970s were a much quieter decade, as Warhol became more entrepreneurial. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol devoted much of his time to rounding up new, rich patrons for portrait commissions– including Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his wife Empress Farah Pahlavi, his sister Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, and Brigitte Bardot. Warhol's famous portrait of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was created in 1973. He also founded, with Gerard Malanga, ''Interview'' magazine, and published ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol'' (1975). An idea expressed in the book: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."

Warhol used to socialize at various nightspots in New York City, including Max's Kansas City; and, later in the '70s, Studio 54. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square."

1980s

Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success in the 1980s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the "bull market" of '80s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and other so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as members of the Transavantgarde movement in Europe, including Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi.

During this time Warhol created the Michael Jackson painting signifying his success attributed to his best-selling album ''Thriller''.

By this period, Warhol was being criticized for becoming merely a "business artist". In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled ''Jewish Geniuses'', which Warhol – who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews – had described in his diary as "They're going to sell." In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol's superficiality and commerciality as "the most brilliant mirror of our times," contending that "Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s."

Warhol also had an appreciation for intense Hollywood glamour. He once said: "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're so beautiful. Everything's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

Death

Warhol died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987. According to news reports, he had been making good recovery from a routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital before dying in his sleep from a sudden post-operative cardiac arrhythmia. Prior to his diagnosis and operation, Warhol delayed having his recurring gallbladder problems checked, as he was afraid to enter hospitals and see doctors. His family sued the hospital for inadequate care, saying that the arrhythmia was caused by improper care and water intoxication.

Warhol's body was taken back to Pittsburgh by his brothers for burial. The wake was at Thomas P. Kunsak Funeral Home and was an open-coffin ceremony. The coffin was a solid bronze casket with gold plated rails and white upholstery. Warhol was dressed in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig, and sunglasses. He was posed holding a small prayer book and a red rose. The funeral liturgy was held at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church on Pittsburgh's North Side. The eulogy was given by Monsignor Peter Tay. Yoko Ono also made an appearance. The coffin was covered with white roses and asparagus ferns. After the liturgy, the coffin was driven to St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, a south suburb of Pittsburgh. At the grave, the priest said a brief prayer and sprinkled holy water on the casket. Before the coffin was lowered, Paige Powell dropped a copy of ''Interview'' magazine, an ''Interview'' t-shirt, and a bottle of the Estee Lauder perfume "Beautiful" into the grave. Warhol was buried next to his mother and father. A memorial service was held in Manhattan for Warhol on April 1, 1987, at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.

Warhol's will dictated that his entire estate – with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members – would go to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby's nine days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed more than US$20 million.

In 1987, in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts began. The Foundation serves as the official Estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission "to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process" and is "focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature."

The Artists Rights Society is the U.S. copyright representative for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for all Warhol works with the exception of Warhol film stills. The U.S. copyright representative for Warhol film stills is the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Additionally, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has agreements in place for its image archive. All digital images of Warhol are exclusively managed by Corbis, while all transparency images of Warhol are managed by Art Resource.

The Andy Warhol Foundation released its 20th Anniversary Annual Report as a three-volume set in 2007: Vol. I, 1987–2007; Vol. II, Grants & Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program. The Foundation remains one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the U.S.

Works

Paintings

By the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol had become a very successful commercial illustrator. His detailed and elegant drawings for I. Miller shoes were particularly popular. They consisted mainly of "blotted ink" drawings (or monoprints), a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.

Pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists (such as Willem de Kooning). Warhol's first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bronwit Teller's window display. This was the same stage his Pop Art contemporaries Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg had also once graced. Eventually, Warhol pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself – to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs – and removed all traces of the artist's "hand" in the production of his paintings.

To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings. On 23 November 1961 Warhol wrote Latow a check for $50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, ''Pop, The Genius of Warhol'', was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter. For his first major exhibition Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for most of his life. The work sold for $10,000 at an auction on November 17, 1971, at Sotheby's New York – a minimal amount for the artist whose paintings sell for over $6 million more recently.

He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well. From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol frequently used silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, following his directions to make different versions and variations.

In 1979, Warhol was commissioned by BMW to paint a Group 4 race version of the then elite supercar BMW M1 for the fourth installment in the BMW Art Car Project. Unlike the three artists before him, Warhol declined the use of a small scale practice model, instead opting to immediately paint directly onto the full scale automobile. It was indicated that Warhol spent only a total of 23 minutes to paint the entire car.

Warhol produced both comic and serious works; his subject could be a soup can or an electric chair. Warhol used the same techniques– silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors – whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters, as in the 1962–63 ''Death and Disaster'' series. The ''Death and Disaster'' paintings included ''Red Car Crash'', ''Purple Jumping Man'', and ''Orange Disaster.''

The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style – artistically and personally affectless. This was mirrored by Warhol's own demeanor, as he often played "dumb" to the media, and refused to explain his work. The artist was famous for having said that all you need to know about him and his works is already there, "Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." His Rorschach inkblots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works – and their means of production – mirrored the atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory". Biographer Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings":

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Warhol's first portrait of ''Basquiat'' (1982) is a black photosilkscreen over an oxidized copper "piss painting".

After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, etc., Warhol returned to painting with a brush in hand in a series of over 50 large collaborative works done with Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1984 and 1986. Despite negative criticism when these were first shown, Warhol called some of them "masterpieces," and they were influential for his later work.

The influence of the large collaborations with Basquiat can be seen in Warhol's ''The Last Supper'' cycle, his last and possibly his largest series, seen by some as "arguably his greatest," but by others as “wishy-washy, religiose” and “spiritless." It is also the largest series of religious-themed works by any U.S. artist.

At the time of his death, Warhol was working on ''Cars'', a series of paintings for Mercedes-Benz.

A self-portrait by Andy Warhol (1963-64), which sold in New York at the May Post-War and Contemporary evening sale in Christie's, fetched $38.4 million.

Films

Warhol worked across a wide range of media – painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films, plus some 500 short black-and-white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors. One of his most famous films, ''Sleep'', monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35-minute film ''Blow Job'' is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this. Another, ''Empire'' (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. The film ''Eat'' consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes. Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by LaMonte Young called ''Trio for Strings'' and subsequently created his famous series of static films including ''Kiss'', ''Eat'', and ''Sleep'' (for which Young initially was commissioned to provide music). Uwe Husslein cites filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, and who claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance.

''Batman Dracula'' is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exhibits. A fan of the Batman series, Warhol's movie was an "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. The film was until recently thought to have been lost, until scenes from the picture were shown at some length in the 2006 documentary ''Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis''.

Warhol's 1965 film ''Vinyl'' is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel ''A Clockwork Orange''. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film ''Camp''.

His most popular and critically successful film was ''Chelsea Girls'' (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm-films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s.

Other important films include ''Bike Boy'', ''My Hustler'', and ''Lonesome Cowboys'', a raunchy pseudo-western. These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art. ''Blue Movie'' – a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time – was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.

After his June 3, 1968, shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with ''Flesh'', ''Trash'', and ''Heat''. All of these films, including the later ''Andy Warhol's Dracula'' and ''Andy Warhol's Frankenstein'', were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro – more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.

In the early '70s, most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. After Warhol's death, the films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. Few of the Warhol-directed films are available on video or DVD.

Factory in New York

Factory: 1342 Lexington Avenue (the first Factory)

The Factory: 231 East 47th street 1963–1967 (the building no longer exists)

Factory: 33 Union Square 1967–1973 (Decker Building)

Factory: 860 Broadway (near 33 Union Square) 1973–1984 (the building has now been completely remodeled and was for a time (2000–2001) the headquarters of the dot-com consultancy Scient)

Factory: 22 East 33rd Street 1984–1987 (the building no longer exists)

Home: 1342 Lexington Avenue

Home: 57 East 66th street (Warhol's last home)

Last personal studio: 158 Madison Avenue

Filmography

The following are the films directed or produced by Andy Warhol.

1963 ''Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love'' ''Sarah-Soap'' ''Denis Deegan'' ''Kiss (film) ''Rollerskate/Dance Movie'' ''Jill and Freddy Dancing'' ''Elvis at Ferus'' ''Taylor and Me'' ''Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of'' ''Duchamp Opening'' ''Salome and Delilah'' ''Haircut No. 1'' ''Haircut No. 2'' ''Haircut No. 3'' ''Henry in Bathroom'' ''Taylor and John'' ''Bob Indiana, Etc.'' ''Billy Klüver (film) ''John Washing'' ''Naomi and John'' ''Screen Tests'' ''Naomi and Rufus Kiss'' ''Blow Job (film) ''Jill Johnston Dancing'' ''Shoulder (film) ''Eat (film) ''Dinner At Daley's'' ''Soap Opera (film) ''Batman Dracula'' ''Three (1964 film) ''Jane and Darius'' ''Couch (film) ''Empire (1964 film) ''Henry Geldzahler (film) ''Taylor Mead's Ass'' ''Six Months'' ''Mario Banana'' ''Harlot (film) ''Mario Montez Dances'' ''Isabel Wrist'' ''Imu and Son'' ''Allen (film) ''Philip and Gerard'' ''13 Most Beautiful Women'' ''13 Most Beautiful Boys'' ''50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities'' ''Pause (film) ''Messy Lives'' ''Lips (film) ''Apple (film) ''The End of Dawn'' ''John and Ivy'' ''Screen Test Number 1 (film) ''Screen Test Number 2 (film) ''The Life of Juanita Castro'' ''Drink (film) ''Suicide (film) ''Horse (film) ''Vinyl (1965 film) ''Bitch (film) ''Poor Little Rich Girl (1965 film) ''Face (1965 film) ''Restaurant (1965 film) ''Kitchen (film) ''Afternoon (film) ''Beauty No. 1'' ''Beauty No. 2'' ''Space (film) ''Factory Diaries ''Outer and Inner Space'' ''Prison (1965 film) ''The Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders'' ''Paul Swan (film) ''My Hustler'' ''My Hustler II'' ''Camp (1965 film) ''More Milk, Yvette'' ''Lupe (film) ''The Closet (1965 film) ''Ari and Mario'' ''3 Min. Mary Might'' ''Eating Too Fast'' ''The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound'' ''Hedy (film) ''Rick (1966 film) ''Withering Heights'' ''Paraphernalia (film) ''Whips (film) ''Salvador Dalí (film) ''The Beard (film) ''Superboy (1966 film) ''Patrick (1966 film) ''Chelsea Girls'' ''Bufferin (film) ''Bufferin Commercial'' ''Susan-Space'' ''The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards'' ''Nico/Antoine'' ''Marcel Duchamp (film) ''Dentist: Nico'' ''Ivy (1966 film) ''Denis (film) ''Ivy and Denis I'' ''Ivy and Denis II'' ''Tiger Hop'' ''The Andy Warhol Story'' ''Since (film) ''The Bob Dylan Story'' ''Mrs. Warhol'' ''Kiss the Boot'' ''Nancy Fish and Rodney'' ''Courtroom (film) ''Jail (Warhol film) ''Alien in Jail'' ''A Christmas Carol (1966 film) ''Four Stars (film) ''Imitation of Christ (film) ''Ed Hood'' ''Donyale Luna (film) ''I, a Man'' ''The Loves of Ondine'' ''Bike Boy'' ''Tub Girls'' ''The Nude Restaurant'' ''Construction-Destruction-Construction'' ''Sunset (1967 film) ''Withering Sighs'' ''Vibrations (film) ''Lonesome Cowboys (1968 film) ''San Diego Surf (film) ''Flesh (film) ''Blue Movie'' ''Trash (film) ''Women in Revolt'' ''Water (1971 film) ''Factory Diaries'' ''Heat (1972 film) ''L'Amour (film) ''Flesh for Frankenstein'' ''Blood for Dracula'' ''Vivian's Girls'' ''Nothing Special footage'' ''Fight (film) ''Andy Warhol's Bad''

