Andy was stalking me
As mentioned earlier (someplace), here’s my photo of Andy Warhol at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, circa 1977, although I can’t find the picture I thought I took of the back of his head while he was autographing catalogues, biographies, coffee-table collections and (sigh) many, many soup cans.
For some absolutely stupid-in-hindsight reason, I didn’t get his signature on anything.
I was focused, as it were, on getting a shot of the back of his head because (get this) I was convinced that that’s where he’d been shot by extremely annoyed feminist Valerie Solanis on the eve of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June ‘68. That accounted for the different shades of his hair, see?
It wasn’t until years later I found out that that was a bloody wig he was wearing and Valerie’s bullets, while ripping up his abdomen pretty efficiently, came nowhere near his head.
I’ve just tried to verify from the Internet the year he was in Toronto, but at the moment, if you search “andy warhol toronto”, all you get is mega-chatter on the new show at the exact same gallery, “Warhol/Supernova”, which David Cronenberg of all people has put together.
The exhibition is giving the AGO a chance to show off some of its own gems, like “Silver Liz Cleopatra” from 1963 (above), a gift to the gallery from the the widow of animal geneticist Walter Landauer, who was evidently not related to the Lindauer family I knew in my hometown. At least that much I could check on the web.
