Warhol's Art Time Capsules

Warhol discovered that he loved filing away the detritus of his life, so much so that he began to hoard his possessions in boxes until his death. "What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up," he advised in his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). "Now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a colour patch on the side for the month of the year." He wasn't joking. From 1974 until the end of his life, Warhol kept a box beside his desk into which he swept all the ephemera that passed through his hands. When it became full, it was taped shut, dated and sent into storage. By the time of his death, aged 58, in 1987, Warhol had filled more than 600 boxes. He came to see them as a conceptual artwork in their own right, a sprawling self-portrait that also captured the spirit of his age. He called them his Time Capsules. Today, the boxes are kept in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh where they form an invaluable - and largely untapped (since more than 460 have yet to be opened) - archival source for studying Warhol's life and work. Two of the capsules from Pittsburgh are travelling to Edinburgh as part of the Warhol exhibition. They have never been shown in Europe before. Keen to discover what secrets they contained, I travelled to the city last week to rummage through them. In the basement of the Royal Scottish Academy building, the contents of the two capsules are spread across a table. Presiding over the mass of papers, mementoes and odds and ends is Matt Wrbican, the archivist from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh charged with cataloguing the chaos inside the 612 boxes that Warhol left behind. "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it," the artist famously said. The Time Capsules suggest otherwise. (For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art