Year !! Film !! Cast !! Notes
	|	Sleep (film)>Sleep''	John Giorno	Runtime of 320+ minutes
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	Kiss''||||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1963	Billy Klüver''||||
	1963	|||
	1963	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	Blow Job''||	DeVeren Bookwalter	frames per second>frame/s, projected at 16 frame/s
	1964	|||
	1964	Shoulder''||||
	1964	Eat''||	Robert Indiana
	1964	|||
	1964	Soap Opera''||||
	1964	|||
	1964	Three''||||
	1964	|||
	1964	Couch''||||
	1964	Empire''||||Runtime of 8 hours 5 minutes
	1964	Henry Geldzahler''||||
	1964	|	Taylor Mead
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	Harlot''||||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	Allen''||||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	|||
	1964	Pause''||||
	1964	|||
	1964	Lips''||||
	1964	Apple''||||
	1964	|||
	1965	|||
	1965	Screen Test #1''||||
	1965	Screen Test #2''||||
	1965	|||
	1965	Drink''||||
	1965	Suicide''||||
	1965	Horse''||||
	1965	Vinyl''||||
	1965	Bitch''||||
	1965	Poor Little Rich Girl''||	Edie Sedgwick
	1965	Face''||||
	1965	Restaurant''||||
	1965	Kitchen''||||
	1965	Afternoon''||||
	1965	|	Edie Sedgwick
	1965	|	Edie Sedgwick
	1965	Space''||||
	1965	|||
	1965	|||
	1965	Prison''||||
	1965	|||
	1965	Paul Swan''||||
	1965	|||
	1965	|||
	1965	Camp''||||
	1965	|||
	1965	Lupe''||||
	1965	The Closet''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	Hedy''||||
	1966	Rick''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	Paraphernalia''||||
	1966	Whips''||||
	1966	Salvador Dalí''||||
	1966	The Beard''||||
	1966	Superboy''||||
	1966	Patrick''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	Bufferin''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	Marcel Duchamp''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	Ivy''||||
	1966	Denis''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	Since''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	|||
	1966	Courtroom''||||
	1966	Jail''||||
	1966	|||
	1966	A Christmas Carol''||||
	1966	Four Stars aka ****''||||runtime of 25 hours
	1967	Imitation of Christ''||||
	1967	|||
	1967	Donyale Luna''||||
	1967	|||
	1967	|||
	1967	|||
	1967	|||
	1967	|||
	1967	|||
	1967	Sunset''||||
	1967	|||
	1967	Vibrations''||||
	1968	Lonesome Cowboys''||||
	1968	San Diego Surf''||||
	1968	Flesh''||||
	1969	|||
	1969	Trash''||	Joe Dallessandro, Holly Woodlawn
	1970	|||
	1971	Water''||||
	1971	|||
	1972	Heat''||||
	1973	L'Amour''||||
	1973	|||
	1974	|||
	1973	|||
	''Phoney''||||
	1975	|||
	1975	Fight''||||
	1977	|||

Music

In the mid 1960s, Warhol adopted the band the Velvet Underground, making them a crucial element of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia performance art show. Warhol, with Paul Morrissey, acted as the band's manager, introducing them to Nico (who would perform with the band at Warhol's request). In 1966 he "produced" their first album ''The Velvet Underground & Nico'', as well as providing its album art. His actual participation in the album's production amounted to simply paying for the studio time. After the band's first album, Warhol and band leader Lou Reed started to disagree more about the direction the band should take, and their artistic friendship ended. In 1989, after Warhol's death, Reed and John Cale re-united for the first time since 1972 to write, perform, record and release the concept album ''Songs for Drella'', a tribute to Warhol.

Warhol designed many album covers for various artists starting with the photographic cover of John Wallowitch's debut album, ''This Is John Wallowitch!!!'' (1964). He designed the cover art for the Rolling Stones albums ''Sticky Fingers'' (1971) and ''Love You Live'' (1977), and the John Cale albums ''The Academy in Peril'' (1972) and ''Honi Soit'' in 1981. In 1975, Warhol was commissioned to do several portraits of Mick Jagger, and in 1982 he designed the album cover for the Diana Ross album Silk Electric. One of his last works was a portrait of Aretha Franklin for the cover of her 1986 gold album ''Aretha'', which was done in the style of the ''Reigning Queens'' series he had completed the year before.

Warhol strongly influenced the New Wave/punk rock band Devo, as well as David Bowie. Bowie recorded a song called "Andy Warhol" for his 1971 album ''Hunky Dory''. Lou Reed wrote the song "Andy's Chest", about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, in 1968. He recorded it with the Velvet Underground, and this version was released on the VU album in 1985.

Books and print

Beginning in the early 1950s, Warhol produced several unbound portfolios of his work.

The first of several bound self-published books by Warhol was ''25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy'', printed in 1954 by Seymour Berlin on Arches brand watermarked paper using his blotted line technique for the lithographs. The original edition was limited to 190 numbered, hand colored copies, using Dr. Martin's ink washes. Most of these were given by Warhol as gifts to clients and friends. Copy #4, inscribed "Jerry" on the front cover and given to Geraldine Stutz, was used for a facsimile printing in 1987 and the original was auctioned in May 2006 for US $35,000 by Doyle New York.

Other self-published books by Warhol include:

''A Gold Book''

''Wild Raspberries''

''Holy Cats''

After gaining fame, Warhol "wrote" several books that were commercially published: ''a, A Novel'' (1968, ISBN 0-8021-3553-6) is a literal transcription– containing spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumbling– of audio recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out. ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again)'' (1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4)– according to Pat Hackett's introduction to ''The Andy Warhol Diaries'', Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained conversations with Brigid Berlin (also known as Brigid Polk) and former ''Interview'' magazine editor Bob Colacello.

''Popism: The Warhol Sixties'' (1980, ISBN 0-15-672960-1), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett is a retrospective view of the sixties and the role of pop art.

''The Andy Warhol Diaries'' (1989, ISBN 0-446-39138-7), edited by Pat Hackett, is a diary dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone conversations. Warhol started the diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.

Warhol created the fashion magazine ''Interview'' that is still published today. The loopy title script on the cover is thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.

Other media

Although Andy Warhol is most known for his paintings and films, he authored works in many different media. Drawing: Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator, producing drawings in "blotted-ink" style for advertisements and magazine articles. Best known of these early works are his drawings of shoes. Some of his personal drawings were self-published in small booklets, such as ''Yum, Yum, Yum'' (about food), ''Ho, Ho, Ho'' (about Christmas) and (of course) ''Shoes, Shoes, Shoes''. His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably ''A Gold Book'', compiled of sensitive drawings of young men. ''A Gold Book'' is so named because of the gold leaf that decorates its pages. Sculpture: Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his ''Brillo Boxes'', silkscreened ink on wood replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes (designed by James Harvey), part of a series of "grocery carton" sculptures that also included Heinz ketchup and Campbell's tomato juice cases. Other famous works include the ''Silver Clouds''– helium filled, silver mylar, pillow-shaped balloons. A ''Silver Cloud'' was included in the traveling exhibition ''Air Art'' (1968–69) curated by Willoughby Sharp. ''Clouds'' was also adapted by Warhol for avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham's dance piece ''RainForest'' (1968). Audio: At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife". Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audio-work of Warhol's was his "Invisible Sculpture", a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer. Time Capsules: In 1973, Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily life– correspondence, newspapers, souvenirs, childhood objects, even used plane tickets and food– which was sealed in plain cardboard boxes dubbed Time Capsules. By the time of his death, the collection grew to include 600, individually dated "capsules". The boxes are now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum. Television: Andy Warhol dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call ''The Nothing Special'', a special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later in his career he did create two cable television shows, ''Andy Warhol's TV'' in 1982 and ''Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes'' (based on his famous "fifteen minutes of fame" quotation) for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances on other programs, including ''The Love Boat'' wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley, who starred alongside Ross in sitcom ''Happy Days'') her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey. Warhol also produced a TV commercial for Schrafft's Restaurants in New York City, for an ice cream dessert appropriately titled the "Underground Sundae". Fashion: Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" One of his most well-known Superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened dresses, a short sub-career as a catwalk-model and books on fashion as well as paintings with fashion (shoes) as a subject. Performance Art: Warhol and his friends staged theatrical multimedia happenings at parties and public venues, combining music, film, slide projections and even Gerard Malanga in an S&M; outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 was the culmination of this area of his work. Theater: Andy Warhol's PORK opened on May 5, 1971 at LaMama theater in New York for a two week run and was brought to the Roundhouse in London for a longer run in August, 1971. Pork was based on tape-recorded conversations between Brigin Berlin and Andy during which Brigid would play for Andy tapes she had made of phone conversations between herself and her mother, socialite Honey Berlin. The play featured Jayne County as "Vulva" and Cherry Vanilla as "Amanda Pork". In 1974, Andy Warhol also produced the stage musical Man On The Moon, which was written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Photography: To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous amount of photographs of Factory visitors, friends. Computer: Warhol used Amiga computers to generate digital art, which he helped design and build with Amiga, Inc. He also displayed the difference between slow fill and fast fill on live TV with Debbie Harry as a model. (video)

Producer and product

Warhol had assistance in producing his paintings. This is also true of his film-making and commercial enterprises.

He founded the gossip magazine ''Interview'', a stage for celebrities he "endorsed" and a business staffed by his friends. He collaborated with others on all of his books (some of which were written with Pat Hackett.) He adopted the young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the band The Velvet Underground, presenting them to the public as his latest interest, and collaborating with them. One might even say that he produced people (as in the Warholian "Superstar" and the Warholian portrait). He endorsed products, appeared in commercials, and made frequent celebrity guest appearances on television shows and in films (he appeared in everything from ''Love Boat'' to ''Saturday Night Live'' and the Richard Pryor movie, ''Dynamite Chicken'').

In this respect Warhol was a fan of "Art Business" and "Business Art"– he, in fact, wrote about his interest in thinking about art as business in ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again''.

Personal life

Sexuality

It is thought that Warhol was homosexual, and quite likely a virgin. His family maintains that he was not homosexual and was celibate. The question of how Warhol's sexuality influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist and is an issue that Warhol himself addressed in interviews, in conversation with his contemporaries, and in his publications (''e.g.'' ''Popism: The Warhol Sixties''). Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and films like ''Blow Job,'' ''My Hustler'' and ''Lonesome Cowboys'') draw from gay underground culture and/or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. Many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters. The first works that he submitted to a fine art gallery, homoerotic drawings of male nudes, were rejected for being too openly gay. In ''Popism'', furthermore, the artist recalls a conversation with the film maker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty Warhol had being accepted socially by the then more famous (but closeted) gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them." In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I 'should' want to change... Other people could change their attitudes but not me". In exploring Warhol's biography, many turn to this period – the late 1950s and early 1960s – as a key moment in the development of his persona. Some have suggested that his frequent refusal to comment on his work, to speak about himself (confining himself in interviews to responses like "Um, no" and "Um, yes", and often allowing others to speak for him) – and even the evolution of his pop style – can be traced to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the inner circles of the New York art world.

Religious beliefs

Warhol was a practicing Ruthenian Rite Catholic. He regularly volunteered at homeless shelters in New York, particularly during the busier times of the year, and described himself as a religious person. Many of Warhol's later works depicted religious subjects, including two series, ''Details of Renaissance Paintings'' (1984) and ''The Last Supper'' (1986). In addition, a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate.

During his life, Warhol regularly attended Mass, and the priest at Warhol's church, Saint Vincent Ferrer, said that the artist went there almost daily, although he was not observed taking communion or going to confession and sat or knelt in the pews at the back. The priest thought he was afraid of being recognized; Warhol said he was self-conscious about being seen in a Latin Rite church crossing himself "in the Orthodox way" (right to left instead of the reverse).

His art is noticeably influenced by the eastern Christian iconographic tradition which was so evident in his places of worship.

Warhol's brother has described the artist as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because [it was] private". Despite the private nature of his faith, in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted it as devout: "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood".

Dedicated museums

Two museums are dedicated to Warhol. The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, is located at 117 Sandusky Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist, holding more than 12,000 works by the artist.

The other museum is the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 by Warhol's brother John Warhola, the Slovak Ministry of Culture, and the Warhol Foundation in New York. It is located in the small town of Medzilaborce, Slovakia. Warhol's parents and his two eldest brothers were born 15 kilometres away in the village of Miková. The museum houses several originals donated mainly by the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York and also personal items donated by Warhol's relatives.

Movies about Warhol

;Dramatic portrayals

In 1979, Warhol appeared as himself in the film ''Cocaine Cowboys''.

After his passing, Warhol was portrayed by Crispin Glover in Oliver Stone's film ''The Doors'' (1991), by David Bowie in ''Basquiat'', a film by Julian Schnabel, and by Jared Harris in the film ''I Shot Andy Warhol'' directed by Mary Harron (1996). Warhol appears as a character in Michael Daugherty's 1997 opera ''Jackie O''. Actor Mark Bringleson makes a brief cameo as Warhol in ''Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery'' (1997). Many films by avant-garde cineast Jonas Mekas have caught the moments of Andy's life. Sean Gregory Sullivan depicted Warhol in the 1998 film ''54''. Guy Pearce portrayed Warhol in the 2007 film, ''Factory Girl'', about Edie Sedgwick's life. Actor Greg Travis portrays Warhol in a brief scene from the 2009 film ''Watchmen''.

Gus Van Sant was planning a version of Warhol's life with River Phoenix in the lead role just before Phoenix's death in 1993.

;Documentaries The 2001 documentary, ''Absolut Warhola'' was produced by Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, featuring Warhol's parents' family and hometown in Slovakia. ''Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film'' is a reverential four-hour 2006 movie by Ric Burns. ''Andy Warhol: Double Denied'' is a 52 minute movie by lan Yentob about the difficulties in authenticating Warhol's work.

