A studio that was also a scene
By 1967 Andy Warhol was already one of the best-known artists in the United States, and the place where he worked had become almost as famous as his pictures. The Factory, in its original form, occupied a loft on East 47th Street in Manhattan. Its walls were covered in silver foil and paint, a look associated with the artist’s friend Billy Name. It was a workshop, a film set, a hangout and a stage for a shifting cast of artists, musicians, hangers-on and visitors. In 1968 the studio moved to Union Square, and the character of the place changed again.
The word “factory” was a joke with a serious edge. Warhol had made his name in the early 1960s by using silkscreen printing to produce images of soup cans, celebrities and car crashes, and he spoke openly about wanting to work like a machine. Assistants helped to make the prints, and the idea of a single, hand-made masterpiece was part of what he was playfully undermining. In 1967 he continued to produce screenprint portfolios, including images of Marilyn Monroe, while a good deal of his energy went elsewhere.
Films that tested patience
Much of that energy went into film. Since 1963 Warhol had made dozens of films, many of them long, static and deliberately unhurried. By 1967 the ones that drew the most attention were his more elaborate productions with sound and scripted-feeling scenes, though most were improvised around a situation and the personalities of the people on camera.
The best known is The Chelsea Girls. It had its first showing in New York in the autumn of 1966, and through 1967 it travelled to other cities and played in ordinary cinemas, which was unusual for an experimental work. It runs for more than three hours and is projected on two screens side by side, with the sound from one reel sometimes louder than the other. Its episodes involve people in rooms of the Chelsea Hotel and elsewhere. Critics argued over whether it was a breakthrough or a tedious in-joke, and that argument was part of its draw. It is often cited as one of the films that brought the underground film movement to a wider audience.
Other Warhol films of the year included Bike Boy and I, a Man, and he also produced very long works that were screened in unusual formats. Paul Morrissey, who had joined the circle a little earlier, took on a larger role in organising the film work, and the later Factory features owe much to that shift. Warhol often described himself in this period as a filmmaker first and a painter second, though how seriously to take that remark is hard to judge.
The band he adopted
Warhol’s most lasting connection to music in 1967 came through the Velvet Underground. The group, centred on Lou Reed and John Cale, had been playing around New York when Warhol took an interest in 1965 and began presenting them as part of his multimedia events. He also encouraged the addition of the German singer Nico. The shows, billed as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, combined the band’s loud, droning sound with film projections, strobe lighting and dancers. They were an early and influential example of what later fed into psychedelic experimentation, although the Velvet Underground’s dark, urban mood was quite different from the sunny image of San Francisco.
The band’s first record, The Velvet Underground and Nico, appeared in March 1967 on the Verve label. Warhol was credited as producer, and the cover carried his banana design, with a sticker that could be peeled to reveal a pink image beneath. The record’s reputation grew only slowly; at the time it sold modestly, and it is now regarded as one of the most influential rock albums of the decade. How much Warhol shaped the actual sound in the studio is a matter on which accounts differ. His clearest contributions were the introduction, the financing and the publicity, rather than hands-on musical decisions.
By the time the album came out, the working relationship between Warhol and the band was already under strain, and the group went its own way soon afterwards. The Factory’s main impact on music was therefore to give a few songs about drugs, sex and city life a platform and a visual identity at a moment when the mainstream was moving in a very different direction.
What 1967 meant for Warhol
Seen in context, 1967 was a year when the downtown art world and the wider American counterculture intersected without fully merging. Warhol attracted press attention, and his scene was reported on in magazines and newspapers alongside the hippies of the West Coast, but he was never a hippie. His manner was cool and detached, and his interest was in fame, glamour and surface rather than communal idealism.
The year was also a high point before a darker turn. In June 1968 Valerie Solanas, a writer who had hung around the Factory and had written the SCUM Manifesto, shot Warhol, and he was seriously wounded. He recovered, but the open-door atmosphere of the early Factory did not return in the same way. Anyone looking back on 1967 is therefore looking at the peak of that earlier phase, when a studio on East 47th Street combined painting, cinema and rock in a way few other places did.