What Patti Smith really thinks of Andy Warhol
When Patti Smith moved to New York in 1967, it wasn’t long before she and Robert Mapplethorpe met the infamous artist Andy Warhol. The couple were desperate to get into venues such as Max’s Kansas City, where icons such as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Warhol hung out. Eventually, they made it inside, and Smith’s status as a punk poet began to rise.
During the late 1960s and ’70s, Smith hung out with some of the biggest names in art and music that gathered in popular New York spots. Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in the Chelsea Hotel for a short period, where Warhol shot a part of his film – Chelsea Girls – whilst living there in the mid-60s. She was also a huge fan of The Velvet Underground, whose debut album was produced by Warhol.
Mapplethorpe developed a love for Warhol’s art, so it greatly upset him when Warhol was shot in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist author of the SCUM manifesto. In Smith’s memoir Just Kids, she writes, “Although Robert tended not to be romantic about artists, he was very upset about it. He loved Andy Warhol and considered him our most important living artist. It was as close to hero worship as he ever got.”
She continued, “He respected artists like Cocteau and Pasolini, who merged life and art, but for Robert, the most interesting of them was Andy Warhol, documenting the human mise-en-scene in his silver-lined Factory.”
However, Smith revealed that she never felt the same about Warhol, writing, “His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”
In 2012, Smith was interviewed at the Louisiana Literature Festival, revealing that her attitude towards Warhol has changed since she got older. She said, “When I was young, I didn’t have an affection for Andy Warhol as a human being. I thought that he was not a very generous or kind person. His work really didn’t speak to me.” Yet, due to Mapplethorpe’s love of the artist, she didn’t “dismiss” him because she knew that Robert “knew things” and “trusted [his] instinct”.
Now, Smith sees Warhol as a “genius”, finding herself always gravitating towards his art in a museum if nothing else. The interviewer also asked Smith to explain the difference between “transforming” and “mirroring”, which led her to explain how the September 11 attacks made her miss Warhol.
“I appreciate, more and more, someone who has the ability to mirror our times. I think it’s important that people do that.” She continued, “I went and looked at the remains of one of the towers – the South Tower – and it was extraordinary – it was like a piece of sculpture. […] And I started thinking a lot about Andy then. I really missed Andy as an artist then because he would’ve known what to do as an artist. Not to transform but to document this extraordinary thing that happened.”
Smith has regularly declared her respect for Warhol since then, performing a concert in dedication to the artist in 2012 in collaboration with the Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years exhibition in New York. She included her own rendition of David Bowie’s song ‘Andy Warhol’ in the set, saying, “I so deeply appreciate his vision. He gave us such a great body of work, and we’re all grateful for that.”