See also

Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board

Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000

Andy Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh.

Bodley Gallery

15 minutes of fame

Moon Museum

References

Further reading

"A symposium on Pop Art". ''Arts Magazine'', April 1963, pp. 36–45. The symposium was held in 1962, at The Museum of Modern Art, and published in this issue the following year.

Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz eds. (1996). ''Pop Out: Queer Warhol.'' Durham: Duke University Press.

Foster, Hal, ''The Return of the Real'' (ch.5), MIT Press / October Book, 1996.

James, James, "Andy Warhol: The Producer as Author", in ''Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties'' (1989), pp. 58–84. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Krauss, Rosalind E. "Warhol's Abstract Spectacle". In ''Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection''. New York: Scalo, 1999, pp. 123–33.

Lippard, Lucy R., ''Pop Art'', Thames and Hudson, 1970 (1985 reprint), ISBN 0-500-20052-1

Scherman, Tony & Dalton, David, ''POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol'', HarperCollins, New York, N.Y. 2009

Suarez, Juan Antonio (1996). ''Bike Boys, Drag Queens, & Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema.'' Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

External links

Warhol Foundation in New York City

Andy Warhol Collection in Pittsburgh

Time Capsules: the Andy Warhol Collection

FBI file on Andy Warhol

Documentation of recent exhibitions of work by Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol at Brooke Alexander Gallery

Andy Warhol's Empire group on Facebook

David Cronenberg speaking about the work of Andy Warhol">David Cronenberg speaking about the work of Andy Warhol on UbuWeb

Warholstars: Andy Warhol Films, Art and Superstars

Pop Art Masters – Andy Warhol

Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work

"Warhol, Soup Cans, Cowboys" (''Studio 360'' radio program, December 10, 2005)

exhibition of 10 statues of liberty in Gallerie Lavignes bastille, Paris 1986

The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art – city of origin

Warhol in Paris – slideshow by ''The First Post''

digital painting of Debbie Harry at the Commodore Amiga product launch press conference in 1985">Andy Warhol makes a digital painting of Debbie Harry at the Commodore Amiga product launch press conference in 1985

Andy Warhol: A Documentary film by Ric Burns for PBS

Footage and interview with Andy Warhol at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery in london 1986

Category:Article Feedback Pilot Category:1928 births Category:1987 deaths Category:20th-century artists Category:20th-century painters Category:20th-century writers Category:American artists Category:American cinematographers Category:American Eastern Catholics Category:American experimental filmmakers Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American painters Category:American people of Rusyn descent Category:American people of Slovak descent Category:American printmakers Category:American screenwriters Category:American shooting survivors Category:American socialites Category:Artists from New York Category:Artists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Attempted assassination survivors Category:Carnegie Mellon University alumni Category:Censorship in the arts Category:Contemporary artists Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Deaths from surgical complications Category:Fashion illustrators Category:Gay artists Category:Gay writers Category:LGBT artists from the United States Category:LGBT Christians Category:LGBT directors Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Photographers from New York Category:Pop artists Category:Postmodern artists Category:Ruthenian Catholics Category:The Velvet Underground Category:Warhola family

af:Andy Warhol als:Andy Warhol ar:آندي وارهول an:Andy Warhol az:Endi Uorxol bn:অ্যান্ডি ওয়ারহল zh-min-nan:Andy Warhol be:Эндзі Уорхал be-x-old:Эндзі Ўорхал bs:Andy Warhol br:Andy Warhol bg:Анди Уорхол ca:Andy Warhol cs:Andy Warhol cy:Andy Warhol da:Andy Warhol de:Andy Warhol et:Andy Warhol el:Άντι Γουόρχολ es:Andy Warhol eo:Andy Warhol eu:Andy Warhol fa:اندی وارهول hif:Andy Warhol fr:Andy Warhol fy:Andy Warhol ga:Andy Warhol gl:Andy Warhol ko:앤디 워홀 hi:एंडी वारहोल hr:Andy Warhol ilo:Andy Warhol id:Andy Warhol is:Andy Warhol it:Andy Warhol he:אנדי וורהול jv:Andy Warhol ka:ენდი უორჰოლი sw:Andy Warhol lad:Andy Warhol la:Andreas Warhol lv:Endijs Vorhols lb:Andy Warhol lt:Andy Warhol li:Andy Warhol lmo:Andy Warhol hu:Andy Warhol mk:Енди Ворхол ml:ആൻഡി വോഹോൾ mi:Andy Warhol mr:अँडी वॉरहोल arz:اندى وارهول mn:Энди Уорхол nl:Andy Warhol new:एन्डी वार्होल ja:アンディ・ウォーホル no:Andy Warhol nn:Andy Warhol oc:Andy Warhol uz:Andy Warhol pag:Andy Warhol pnb:اینڈی وارہول pms:Andy Warhol pl:Andy Warhol pt:Andy Warhol kaa:Andy Warhol ro:Andy Warhol rue:Енді Варгол ru:Уорхол, Энди sq:Andy Warhol scn:Andy Warhol simple:Andy Warhol sk:Andy Warhol sl:Andy Warhol sr:Енди Ворхол sh:Andy Warhol fi:Andy Warhol sv:Andy Warhol tl:Andy Warhol ta:அன்டி வார்ஹால் th:แอนดี วอร์ฮอล tr:Andy Warhol uk:Енді Воргол ur:اینڈی وارہول vi:Andy Warhol vo:Andy Warhol war:Andy Warhol zh-yue:安迪華荷 bat-smg:Andy Warhol zh:安迪·沃荷

Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
name	Debbie Harry
background	solo_singer
birth name	Deborah Ann Harry
born	July 01, 1945Miami, Florida, US
instrument	Vocals, percussion, tambourine, tambura,finger cymbals, clarinet
genre	New wave, pop, rock,punk rock, power pop, disco
occupation	Vocalist, musician, actress
years active	1965–present
label	Capitol RecordsChrysalis RecordsGeffen/Warner Bros.Sire/Warner Bros.
associated acts	The Wind in the Willows The Stilettos Blondie DivinylsThe Jazz PassengersChris SteinJimmy DestriLos Fabulosos CadillacsClem Burke
website	Official Website
notable instruments	}}

Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry (born July 1, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers. Her acting career spans over thirty film roles and numerous television appearances.

Life and early career

Harry was born in Miami, Florida and adopted by Catherine Harry and Richard Smith, gift shop proprietors in Hawthorne, New Jersey. She attended Hawthorne High School, where she graduated in 1963. She graduated from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey, with an Associate of Arts degree in 1965. Before starting her singing career she moved to New York City in the late 1960s and worked as a secretary at BBC Radio's office there for one year. Later, she was a waitress at Max's Kansas City, after which she was a dancer in Union City, New Jersey, and a Playboy Bunny.

Deborah Harry began her musical career in the late '60s with the folk rock group The Wind in the Willows, who recorded one album for Capitol Records. Harry then joined The Stilettos, with Elda Gentile and Amanda Jones, in 1974. The Stilettos included her eventual boyfriend and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. When Harry and Stein left the Stilletos, they formed Angel and the Snake, with Tish and Snooky Bellomo. Shortly thereafter, Harry and Stein formed Blondie, naming it for the term of address men often yelled at Harry. Blondie quickly became regulars at Max's Kansas City and CBGB in New York City. After a debut album in 1976, commercial success followed in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, first in Australia and Europe, then in the United States.

While leading Blondie, Harry and Stein became life as well as musical partners, although they never married; Harry has no children. In the mid-1980s, she took a few years off to nurse Stein back to health after he suffered a life-threatening disease. Stein and Harry broke up in the 1990s, but they have continued to work together. In 1999, she was called the 12th greatest woman of rock and roll by VH1's 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll and in 2002, she was called the 18th sexiest artist of all time by VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists.

Blondie

With her two-tone bleached-blonde hair, Harry quickly became a punk icon. Her look was further popularized by the band's early presence in the music video revolution of the era. She was a regular at Studio 54. In June 1979, Blondie was featured on the cover of ''Rolling Stone''. Harry's persona, combining cool sexuality with streetwise style, became so closely associated with the group's name that many came to believe "Blondie" was the singer's name. The difference between the individual Harry and the band Blondie was famously highlighted with a "Blondie is a Group" button campaign by the band in 1979. In 1981 Harry issued a press release to clarify that her name was not "Debbie Blondie" or "Debbie Harry", but Deborah Harry, though Harry later described her character in the band as being named "Blondie", as in this quote from the ''No Exit'' tour book:

During 1976 and 1977 Blondie released their first two albums. The second experienced some marginal success outside the United States. However, 1978's ''Parallel Lines'' (US #6, UK #1) shot the group to international success and included the global smash hit single "Heart of Glass." Riding the crest of Disco's domination, the infectious track hit #1 in the US and sold nearly two million copies. The follow-up single "One Way Or Another" reached #24 on Billboard's Hot 100. The album was the band's biggest success, having sold over 6 million copies in the United States alone. The band were also pioneers of the music video movement with ''Eat To The Beat'' being heralded as the first ever music video cassette album.

The release of the platinum-plus ''Eat to the Beat'' album (US #17, UK #1) in 1979 and ''Autoamerican'' (US #7, UK #3) in 1980 continued the band's run of hits, including "Dreaming", Atomic" and three more US #1 singles: "The Tide Is High", "Rapture" and "Call Me" from the soundtrack to the film ''American Gigolo'', which became Billboard's #1 song of 1980.

After a year-long hiatus in 1981, during which Harry released her first solo album (see below), Blondie regrouped and released their sixth studio album ''The Hunter'' (US #33, UK #9). The album met with a disastrous reception, peaking at #33 and falling rapidly off the charts. The single "Island of Lost Souls" briefly cracked the US Top 40. The band's "War Child" was released as a single in the UK. Blondie launched a North American tour to support the release, but it was cut short when Stein fell seriously ill with the rare autoimmune disease, pemphigus. Coupled with declining commercial fortunes, the band split up.

Later in the 1980s, the remix album ''Once More Into The Bleach'' was released, featuring remixes of tracks by Blondie and from Harry's solo career. The mid-1990s saw the release of further Blondie remix albums ''Beautiful'' in Europe and ''Remixed Remade Remodeled'' in the US. New mixes of "Heart of Glass", "Atomic" and "Union City Blue" were released as singles and all made the UK Top 40, while remixes of "Atomic", "Rapture" and "Heart of Glass" had major success on the US dance charts.

Reunion

In 1997, Blondie began working together again for the first time in 15 years. Two tracks were recorded with TV Mania, the production trio of two Duran Duran members, Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo, and producer Anthony J. Resta. "Studio 54" and "Pop Trash Movie" were scheduled for release on a Blondie compilation, entitled ''This Is Blondie''. However, the project and the tracks were shelved as the four original members (Harry, Stein, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri) embarked on sessions for what would become Blondie's seventh studio album. During this period, they released a cover of Iggy Pop's "Ordinary Bummer" on the tribute album ''We Will Fall'' (1997).

After a final tour of Europe with The Jazz Passengers in the summer of 1998, Deborah Harry resumed duties as lead vocalist of Blondie. Prior to the release of ''No Exit'', the band completed a sold out tour of Europe. Dates at London's Lyceum Theatre were recorded by the BBC and aired on national BBC Radio 1. A week before the release of ''No Exit'', the lead single "Maria" debuted at No. 1 in the UK, giving Blondie their sixth UK No.1 hit. "Maria" also reached #1 in 14 different countries, the top 10 on the US Dance Charts and Top 15 on the US Adult Top 40 Charts. ''No Exit'' debuted at No.3 in the UK and #17 in the US and Blondie announced dates for a major arena tour that summer, during which they played the Glastonbury Festival and Party in the Park in London. "Nothing Is Real but the Girl" was another UK Top-30 hit, while the title track was released as a limited-edition single to coincide with further arena dates in November of that year.

Tracks culled from dates throughout the 1999 world tour were released as a live album, titled ''Live'' in the US and ''Livid'' in the UK and were released in late 1999 and early 2000, respectively. A ''Blondie Live'' companion DVD was also released, recorded at a show in New York City's The Town Hall.

Although Blondie commenced recording tracks for the follow-up to ''No Exit'' in 2001, the sessions were besieged with problems including the loss of master tapes after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the winter of 2002, Blondie returned with a full-scale UK tour. This preceded the release of a new single in 2003 entitled "Good Boys" (a hit across the UK and Europe that autumn, and top 10 on the US Dance Charts the following spring) and the release of Blondie's eighth studio album, ''The Curse of Blondie''. The band toured throughout 2003 and 2004, completing two further full-scale tours of the UK.

A second live album, entitled ''Live By Request'', was released in 2005, along with a companion DVD set. In that year, the band also released the mash-up "Rapture Riders," which combined their 1981 hit "Rapture" with The Doors' "Riders on the Storm". This track was taken from a greatest hits compilation entitled ''Sound and Vision'' (first issued in the UK as ''Sight + Sound''), released with a companion DVD and new mixes of "In the Flesh" and "Good Boys".

In the winter of 2005, Blondie toured the UK for the fourth time in as many years. In 2006, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Around this time, Blondie released a new studio track, a cover of Roxy Music's 1982 hit "More Than This". This was to promote their "Road Rage" tour and the single was made available for free download.

At the end of 2006, a new mix of "Heart of Glass" became a club hit in Europe, while Harry released the single "New York New York", a collaboration with Moby. The song debuted on YouTube, some four weeks before its official release.

In the summer of 2007, Blondie toured in the UK once again. Around this time, Harry delineated the different personas (Blondie the band, her role in the band, and Deborah Harry the singer) to an interviewer who asked why she played only solo music on the 2007 True Colors Tour: "I've put together a new trio with no Blondie members in it—I really want to make a clear definition between Debbie's solo projects and Blondie—and I hope that the audience can appreciate that and also appreciate this other material."

On July 3, 2008, Blondie commenced a world tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of ''Parallel Lines'' with a sell-out concert at the amphitheatre in Ra'anana, Israel. During the tour, drummer Clem Burke stated that the tour had inspired the band to make another record, ''Panic of Girls'', their first new album since the release of ''The Curse of Blondie'' in 2003.

In 2009, Blondie went on tour with Pat Benatar for the "Call Me Invincible" tour. The majority of the shows were opened by The Donnas. In December 2009, Blondie recorded their version of the traditional song "We Three Kings" to coincide with the band's new album.

In the summer of 2010, Blondie began a UK tour, including venues in Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Dublin. They also played festivals including the Isle of Wight and Rockness Festival in Inverness, Scotland. Tracks from their forthcoming album ''Panic of Girls'' were performed during their tour of the UK, notably 'D-Day' and 'What I Heard'. In an interview at the Isle of Wight Festival, drummer Clem Burke indicated that Blondie might return for another tour in 2011, depending on how well the record is received.

Solo albums

Harry has released five solo albums. Harry began her solo career with the Chrysalis Records album ''Koo Koo'' in 1981. The album peaked at #28 in the US and #6 in the UK; it was later certified gold in the US and Silver in the UK. "Backfired", the first single from the album, had a video directed by H. R. Giger (who also painted the album's eye-catching cover featuring Harry's face with metal skewers through it) and climbed to #43 on the Billboard Hot 100, #29 on the Hot Dance Club Songs and #32 on the UK Singles Chart.

In 2006, Harry started work in New York City on tracks for her fifth solo album ''Necessary Evil'' (2007). Working with production duo Super Buddha (who produced the remix of Blondie's "In the Flesh" for the 2005 ''Sound and Vision'' compilation), the first music to surface in was a hip hop track entitled "Dirty and Deep" in which she spoke out against rapper Lil' Kim's incarceration.

Throughout 2006, a number of new tracks surfaced on Harry's MySpace page, including "Charm Alarm", "Deep End", "Love With A Vengeance", "School for Scandal" and "Necessary Evil", as well as duets she recorded with Miss Guy (of Toilet Böys fame). These were "God Save New York" and "New York Groove". A streaming version of the lead single, "Two Times Blue", was added to Harry's MySpace page in May 2007. On 6 June 2007, an iTunes downloadable version was released via her official website.

Harry joined Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Tour for the Human Rights Campaign. She is a strong advocate for gay rights and same-sex marriage. Though she has stated that she identifies as mostly heterosexual, Harry has said she has had intimate relationships with both men and women.

''Necessary Evil'' was released on Eleven Seven Music after Harry completed both a solo tour of the US in June 2007 and a European tour with Blondie in July 2007. The first single, "Two Times Blue", peaked at #5 on the US Dance Club Play chart. The album debuted at #86 in the UK and #37 in the US Billboard Top Independent Albums chart.

To promote the album, Harry appeared on various talk shows to perform "Two Times Blue". She also started a 22-date US tour on November 8, lasting until December 9, playing small venues and clubs across the country. On January 18, 2008, an official music video for "If I Had You" was released.

Other musical projects

In 1983 Harry teamed up with Giorgio Moroder (with whom she had worked previously on Blondie's "Call Me") on the song "Rush Rush," which was featured in the film ''Scarface'' and in the video game ''Grand Theft Auto III''. Harry's single "Feel the Spin", produced by John "Jellybean" Benitez, was released (as a 12" single only) in 1985. That song, along with the whole soundtrack to the film ''Krush Groove'', peaked at #5 on the US Dance Charts. The song's "uno dos tres quatro" intro has been sampled on a number of records, including S'Express' "Theme from S'Express". While recording her fourth album in 1992, Harry collaborated with German heavy metal band Die Haut on the track "Don't Cross My Mind", and released the song "Prelude to a Kiss" on the soundtrack to the film of the same name. She also released a cover of "Summertime Blues" from the soundtrack to the film ''That Night'' in Australia.

In the mid-1990s, Harry teamed up with New York avant-garde jazz ensemble The Jazz Passengers. Between 1994 and 1998 she was a permanent member of the troupe, touring North America and Europe. She was a featured vocalist on their 1994 album ''In Love'' singing the track "Dog In Sand". The follow-up album, 1997's ''Individually Twisted'', is credited as "The Jazz Passengers featuring Deborah Harry" and Harry sings vocals throughout, teaming up with guest Elvis Costello for a cover of "Doncha Go Way Mad". The album also features a re-recorded version of the song "The Tide Is High". A live album entitled ''Live In Spain'', again featuring Harry on vocals, was released in 1998.

Harry collaborated on a number of other projects with other artists. She featured as vocalist on Talking Heads side project The Heads' 1996 release ''No Talking, Just Head'' (performing the title track and "Punk Lolita"). She also sings on a cover of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and on the song "Estrella de Mar" by Argentine band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. In 1997 she collaborated with Jazz Passenger Bill Ware in his side project Groove Thing, singing lead vocals on the club hit "Command and Obey". Another JP collaboration appeared on the Edgar Allan Poe tribute album ''Closed on Account of Rabies'' (1997). Harry also reunited with Blondie keyboardist Jimmy Destri for a cover of Otis Blackwell's "Don't Be Cruel" for the 1995 tribute album ''Brace Yourself''. During this period, she also recorded a duet with Robert Jacks entitled "Der Einzige Weg (The Only Way) - Theme from Texas Chainsaw Massacre," which was recorded in German and in English, although these did not surface until 1999. Likewise, at the end of 1999, Chrysalis Records released a best of her solo recordings entitled ''Most of All - The Best of Deborah Harry'' and a remix of "I Want That Man".

Aside from writing and recording material for Blondie, Harry pursued various other projects. She appears on the 2001 Bill Ware album ''Vibes 4'' singing the track 'Me and You' as well as on ex-Police guitarist Andy Summers's album ''Peggy's Blue Skylight'' on the track "Weird Nightmare". A techno cover of Stan Jones' "Ghost Riders in the Sky" was featured on the soundtrack to the film ''Three Business Men'' and was available on her website to download. Harry sings on two tracks on Andrea Griminelli's ''Cinema Italiano'' project: "You'll Come To Me" (inspired by ''Amarcord'''s main theme) and "When Love Comes By" (from ''Il Postino''), as well as on a tribute album reinterpreting the music of Harold Arlen, on which she sings the title track "Stormy Weather". In May 2002, she accompanied The Jazz Passengers and the BBC Concert Orchestra in a performance of her jazz material at the Barbican Centre in London. In 2003, she was featured vocalist on the song "Uncontrollable Love" by electro-clash dance producers Blow Up.

Harry also contributed to Fall Out Boy's 2008 album ''Folie à Deux''. She sings on the chorus of the album's closer "West Coast Smoker".

Harry is a credited co-writer on a song called "Supersensual" that appears on Australian singer Natalie Bassingthwaighte's debut album ''1000 Stars''. The song samples the recognizable "woo-ooo-wo-oh" refrain from "Heart of Glass".

Acting roles

Harry appeared on Broadway with Andy Kaufman in the wrestling play ''Teaneck Tanzi''. A retitled version of the British play ''Trafford Tanzi'', the show opened and closed in one night. Later that year Harry, who had already appeared in a number of independent and underground films, made her major motion picture debut in the David Cronenberg film ''Videodrome''.

Following the release of ''Rockbird'', Harry took a number of acting roles including the villainous Velma Von Tussle in John Waters' ''Hairspray'' (1988).

A cover of The Castaways' "Liar Liar" from the soundtrack to the film ''Married to the Mob'' was released as a single in the US. Harry's version of Michael Jay's "Mind Over Matter" was also recorded in this period, but never released. Harry starred in a film called ''Forever Lulu'', also known as ''Crazy Streets'', in 1987 alongside Alec Baldwin. She had only one line but made appearances throughout the film. She also starred in the film ''Intimate Stranger'' as Cory Wheeler, a telephone sex worker being pursued by a serial killer. Harry's other film roles include ''Roadie'', ''Union City'', ''New York Beat Movie'' (otherwise known as ''Downtown '81''), ''Rock & Rule'', ''Tales from the Darkside: The Movie'', ''Six Ways to Sunday'', ''The Fluffer'', ''Cop Land'', ''Heavy'', ''My Life Without Me'', "Spun" and ''Full Grown Men''. Her television appearances include roles on ''Tales from the Darkside'', ''Will & Grace'', ''The Muppet Show'', ''MADtv'', ''Sabrina the Teenage Witch'', ''Absolutely Fabulous'', ''Saturday Night Live'', ''The Adventures of Pete and Pete'', and ''Wiseguy''.

Current projects

Harry is one of the faces of MAC Cosmetics' Viva Glam VI campaign (2006). The campaign donates every cent of the selling price of their lipstick shades to the MAC AIDS Fund, which helps people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. She is also one of the faces of the RockStars of Science Campaign (2010) alongside other musicians Bret Michaels, Ann & Nancy Wilson of Heart, B.O.B., Keri Hilson, Jay Sean and Timbaland.

She recently completed recording a new album with Blondie titled ''Panic Of Girls'', which will be released on July 4, 2011.

Discography

Studio albums

Title	Album details	Peak chart positions								! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"
		''[[Koo Koo">Music recording sales certification
! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"
''[[Koo Koo''		* Release date: July 27, 1981	* Label: Chrysalis Records	* Formats: Compact cassette	25	—	17	24	17	7	6		CAN: Gold	British Phonographic Industry>UK: Silver	Recording Industry Association of America>US: Gold
''Rockbird''		* Release date: November 29, 1986	* Label: Geffen Records	Compact disc>CD, cassette	97	—	—	—	22	30	31		* UK: Gold
''Def, Dumb and Blonde''		* Release date: October 28, 1989	* Label: Sire Records	* Formats: CD, cassette	123	—	—	—	—	—	12		* UK: Silver
''Debravation''		* Release date: August 1993	* Label: Sire/Reprise Records	* Formats: CD, cassette	—	—	—	—	—	—	24
! scope="row"		* Release date: September 15, 2007	* Label: Eleven Seven Music	* Formats: CD, music download	—	37	—	—	—	—	86

Compilation albums

!Year

!Album

!width="50"

!width="50"

* ''Heart on a Wall'' (Jimmy Destri album featuring backing vocals by Debbie Harry) (1981)

* ''Halfway to Sanity'' (Ramones album featuring backing vocals by Debbie Harry on 1 song: "Go Lil' Camaro Go") (1987)

Hairspray (1988 soundtrack)>Hairspray: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack'' (Debbie Harry features on the song "Hairspray" by Rachel Sweet)

* ''Like A Girl, I Want You To Keep Coming'' (Various artists CD - Debbie Harry song: "Invocation to Papa Legba") (1989)

* ''Standing in the Spotlight'' (Dee Dee Ramone album featuring backing vocals by Debbie Harry on 2 songs: "Mashed Potato Kid" and "German Kid") (1989)

* ''Big Trash'' (Thompson Twins album featuring backing vocals by Debbie Harry on 1 song: "Sugar Daddy", and spoken-word telephone vocals on "Queen of the USA") (1989)

* ''

* ''Cash Cow'' (Various artists CD - Debbie Harry song: "Moroccan Rock (Pipe of Pain)") (1993)

* ''Heck on Wheels Volume 3'' (Various artists promotional CD - Debbie Harry song: "Communion") (1993)

* ''Head On'' ([[Die Haut">Just Say Da (album)

* ''[[Prelude to a Kiss (film)

* ''Get Out'' (Various artists promotional CD issued with ''Out'' magazine charter subscriptions - Debbie Harry song: "I Want That Man (Remix/Edit)") (1992)

* ''Cash Cow'' (Various artists CD - Debbie Harry song: "Moroccan Rock (Pipe of Pain)") (1993)

* ''Heck on Wheels Volume 3'' (Various artists promotional CD - Debbie Harry song: "Communion") (1993)

* ''Head On'' ([[Die Haut album featuring vocals by Debbie Harry on 1 song: "Don't Cross My Mind") (1993)

* ''Brace Yourself! A Tribute to Otis Blackwell''(various artists tribute album - Debbie Harry song: "Don't Be Cruel") (1994)

* ''In Love'' (The Jazz Passengers featuring Deborah Harry vocals on 1 song: "Dog in Sand") (1994)

* ''Rey Azúcar'' (Los Fabulosos Cadillacs album - Debbie Harry Vocals on 2 songs: "Strawberry Fields Forever" & "Estrella de Mar") (1995)

Virtuosity>Virtuosity Soundtrack'' (Soundtrack album - Debbie Harry vocals on 1 song: "No Talking, Just Head" (with The Heads)) (1995)

* ''No Talking, Just Head'' (The Heads album - Debbie Harry vocals on 1 song: "No Talking, Just Head") (1996)

* ''Individually Twisted'' (The Jazz Passengers featuring Deborah Harry) (1996)

* ''Live In Spain'' (The Jazz Passengers featuring Deborah Harry) (1997)

* ''Six Ways to Sunday

'' (Franz Ferdinand (band)>Franz Ferdinand EP featuring the duet "Live Alone") (2011)

Singles

!Artist credit	!Year	!Song	!width="40"	!width="40"	!width="40"	Australia	New Zealand	Canada	!width="40"	Album
		"Backfired"			align="center"
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"The Jam Was Moving"		align="center"
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1983				align="center"
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1985	"Feel the Spin"	align="center"
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''Krush Groove'' (soundtrack)
1986				align="center"
	"In Love with Love"			align="center"
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"Free to Fall"	align="center"
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1988		align="center"
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''Married to the Mob'' (soundtrack)
		"I Want That Man"	align="center"
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"Kiss It Better"	align="center"
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"Brite Side"	align="center"
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"Maybe for Sure"	align="center"
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Deborah Harry & Iggy Pop	1991	"Well, Did You Evah!"	align="center"
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	''Red Hot + Blue''
		"I Can See Clearly"	align="center"
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"Strike Me Pink"	align="center"
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	1997	"Command and Obey"	align="center"
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''This Is No Time''
	"Command and Obey" (Remix)	align="center"
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''-''
Deborah Harry	"I Want That Man" (Almighty Remix)	align="center"
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''Most of All - The Best of Deborah Harry''
Moby featuring Debbie Harry	2006		align="center"
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	''Go – The Very Best of Moby''
	2007	"Two Times Blue"	align="center"
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"Fit Right In"	align="center"
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Filmography

Features

''Unmade Beds'' (1976)

''Deadly Hero'' (1976)

''The Blank Generation'' (1976) (documentary)

''The Foreigner'' (1978)

''Mr. Mike's Mondo Video'' (1979)

''Union City'' (1980)

''Roadie'' (1980)

''Downtown 81'' (1981)

''Rock & Rule'' (1983 (voice)

''Videodrome'' (1983)

''Terror in the Aisles'' (1984)

''Forever Lulu'' (1987)

''Satisfaction'' (1988)

''Hairspray'' (1988)

''New York Stories'' (1989)

''Tales from the Darkside: The Movie'' (1990)

'''' (1992)

''Body Bags (1993)

''Dead Beat'' (1994)

''Drop Dead Rock'' (1995)

''Heavy'' (1995)

''Wigstock: The Movie'' (1995) (documentary)

''Cop Land'' (1997)

''Six Ways to Sunday'' (1997)

''Joe's Day'' (1998)

''Zoo'' (1999)

''Red Lipstick'' (2000)

''The Fluffer'' (2001)

''Deuces Wild'' (2002)

''Spun'' (2002)

''Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'' (2002) (Voice)

''All I Want'' (2002)

''End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones'' (2003) (documentary)

''My Life Without Me'' (2003)

''A Good Night to Die'' (2003)

''Ghostlight'' (2003)

''The Tulse Luper Suitcases'' (2003)

''Mayor of the Sunset Strip'' (2003) (documentary)

''Picture This: Blondie and Debbie Harry'' (2004) (documentary)

''Kiki and Herb Reloaded'' (2005) (documentary)

''Face Addict'' (2005) (documentary)

''Too Tough to Die: A Tribute to Johnny Ramone'' (2006) (documentary)

''Full Grown Men'' (2006)

''Anamorph'' (2007)

''Elegy'' (2008)

''Hotel Gramercy Park'' (2008) (documentary)

Short subjects

''A New Face of Debbie Harry'' (1982)

''Sandman'' (1996)

''Who Is Harry Smith?'' (1998)

''Drive'' (2002)

''Honey Trap'' (2005)

''Patch'' (2005)

''I Remember You Now...'' (2005)

References

External links

Official sites

Debbie Harry — official website & blog

www.dhbis.com — Deborah Harry & Blondie Mailing List

Deborah Harry discography at Discogs

www.blondie.net/deborah_harry.shtml, Deborah Harry's personal blog on Blondie site

Media links

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entry

Blondie at Rolling Stone Magazine

Debbie Harry Pop Culture Madness interview

Debbie Harry Interview on ''The Hour'' with George Stroumboulopoulos

Debbie Harry at NNDB

Category:1945 births Category:American dance musicians Category:American female singers Category:American film actors Category:American punk rock musicians Category:American punk rock singers Category:Blondie members Category:Sire Records artists Category:Chrysalis Records artists Category:Geffen Records artists Category:Female punk rock singers Category:Female New Wave singers Category:Musicians from Florida Category:People from Miami, Florida Category:Pop punk singers Category:LGBT rights activists from the United States Category:American adoptees Category:Living people Category:American New Wave musicians

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Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
name	David Bowie
background	solo_singer
birth name	David Robert Jones
birth date	January 08, 1947
birth place	Brixton, London, England
occupation	Musician, singer-songwriter,record producer, actor
years active	1964–present
instrument
genre	Rock, glam rock, art rock, pop
associated acts	The Riot Squad, Tin Machine
label	Deram, RCA, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Pye
website	davidbowie.com }}

David Bowie ( ; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s, and is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth of his work.

Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.

In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album ''Young Americans'', which the singer characterised as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album ''Low'' (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" and its parent album, ''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)''. He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with the album ''Let's Dance'', which yielded the hit singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love". Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was ''Reality'' (2003), which was supported by the 2003–2004 Reality Tour.

Biographer David Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and eight Silver, and in the United States, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.

History

1947–62: early years

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent, worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, was a promotions officer for Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.

In 1953 the family moved to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His singing voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that." By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet." Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.

It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:

Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician. He received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would lose the sight of the eye, and he was forced to stay out of school for a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation. The damage could not be fully repaired, leaving him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil (the latter producing Bowie's appearance of having different coloured eyes, though each iris has the same blue colour). Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.

1962–68: the Konrads to the Riot Squad

Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument in 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.

Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul — "I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall. "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.

Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie re-named himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, ''David Bowie'', an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.

Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus." Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside." Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year. After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.

1969–73: psychedelic folk to glam rock

''Space Oddity'' to ''Hunky Dory''

Because of his lack of commercial success, Bowie was forced to try to earn a living in different ways. He featured in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, but was rejected for another by Kit Kat. Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, ''Love You till Tuesday'', was made. Although not released until 1984, the filming sessions in January 1969 led to unexpected success when Bowie told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He then demoed the song that would provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing. Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street. This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival". "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, to become a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, ''Space Oddity'', followed in November; originally issued in the UK as ''David Bowie'', it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled ''Man of Words/Man of Music''. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.

Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence. Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally". The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist. A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. After a brief and disastrous manifestation as the Hype, the group reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist. Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey. Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.

The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, ''The Man Who Sold the World'' (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by ''Space Oddity''. To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including ''Rolling Stone''s John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass". During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol". A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars".

''Hunky Dory'' (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. (His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word ''zoe'', life.) Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time.

''Ziggy Stardust''

With his next venture, Bowie, in the words of biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture". Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972. The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'' (1972), combining the hard rock elements of ''The Man Who Sold the World'' with the lighter experimental rock and pop of ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July ''Top of the Pops'' performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old ''Hunky Dory''. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.

Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough ''Transformer'', co-producing the album with Mick Ronson. His own ''Aladdin Sane'' (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. ''Aladdin Sane'' spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".

Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both ''Ziggy Stardust'' and ''Aladdin Sane'', were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film ''Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''.

After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: ''The Man Who Sold the World'' had been re-released in 1972 along with ''Space Oddity''. "Life on Mars?", from ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four. ''Pin Ups'', a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.

1974–1976: Soul, funk and the Thin White Duke

Bowie moved to the United States in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. ''Diamond Dogs'' (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's ''1984'' to music. The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, ''Cracked Actor'', featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems. He later commented that the accompanying live album, ''David Live'', ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory". ''David Live'' nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.

The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was ''Young Americans'' (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. ''Young Americans'' yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon would call Bowie's work as "great, but just rock and roll with lipstick on". Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show ''Soul Train'', Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his October single, and that it was offered to Elvis Presley to perform, but Presley declined it. ''Young Americans'' was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US. Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of ''Ziggy Stardust'' alone), existed essentially on loose change." In 1975, in a move echoing Pitt's acrimonious dismissal 15 years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door." Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.

''Station to Station'' (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'' the same year. Developing the funk and soul of ''Young Americans'', ''Station to Station'' also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence." His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.

''Station to Station''s January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in ''NME''. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke. "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...". According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in ''The Times'', "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."

1976–79: the Berlin era

Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use increased; so too did his interest in pursuits outside his musical career. He took up painting, producing a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. [...] Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography".

Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy. During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, ''The Idiot'', and its follow-up, ''Lust for Life'', touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977. ''Low'' (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, ''Low'' yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of ''Station to Station'' in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described ''Low'' as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his ''Symphony No. 1 "Low"''; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 ''Symphony No. 4 "Heroes"''. Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".

Echoing ''Low''s minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, ''"Heroes"'' (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like ''Low'', ''"Heroes"'' evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French. Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show ''Marc'', and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.

After completing ''Low'' and ''"Heroes"'', Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends." Recordings from the tour made up the live album ''Stage'', released the same year.

The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", ''Lodger'' (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop. The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's ''Sergeant Pepper'' [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." ''Lodger'' reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ". Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.

1980–89: from superstar to megastar

''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)'' (1980) produced the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time. While ''Scary Monsters'' utilised principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer and Tom Verlaine. As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on 24 September, starring in ''The Elephant Man''.

Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German film ''Christiane F.'', a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as ''Christiane F.'' a few months later. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play ''Baal''. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as ''David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal''. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film ''Cat People'' came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.

Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with ''Let's Dance''. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially-censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film ''From Here to Eternity''), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. ''Let's Dance'' was followed by the Serious Moonlight Tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.

''Tonight'' (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of ''The Falcon and the Snowman''. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.

Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film ''Absolute Beginners''. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film ''Labyrinth'', for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's ''Never Let Me Down'', where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album". Supporting ''Never Let Me Down'', and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.

1989–91: Tin Machine

Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, known by Bowie since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album ''Lust For Life''.

Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making. The band's album debut, ''Tin Machine'' (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book." EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production". The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK. Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.

In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. ''Tin Machine II''s arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Kouroi statues, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album ''Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby'' failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.

1992–99: electronica

In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part. Four days later, Bowie and Iman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.

1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced ''Black Tie White Noise''. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with ''Let's Dance'' producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say". Bowie explored new directions on ''The Buddha of Suburbia'' (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in ''Black Tie White Noise'', and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.

Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial ''Outside'' (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996. Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, ''Earthling'' (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film ''Showgirls'' was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for ''The Rugrats Movie''. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'". The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.

1999–present: Neoclassicist Bowie

Bowie created the soundtrack for ''Omikron'', a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album '''Hours...''' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant. Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica. Sessions for the planned album ''Toy'', intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album ''Heathen''. Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.

In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes". 2002 saw the release of ''Heathen'', and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual ''Meltdown'' festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's ''Low'' era. ''Reality'' (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.

Since recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie has reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film ''Shrek 2''. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film ''Stealth''. He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album ''Return to Cookie Mountain'', made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio, and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album ''No Balance Palace''.

Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006. In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums." He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive.

Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event, and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, ''Anywhere I Lay My Head''. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. ''A Reality Tour'', a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.

In late March 2011, ''Toy'', Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for ''Heathen'' and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.

Acting career

Biographer David Buckley writes, "The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream—from art, literature, theatre and film—and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed." Buckley says "Just one person took glam rock to new rarefied heights and invented character-playing in pop, marrying theatre and popular music in one seamless, powerful whole." Bowie's career has also been punctuated by various roles in film and theatre productions, earning him some acclaim as an actor in his own right.

The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production ''Pierrot in Turquoise'' (later made into the 1970 television film ''The Looking Glass Murders''). In the black-and-white short ''The Image'' (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him. The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel ''The Virgin Soldiers'' saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra. Bowie starred in ''The Hunger'' (1983), a revisionist vampire film, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, ''Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence'', based on Laurens van der Post's novel ''The Seed and the Sower'', Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in ''Yellowbeard'', a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film ''Into the Night''. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film ''A View to a Kill'' (1985).

''Absolute Beginners'' (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy ''Labyrinth'' found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins. Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film ''The Last Temptation of Christ''. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in ''The Linguini Incident'' (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's ''Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me'' (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in ''Basquiat'', artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western ''Il Mio West'' (1998, released as ''Gunslinger's Revenge'' in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's ''Everybody Loves Sunshine'' (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of ''The Hunger''. In ''Mr. Rice's Secret'' (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in ''Zoolander''.

Bowie portrayed physicist Nikola Tesla in the Christopher Nolan film, ''The Prestige'' (2006), which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the early 20th century. He voice-acted in the animated film ''Arthur and the Invisibles'' as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the ''SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis'' television film. In the 2008 film ''August'', directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for ''The Man Who Fell to Earth''.

Sexual orientation

Buckley writes, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality." Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Michael Watts of ''Melody Maker'' in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust.

In a 1983 interview with ''Rolling Stone'', Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made", and on other occasions he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than his own feelings; as described by Buckley, he said he had been driven more by "a compulsion to flout moral codes than a real biological and psychological state of being".

Asked in 2002 by ''Blender'' whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied: }}

Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock", and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'." Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy." Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women."

Musicianship

From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie has employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced not only by rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley but also by the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, ''David Bowie'' (to the disgust of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher). Bowie's music hall fascination continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop.

Musicologist James Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, "Space Oddity", and later in the song "Heroes", to dramatic effect; Perone notes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register [...] his voice has an almost crooner-like richness."

Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive". Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect." Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."

Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums and percussion, and string instruments including viola and cello.

Legacy

Bowie's innovative songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie, according to music historians Schinder and Schwartz, has joint responsibility with Marc Bolan for creating the genre. At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock music movement—historian Michael Campbell calls him "one of punk's seminal influences". While punk musicians trashed the conventions of pop stardom, Bowie moved on again—into a more abstract style of music making that would in turn become a transforming influence. Biographer David Buckley writes, "At a time when punk rock was noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation." Bowie's record company sought to convey his unique status in popular music with the slogan, "There is old wave, there is new wave, and there is Bowie..." Musicologist James Perone credits him with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledge the intellectual depth of his work and influence.

Buckley writes that, in an early 1970s pop world that was "Bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, ... Bowie challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day." As described by John Peel, "The one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change." Buckley says that Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star", with the result that "After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. ... The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." Buckley concludes that "Bowie is both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced ... has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. ... His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Through perpetual reinvention, he has seen his influence continue to broaden and extend: music reviewer Brad Filicky writes that over the decades, "Bowie has become known as a musical chameleon, changing and dictating trends as much as he has altered his style to fit", influencing fashion and pop culture to a degree "second only to Madonna". Biographer Thomas Forget adds, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."

Awards and recognition

Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality. For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'', he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he has been honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, two Grammy Awards and two BRIT Awards.

In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year. He declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003, stating: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."

Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum, 11 Gold and 8 Silver albums, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time and the 23rd best singer of all time. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.

Discography

''David Bowie'' (1967)

''Space Oddity'' (1969)

''The Man Who Sold the World'' (1970)

''Hunky Dory'' (1971)

''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'' (1972)

''Aladdin Sane'' (1973)

''Pin Ups'' (1973)

''Diamond Dogs'' (1974)

''Young Americans'' (1975)

''Station to Station'' (1976)

''Low'' (1977)

''"Heroes"'' (1977)

''Lodger'' (1979)

''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)'' (1980)

''Let's Dance'' (1983)

''Tonight'' (1984)

''Never Let Me Down'' (1987)

''Black Tie White Noise'' (1993)

''Outside'' (1995)

''Earthling'' (1997)

'''Hours...''' (1999)

''Heathen'' (2002)

''Reality'' (2003)

See also

Best selling music artists

Bowie Bonds

List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 (US)

List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart

List of David Bowie tours

List of number-one hits (United States)

List of Number 1 Dance Hits (United States)

List of people who have declined a British honour

Notes

References

Further reading

Trynka Paul, ''Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography'', Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2011

Cann, David, ''Any Day Now: David Bowie the London Years 1947–1974'', Kenneth Pitt in Books, 2011

Jacke, Andreas, ''David Bowie – Station To Station'', Psychosozial- Verlag, 2011

Seabrook, Thomas Jerome, ''Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town'', Jawbone Press, 2008.

Spitz, Marc, ''Bowie: A Biography'', Crown Publishers, 2009.

Tremlett, George, ''David Bowie: Living on the Brink'', Carroll and Graf, 1997.

Waldrep, Shelton, "Phenomenology of Performance", ''The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie'', University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Welch, Chris, ''David Bowie: We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song'', Da Capo Press, 1999.

Wilcken, Hugo, ''33⅓: David Bowie's'' Low, Continuum, 2005.

External links

Official Myspace page

Official YouTube channel

Bowieart – paintings, printmakings, etc.

Category:1947 births Category:Bisexual actors Category:Bisexual musicians Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Category:Decca Records artists Category:EMI Records artists Category:English film actors Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English record producers Category:English rock musicians Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Glam rock Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:LGBT musicians from the United Kingdom Category:LGBT parents Category:LGBT people from England Category:Living people Category:Musicians from London Category:People from Brixton Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Singers from London Category:Virgin Records artists Category:Androgyny

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Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Jean-Michel Basquiat
birth date	December 22, 1960
birth place	Brooklyn, New York City, U.S.
death date	August 12, 1988
death place	Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
nationality	American
field	Graffiti, painting, poetry
movement	Neo-expressionism
influenced by	Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol
awards	}}

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27.

Early life

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, the first of three children to Matilde Andrades (July 28, 1934 – November 17, 2008) and Gerard Basquiat (born 1930). He had two younger sisters: Lisane, born in 1964, and Jeanine, born in 1967.

His father, Gerard Basquiat, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and his mother, Matilde Basquiat, was of Puerto Rican descent, born in Brooklyn, New York. Basquiat was a precocious child who learned how to read and write by age four and was a gifted artist. His teachers noticed his artistic abilities, and his mother encouraged her son's artistic talent. By the age of eleven, Basquiat could fluently speak, read, and write French, Spanish and English.

In September 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, and eventually underwent a splenectomy. His parents separated that same year and he and his sisters were raised by their father. The family resided in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for five years, then moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1974. After two years, they returned to New York City.

At 15, Basquiat ran away from home. He slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, and was arrested and returned to the care of his father within a week.

Basquiat dropped out of City As School in the tenth grade. His father banished him from the household and Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn. He supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards. He also worked at the Unique Clothing Warehouse in West Broadway, Manhattan.

Career

In 1976, Basquiat and friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson began spray-painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured inscribed messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause." On December 11, 1978, the ''Village Voice'' published an article about the graffiti. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph "SAMO IS DEAD," inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979.

In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live Public-access television cable TV show ''TV Party'' hosted by Glenn O'Brien, and the two started a friendship. Basquiat made regular appearances on the show over the next few years. That same year, Basquiat formed the noise rock band Gray with Shannon Dawson, Michael Holman, Nick Taylor and Wayne Clifford. Gray performed at nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah, and the Mudd Club. In 1980, Basquiat starred in the O'Brien's independent film ''Downtown 81'', originally titled New York Beat. That same year, O'Brien introduced Basquiat to Andy Warhol, with whom he later collaborated. The film featured some of Gray's recordings on its soundtrack. He also appeared in the Blondie music video "Rapture" as a nightclub disc jockey.

In June 1980, Basquiat participated in ''The Times Square Show'', a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda. In 1981, Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in ''Artforum'' magazine, which brought Basquiat to the attention of the art world.

In late 1981, he joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo, Manhattan. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, involved with the Neo-expressionist movement. He was represented in Los Angeles, California by the Larry Gagosian gallery, and throughout Europe by Bruno Bischofberger. He briefly dated then-aspiring performer Madonna in late 1982. That same year, Basquiat also worked briefly with musician and artist David Bowie. Basquiat painted in Armani suits, and often appeared in public in the same paint-splattered $1,000 suits.

By 1986, Basquiat had left the Annina Nosei gallery, and was showing in the famous Mary Boone gallery in SoHo. On February 10, 1986, he appeared on the cover of ''The New York Times Magazine'' in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist". He was a successful artist in this period, however his growing heroin addiction began to interfere with his personal relationships.

Death

When Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression grew more severe. Despite an attempt at sobriety during a trip to Maui, Hawaii, Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, of a heroin overdose at his art studio in Great Jones Street in New York City's NoHo neighborhood. He was 27.

Artistic activities

Continuing his activities as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and become known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress with the words "Little Shit Brown". He would often draw on random objects and surfaces.

The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat's art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams and more.

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and imagery. The years 1984-85 were also the main period of the Basquiat–Warhol collaborations, even if, in general, they weren't very well received by the critics.

A major reference source used by Basquiat throughout his career was the book ''Gray's Anatomy'', which his mother gave to him while in the hospital at age seven. It remained influential in his depictions of internal human anatomy, and in its mixture of image and text. Other major sources were Henry Dreyfuss Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo Da Vinci's ''notebooks'', and Brentjes ''African Rock Art''.

Basquiat doodled often and some of his later pieces exhibited this; they were often colored pencil on paper with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his paintings.

Representing his heritage in his art

According to Andrea Frohne, Basquiat’s 1983 painting "Untitled (History of the Black People)" "reclaims Egyptians as African and subverts the concept of ancient Egypt as the cradle of Western Civilization". At the center of the painting, Basquiat depicts an Egyptian boat being guided down the Nile River by Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. On the right panel of the painting appear the words “Esclave, Slave, Esclave”. Two letters of the word "Nile" are crossed out and Frohne suggests that, "The letters that are wiped out and scribbled over perhaps reflect the acts of historians who have conveniently forgotten that Egyptians were black and blacks were enslaved." On the left panel of the painting Basquiat, has illustrated two Nubian style masks. The Nubians historically were darker in skin color, and were considered to be slaves by the Egyptian people. Throughout the rest of the painting, images of the Atlantic slave trade are juxtaposed with images of the Egyptian slave trade centuries before. The hat that frames the head of the Negro policeman resembles a cage, and represents how constrained the independent perceptions of African-American’s were at the time, and how constrained the policeman’s own perceptions were within white society. Basquiat drew upon his Haitian heritage by painting a hat that resembles the top hat associated with the Haitian trickster lwa, leader of the Gede family of lwas and guardian of death and the dead in vodou. edited by Richard Marshall and including several essays of differing styles, was a groundbreaking piece of scholarship into Basquiat's work and still a major source. Another influential showing was the "Basquiat" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum March–June 2005 (which subsequently traveled to Los Angeles and Houston from 2005 to 2006).

Until 2002, the highest money paid for an original work of Basquiat's was US$3,302,500, set on November 12, 1998 at Christie's. On May 14, 2002, Basquiat's ''Profit I'' (a large piece measuring 86.5"/220 cm by 157.5"/400 cm), owned by drummer Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band Metallica, was set for auction again at Christie's. It sold for US$5,509,500. The proceedings of the auction are documented in the film ''Some Kind of Monster''.

On November 12, 2008, at another auction at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece, ''Untitled (Boxer)'', for US$13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. The record price for a Basquiat painting was made on May 15, 2007, when an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for US$14.6 million.

In 1996, seven years after his death, a biopic titled ''Basquiat'' was released, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat. David Bowie played the part of Andy Warhol. Schnabel purchased the rights to the project after being interviewed, as a personal acquaintance of Basquiat, during its script development and realizing that he could do a better film.

In 1991, poet Kevin Young produced a book, ''To Repel Ghosts'', a compendium of 117 poems relating to Basquiat’s life, individual paintings, and social themes found in the artist’s work. He published a “remix” of the book in 2005.

In 2005, poet M.K. Asante, Jr. published the poem "SAMO," dedicated to Basquiat, in his book ''Beautiful. And Ugly Too''.

A 2009 documentary film, ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child'', directed by Tamra Davis, was first screened as part of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2011.

The title of the 2010 song "Out Getting Ribs", written by Zoo Kid, is a reference to a Basquiat piece titled the same.

Further reading

Buchhart Dieter, O'Brien Glenn, Prat Jean-Louis, Reichling Susanne, ''Jean-Michel Basquiat'', Hatje Cantz, 2010. ISBN 9783775725934

Deitch J, Cortez D, and O’Brien, Glen. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981: the Studio of the Street'', Charta, 2007. ISBN 9788881586257

Fretz, Eric. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography''. Greenwood Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-313-38056-3

Hoban, Phoebe. ''Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art'' (2nd ed.), Penguin Books, 2004.

Marenzi, Luca. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat.'' Charta, 1999. ISBN 9788881582396

Marshall, Richard. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat'', Abrams / Whitney Museum of American Art. Hardcover 1992, paperback 1995. (Catalog for 1992 Whitney retrospective, out of print).

Marshall, Richard. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: In World Only.'' Cheim & Read, 2005. (out of print).

Mayer, Marc, Hoffman Fred, et al. ''Basquiat'', Merrell Publishers / Brooklyn Museum, 2005.

Tate, Greg. ''Flyboy in the Buttermilk''. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. ISBN 978-0-671-72965-3

References

External links

Brooklyn Museum Website of the 2005 Basquiat retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Basquiat at Artfacts (Commercial site giving listing of Basquiat exhibitions, and works currently on sale.)

Basquiat Biography. (Scholarly Basquiat website with bibliography, timeline, links to on-line images, school lesson-plans, list of Basquiat works recently at auction, and updated blog of current Basquiat-related events.)

Emmerling, Leonhard. Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960-1988. Köln: Taschen Art Album, 2003.

Hoban, Phoebe. “SAMO IS DEAD: The Fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat”. ''New York Magazine''. Sept. 26, 1988. pp 36–44.

Pearlman, Alison. Unpackaging Art of the 1980s.

Powers, Nicholas. The Radiant Death, a review of the Brooklyn Museum's Basquiat exhibit

Seed, John. Driving Mr. Basquiat.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Documentary film by Tamra Davis, screened at Sundance Film Festival 2010

Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Fun Gallery, excerpt from "Young Expressionists" (ART/New York #19), video, 1982.

Basquiat: The Radiant Child'' site for Independent Lens on PBS

Official Trailer for the 2011 documentary ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child''

Category:1960 births Category:1988 deaths Category:Accidental deaths in New York Category:American graffiti artists Category:American painters Category:American people of Haitian descent Category:American people of Puerto Rican descent Category:Artists from New York Category:Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery Category:Contemporary painters Category:Deaths by heroin overdose in New York Category:Haitian painters Category:People from Brooklyn Category:People from Manhattan Category:Puerto Rican painters Category:Puerto Rican people of Haitian descent Category:20th-century painters

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Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
name	Edie Sedgwick
birth name	Edith Minturn Sedgwick
birth date	April 20, 1943
birth place	Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
death date	November 16, 1971
death place	Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
occupation	Artist, socialite, model, actress
years active	1965–1971
spouse	}}

Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick (April 20, 1943 – November 16, 1971) was an American actress, socialite, model and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's superstars. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Warhol's short films, in the 1960s. Dubbed an "It Girl", ''Vogue'' magazine also named her a "Youthquaker".

Family background and early life

Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California, to Alice Delano de Forest (1908–1988) and Francis Minturn Sedgwick, (1904–1967, known as either "Duke" or "Fuzzy"), a philanthropist, rancher and sculptor. She was named after her father's aunt, Edith Minturn, famously painted, with her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, by John Singer Sargent.

Sedgwick's family was long established in Massachusetts history. Her seventh-great grandfather, English-born Robert Sedgwick, was the first Major General of the Massachusetts Bay Colony settling in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1635. Edie's family later originated from Stockbridge, Massachusetts where her great-great-great grandfather Judge Theodore Sedgwick had settled after the American Revolution. Theodore married Pamela Dwight of the New England Dwight family who was the daughter of Abigail (Williams) Dwight, which means that Ephraim Williams, the founder of Williams College, was her fifth-great grandfather. Theodore Sedgwick was the first to plead and win a case for the freedom of a black woman, Elizabeth Freeman, under the Massachusetts Bill of Rights that declared all men to be born free and equal. Sedgwick's mother was the daughter of Henry Wheeler de Forest (President and Chairman of the Board of the Southern Pacific Railroad and a direct descendant of Jessé de Forest whose Dutch West India Company helped to settle New Amsterdam). Jessé de Forest was also Edie's seventh-great grandfather. Her paternal grandfather was the historian and acclaimed author Henry Dwight Sedgwick III; her great grandmother, Susanna Shaw, was the sister of Robert Gould Shaw, the American Civil War Colonel; and her great-great grandfather, Robert Bowne Minturn, was a part owner of the ''Flying Cloud'' clipper ship and is credited with creating and promoting Central Park in New York City. And her great-great-great grandfather, William Ellery, was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence.

She was the first cousin, once removed, of actress Kyra Sedgwick. Kyra is the daughter of Henry Dwight Sedgwick V (Edie's first cousin), the son of Robert Minturn Sedgwick, who was the older brother of Francis Minturn Sedgwick.

Despite her family's wealth and high social status, Edie's early life was troubled. All the Sedgwick children had deeply conflicted relationships with their father Fuzzy—they adored him, but by most accounts he was narcissistic, emotionally remote, controlling and frequently abusive. Her eldest sister Alice ("Saucie") eventually broke with the family and her two older brothers died prematurely. Francis (known as "Minty"), who had a particularly unhappy relationship with Fuzzy, suffered several breakdowns, eventually committing suicide in 1964 while in a psychiatric hospital. Her oldest brother Robert ("Bobby"), who also suffered from mental health problems, died in a motorcycle accident in 1965. Edie had a very difficult relationship with her father, who openly carried on affairs with other women. On one occasion she walked in on him while he was having sex with one of his paramours. She flew into a rage, but Fuzzy claimed that Edie imagined the whole event. As a result of her emotional problems, Edie developed anorexia by her early teens and settled into a lifelong pattern of binging and purging.

The Sedgwick children were raised on their family's California ranches. Initially schooled at home and cared for by nannies, their lives were rigidly controlled by their parents; they were largely isolated from the outside world and it was instilled into them that they were superior to most of their peers. At age 13 (the year her grandfather Babbo died) Edie began boarding at the Branson School near San Francisco, but, according to Saucie, she was soon taken out of the school because of her anorexia. In 1958 she was enrolled at St. Timothy's School in Maryland. She initially made a dazzling impression but soon ran into trouble and was taken out the following year. At this point, apparently a serious rift developed between Edie's parents, and her mother left the country with Edie, intending to take her to stay with a noble family in Austria. However, this arrangement was terminated almost immediately, and Edie and her mother reportedly returned to the United States within 48 hours.

In the fall of 1962, at Fuzzy's insistence, Edie was admitted to the Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. According to fellow patient Virginia Davis, the regime was very lax there, and Edie and her friends often left the hospital after lunch and went into town on shopping sprees, charging up thousands of dollars worth of goods on credit at local stores. Edie easily manipulated the situation at Silver Hill, but her weight kept dropping to just ninety pounds. Consequently, her family had her transferred to a "closed" facility at Bloomingdale, the Westchester County, New York division of the New York Hospital. There, thanks to the strict treatment program, Edie's condition improved markedly. Around the time she left the hospital she had a brief relationship with a Harvard student, became pregnant and procured an abortion with her mother's help.

In the fall of 1963 Edie moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began studying art with her cousin Lily Saarinen. During this period she partied with members of the bohemian fringe of the Harvard social scene, which included many gay men. Jean Stein's biography includes an account by her friend Ed Hennessy of the occasion on which Edie and her friends bluffed their way into the Ritz Hotel in Boston by claiming that her father had a charge account there. They ordered a lavish meal, which reportedly cost around $250 (equal to perhaps 10 times that amount today) and when the bill was presented, to the amazement of the staff and her friends, Edie added a 100 percent tip. After the bill had been paid, the party grew even wilder, with Edie at one point climbing onto a table and singing her favorite song, Richard Rodgers' "Loads of Love".

Edie was deeply affected by the loss of her brothers, who died within 18 months of each other. Francis (nicknamed "Minty") also had a troubled life; he became an alcoholic in his early teens, triggering a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse, and in late 1963 he suffered a serious breakdown and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital before being transferred to Silver Hill. According to her friend Ed Hennessy, Edie told him that Minty had finally admitted to his father that he was homosexual, and that this had enraged Fuzzy, who said that he would never speak to him again. Shortly after this, in May 1963, on the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, Minty hanged himself with a tie from the door of his bathroom at Silver Hill.

By the time of Minty's death Edie had moved to New York City. She lived at first with her senile grandmother, who had an apartment on 75th Street, but in late fall 1964 she took an apartment in the East Sixties between Fifth and Madison, which her mother decorated lavishly. Edie embarked on a constant round of partying and spent her trust fund at an astonishing rate; according to friend Tom Goodwin she went through eighty thousand dollars in just six months and bought huge amounts of clothing, jewelery and cosmetics. After her 'chauffeur' crashed the gray Mercedes she had been given by her father, she began using limousine services constantly, moving from company to company each time she had exhausted her credit. She also began experimenting with drugs and was reportedly introduced to LSD by friends from Cambridge who knew Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.

Edie's eldest brother Bobby was also experiencing serious mental health problems, and in late 1963, a few months before Minty's breakdown, Bobby too suffered a breakdown and his sister Saucie had to have him admitted to Bellevue. He became increasingly self-destructive, crashing a sports car and habitually riding his powerful Harley Davidson motorcycle without a helmet. Bobby was asked not to attend the Sedgwick Christmas gathering in California (according to Saucie, his father told Bobby he was a "bad influence" on the other children) and on 31 December 1964 Bobby suffered critical head injuries when his bike slammed into the side of a bus on Eighth Avenue in New York City; he never regained consciousness and died in hospital twelve days later, aged 36. Edie told her friend Gillian Walker that she knew that Bobby was going to die and that he had killed himself. In Walker's view, Edie dealt with these tragedies by suppressing her feelings and throwing herself back into the New York party world.

Shortly after Bobby's death, Edie was herself injured in a car accident in California, in which she suffered a broken knee. She was fearful that her father might use this as an excuse to have her sent back into psychiatric care, so with her mother's help she surreptitiously left California and returned to New York.

The Factory days

In March 1965, Sedgwick met artist and avant-garde filmmaker Andy Warhol at Lester Persky's apartment. She began going to The Factory regularly in March 1965 with her friend, Chuck Wein. During one of those visits, Warhol was filming ''''Vinyl'''', his interpretation of the novel ''A Clockwork Orange''. Despite ''Vinyl'''s all-male cast, Warhol put Sedgwick in the movie. She also made a small cameo appearance in another Warhol film, ''Horse'', when she entered towards the end of the film. Although Sedgwick's appearances in both films were brief, they generated so much interest that Warhol decided to create a vehicle in which she could star.

The first of those films, ''Poor Little Rich Girl'', was originally conceived as part of a series featuring Sedgwick, called ''The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga''. The series was to include ''Poor Little Rich Girl'', ''Restaurant'', ''Face'' and ''Afternoon''. Filming of ''Poor Little Rich Girl'' started in March 1965 in Sedgwick's apartment. The first reel shows Sedgwick waking up, ordering coffee and orange juice, and putting on her makeup in silence with only an Everly Brothers record playing. Due to a problem with the camera lens, the footage on the first reel is completely out of focus. The second reel consists of Sedgwick smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, trying on clothes, and describing how she had spent her entire inheritance in six months.

On April 30, 1965, Warhol took Sedgwick, Chuck Wein and Gerard Malanga to the opening of his exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. On returning to New York City, Warhol asked his scriptwriter, Ron Tavel, to write a script for Sedgwick, “something in a kitchen – something white, and clean, and plastic,” Warhol is to have said, according to Ric Burns' ''Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film.'' The result was ''Kitchen'', starring Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, Roger Trudeau, Donald Lyons and Elecktrah. After ''Kitchen'', Chuck Wein replaced Ron Tavel as writer and assistant director for the filming of ''Beauty No. 2'', in which Sedgwick appeared with Gino Piserchio. ''Beauty No. 2'' premiered at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque at the Astor Place Playhouse on July 17.

Although Warhol's films were not commercially successful and rarely seen outside The Factory circle, but as Sedgwick's notoriety grew, mainstream media outlets began reporting on her appearances in Warhol's underground films and her unusual fashion sense. During this period she developed her "trademark" look -- black leotards, mini dresses, and large chandelier earrings. Sedgwick also cut her hair short and colored her naturally brown hair with silver spray, creating a similar look to the wigs Warhol wore. Warhol christened her his "Superstar" and both were photographed together at various social outings.

Throughout 1965, Sedgwick and Warhol continued making films together -- ''Outer and Inner Space'', ''Prison'', ''Lupe'' and ''Chelsea Girls''. However, by late 1965, Sedgwick and Warhol's relationship had deteriorated and Sedgwick requested that Warhol no longer show any of her films. She asked that the footage she filmed for ''Chelsea Girls'' be removed and it was replaced with footage of Nico, with colored lights projected on her face and The Velvet Underground music playing in the background. The edited footage of Sedgwick in ''Chelsea Girls'' would eventually become the film ''Afternoon''.

''Lupe'' is often thought to be Sedgwick's last Warhol film, but Sedgwick filmed ''The Andy Warhol Story'' with Rene Ricard in 1966, almost a year after she filmed ''Lupe''. ''The Andy Warhol Story'' was an unreleased film that was only screened once at The Factory. The film featured Sedgwick, along with Rene Ricard, satirically pretending to be Andy Warhol. It is thought to be either lost or destroyed.

Bob Dylan and Bob Neuwirth

Following her estrangement from Warhol's inner circle, Sedgwick began living at the Chelsea Hotel, where she became close to Bob Dylan. Dylan's friends eventually convinced Sedgwick to sign up with Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager. Sedgwick and Dylan's relationship ended when Sedgwick learned Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a secret ceremony – something she apparently learned from Warhol during an argument at the Gingerman Restaurant in February 1966.

According to Paul Morrissey, Sedgwick had said: "'They're [Dylan's people] going to make a film and I'm supposed to star in it with Bobby [Dylan].' Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and they realized that she had a crush on him. They thought he'd been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in his lawyer's office that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months – he married Sara Lownds in November 1965... Andy couldn't resist asking, 'Did you know, Edie, that Bob Dylan has gotten married?' She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn't been truthful."

Several weeks before the December 29, 2006 one-week release of the controversial film ''Factory Girl'' (described by ''The Village Voice'' review as "Edie for Dummies)," the Weinstein Company and the film's producers interviewed Sedgwick's older brother, Jonathan, who asserted that she had "had an abortion of the child she was (supposedly) carrying by Dylan." Jonathan Sedgwick, a retired airplane designer, was flown in from Idaho to New York City by the distributor to meet Sienna Miller, who was playing his late sister, as well as to give an eight-hour video interview with details about the purported liaison between Edie and Dylan, which the distributor promptly released to the news media. Jonathan claims an abortion took place soon after "Edie was badly hurt in a motorcycle crash and sent to an emergency unit. As a result of the accident, doctors consigned her to a mental hospital where she was treated for drug addiction." No hospital records or Sedgwick family records exist to support this story. Nonetheless, Edie's brother also claimed "Staff found she was pregnant but, fearing the baby had been damaged by her drug use and anorexia, forced her to have the abortion." However, according to Edie Sedgwick's personal medical records and oral life-history tape recorded less than a year before her death for her final film, ''Ciao! Manhattan'', there is credible evidence that the only abortion she underwent in her lifetime was at age 20 in 1963.

Throughout most of 1966, Sedgwick was involved in an intensely private yet tumultuous relationship with Dylan's closest friend, Bob Neuwirth. During this period, she became increasingly dependent on barbiturates. Although she abused many drugs, there is no evidence that Sedgwick ever became a heroin addict. In early 1967, unable to cope with Sedgwick's drug abuse and erratic behavior, Neuwirth broke off their relationship.

Later years

Sedgwick auditioned for Norman Mailer's play ''The Deer Park'', but Mailer thought she "wasn't very good... She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances."

In April 1967, Sedgwick began shooting ''Ciao! Manhattan'', an underground movie. After initial footage was shot in New York, co-directors John Palmer and David Weisman continued working on the film over the course of the next five years. Sedgwick's rapidly deteriorating health saw her return to her family in California, spending time in several different psychiatric institutions. In August 1969, she was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward of Cottage Hospital after being arrested for drug offenses by the local police. While in the hospital, Sedgwick met another patient, Michael Brett Post, whom she would later marry. Sedgwick was in the hospital again in the summer of 1970, but was let out under the supervision of a psychiatrist, two nurses, and the live-in care of filmmaker John Palmer and his wife Janet. Staunchly determined to finish ''Ciao! Manhattan'' and have her story told, Sedgwick recorded audio-tapes reflecting upon her life story, which enabled Weisman and Palmer to incorporate her accounts into the film's dramatic arc.

Last years and death

Sedgwick married Michael Post on July 24, 1971, and under his influence she reportedly stopped abusing alcohol and other drugs for a short time. Her sobriety lasted until October, when pain medication was given to her to treat a physical illness. She remained under the care of her physician Dr. Wells, who prescribed her barbiturates, but she would demand more pills or claim that she had lost them in order to get more, and often combined the medications with alcohol. Post was later put in charge of administering her medication; by his account, she took at least two 300 mg Quaalude tablets and two capsules of three-grain Tuinal every night, in addition to alcohol and whatever other drugs she may have been secretly consuming.

On the night of November 15, 1971, Sedgwick went to a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum, a segment of which was filmed for the television show ''An American Family''. After the fashion show, she attended a party where (according to the accounts of her husband and brother-in-law) a drunken guest insulted her by calling her a heroin addict and repeatedly asserting that her marriage would fail. Sedgwick phoned Post, who arrived at the party and, seeing her distress at the accusations, took her back to their apartment around one in the morning. On the way home, Sedgwick expressed thoughts of uncertainty about their marriage. Before they both fell asleep, Post gave Sedgwick the medication that had been prescribed for her. According to Post, Sedgwick started to fall asleep very quickly, and her breathing was, "bad – it sounded like there was a big hole in her lungs," but he attributed that to her heavy smoking habit and went to sleep.

When Post awoke the following morning, Edie Sedgwick was dead. The coroner ruled Sedgwick's death as "undetermined/accident/suicide." The time of death was estimated to be 9:20 A.M. The death certificate claims the immediate cause was "probable acute barbiturate intoxication" due to ethanol intoxication. Sedgwick's alcohol level was registered at 0.17% and her barbiturate level was 0.48 mg%. She was 28. Allegedly when learning of Sedgwick's death, Andy Warhol responded with "Edie who?".

Sedgwick was buried in the small Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, California in a simple grave. Her epitaph reads "Edith Sedgwick Post – Wife Of Michael Brett Post 1943–1971." Her mother Alice was buried next to her in 1988.

In popular culture

In music

Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" from his 1966 album ''Blonde on Blonde'' are purportedly about Sedgwick. His 1965 #2 single "Like a Rolling Stone" was also reportedly inspired by her.

The Velvet Underground song "Femme Fatale" from the 1967 album ''The Velvet Underground & Nico'' is an ode to Edie. It is explicitly stated before the beginning of the song on their live set in San Francisco (Documented in the Quine Tapes) on November 7, 1969.

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions included a song about Edie Sedgwick called "Grace" on their 1985 ''Easy Pieces'' album.

The alternative rock band Dramarama used a photograph of Sedgwick on their 1985 album ''Cinéma Vérité''. On that album, the song "All I Want" makes a reference to Edith Sedgwick Post. Dramarama also recorded a version of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" on their first ''Cinema Verite'', and their debut EP ''Comedy''.

Etienne Daho song "La Ballade d'Edie S." from 1985 is about Edie Sedgwick

The Adult Net released a single called 'Edie' in 1985 on ''Beggars Banquet'' which was an homage to Edie Sedgwick.

James Ray and the Performance wrote a song about her called "Edie Sedgwick" on the b-side of the 12" version of their debut 1986 single, "Mexico Sundown Blues". A remake was recorded on the James Rays Gangwar LP, ''Psychodalek'', titled "Edie."

Edie Brickell & New Bohemians wrote a song about her called "Little Miss S" which was on their ''Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars'' album released in 1988.

The Cult wrote a song about her life called "Edie (Ciao Baby)" which was on their ''Sonic Temple'' album, released in 1989. It was released as a single and video-clip starring an Edie-Double. The cover featured the famous ''Ciao! Manhattan'' cover shot and a tribute to Angel.

Madonna played Edie Sedgwick in her Deeper and Deeper video in 1992.

The Dream Academy dedicated the song "Girl In a Million" to Edie Sedgwick on their ''Three Steps Past the Edge of Forever'' release in 1997.

Will Young's 2002 music video for the remake of The Doors song "Light My Fire" features model Fanni Bostrom as Sedgwick. The video is loosely based on Sedgwick's last film ''Ciao! Manhattan''.

The Long Blondes reference Edie, along with Arlene Dahl, in the song "Lust in the Movies" from the 2006 album, ''Someone To Drive You Home''. Following the reference is the line 'I just want to be a sweetheart.'

Alizée released a song in 2008 called "Fifty-Sixty", which centers on the relationship of Edie and Andy Warhol. In 2010, Alizée released an album inspired by and about Sedgwick titled ''Une Enfant Du Siècle''.

Leddra Chapman's 2009 song Edie, in her album ''Telling Tales'', is based on Edie's role as a muse.

Justin Moyer (formerly of El Guapo/Supersystem) has a 2010 solo project called "Edie Sedgwick" in which he dresses in drag.

Martin Lyon's "Edie Sedgwick's Waltz" by the Dream Machine Experience.

In films

In the 1980s, Warren Beatty bought the rights to Edie's life story and was planning to make a movie with Molly Ringwald starring as Sedgwick. It was also reported a film entitled ''The War at Home'' was to be loosely based on her life during The Factory years, with Linda Fiorentino slated to portray her. It was to be based on John Byrum's fictionalized account of a working-class man who becomes enamored with her. Neither was ever produced.

Sedgwick was portrayed by Jennifer Rubin in Oliver Stone's 1991 film ''The Doors'', starring Val Kilmer, during the Factory party scene when Jim Morrison meets Andy Warhol.

In the 2002 film ''Igby Goes Down'', Amanda Peet's character, Rachel is described as an "Edie Sedgwick wanna-be" and dresses in Edie inspired attire throughout the film. Director Mike Nichols and actress Natalie Portman considered doing a film about Edie and Andy Warhol, but instead decided to film an adaption of Patrick Marber's play ''Closer'', released in 2004. Sienna Miller played Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper's film ''Factory Girl'', a fictionalized film about Sedgwick's life and times, released in December 2006. The film portrays Warhol, played by Guy Pearce, as a cynic who leads Edie to psychiatric problems and later death. In the film, Hayden Christensen plays "Billy Quinn", an apparent conglomeration of various characters but a look-alike of Bob Dylan. (As of late 2006, Dylan was apparently threatening to pursue a defamation lawsuit, claiming the film implicates him as having driven Sedgwick to her ultimate demise and eventual death.) Michael Post, Sedgwick's widower, appears as a taxi driver in one of the last scenes of the film.

The 2007 film ''I'm Not There'' based on Bob Dylan's life and times features an Edie-like character named "CoCo Rivington," played by Michelle Williams.

Other

One of the poems from Patti Smith's 1972 book ''Seventh Heaven'' is called "Edie Sedgwick".

A 2004 off-Broadway play entitled ''Andy & Edie'', written and produced by ''Peter Braunstein'', ran for ten days. Misha Moore, who portrayed Sedgwick, represented to the media that she was Sedgwick's niece. At the request of the Sedgwick family, the ''New York Times'' published a notice of correction.

In the fall of 2006, ''Ciao! Manhattan'' co-Director, David Weisman, announced on ''Access Hollywood'' that a documentary about Sedgwick is being developed with the same title of the book he co-authored, ''Edie: Girl on Fire.''

Filmography

+Film
! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes
1965			Non-speaking role
1965			Non-speaking role
1965	''Bitch''
1965	''Screen Test No.1''	Herself
1965	''Screen Test No.2''	Herself
1965
1965	''Face''
1965	''Restaurant''
1965	''Kitchen''
1965	''Afternoon''
1965	''Space''
1965
1965	''Factory Diaries''
1965	''Outer and Inner Space''
1965	''Prison''		Alternative title: ''Girls in Prison''
1966	''Lupe''
1966	''''
1967–1968	''****''		Alternative title: ''The Four Star Movie''
1969	''Diaries, Notes and Sketches''	Herself	Alternative title: ''Walden''
1972	''Ciao! Manhattan''	Susan Superstar

Bibliography

Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga: ''Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story''

Victor Bockris: ''Andy Warhol''

Michael Opray: ''Andy Warhol. Film Factory''

Jean Stein: ''Edie: American Girl"

Andy Warhol: ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol''

Melissa Painter and David Weisman: ''Edie: Girl on Fire'' Book and Film

Steven Watson: ''Factory Made: Warhol And the Sixties''

Nat Finkelstein and David Dalton: ''Edie: Factory Girl''

References

External links

''Blast'' Magazine Article "Girl on Fire"

Category:1943 births Category:1971 deaths Category:Actors from California Category:American female models Category:American artists' models Category:American artists Category:American film actors Category:American socialites Category:Delano family Category:Drug-related deaths in California Category:People from New York City Category:People from Santa Barbara, California Category:Sedgwick family Category:Warhol Superstars

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