We see Warhol in a fresh light — young, victorious, on the verge of dominating the art world… We see Warhol through his art.
- Patrick Moore, former Director of The Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol lifted the sheet of acetate to the light, and for a moment, he and Marilyn Monroe dissolved into the same image. It was early 1964 in the Silver Factory, and the photographer William John Kennedy had asked Warhol what the large roll leaning against the wall was for. "These are the acetates used in my silkscreens," Warhol replied, and with a flurry of movement, held one sheet up. Through Marilyn's face, the artist peered out at the camera; Kennedy pressed the shutter. In a single frame, he had done what no portrait could: he folded the man into his own masterpiece, maker and icon collapsed into one.
Dellasposa is pleased to present Warhol / Indiana: On the Origins of Pop, a collection of original, signed photographs by William John Kennedy of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana in 1963 and 1964, several of which exist as Artist Proofs or unique pieces outside of an edition.
Kennedy's work is defined by a single, radical insight: that the truest portrait of an artist is one made through his art. Rather than photograph Warhol and Indiana as isolated subjects, Kennedy embedded each within his own work at the very moment of its making — folding Warhol through the acetate of Marilyn, or standing in Indiana’s studio as the LOVE canvas was first raised. Granted a year of unguarded access to Warhol at the Silver Factory on East 47th Street and to Indiana at his Coenties Slip studio, Kennedy documented both artists in the precise months before either ascended to prominence. The photographs in this exhibition trace that formative passage, from the birth of an icon to the dawn of a movement.
The collection takes its subject from a chain of encounters Kennedy himself described. Reflecting on the origins of the series, he recalled: "When I look back on my involvement with the Pop artists, it all came off my initial involvement with Robert Indiana. He was the lynchpin". It was Indiana who, in the winter of 1963, introduced Kennedy to an as-yet-unknown Warhol at the Museum of Modern Art’s Americans exhibition — the meeting from which this entire body of work would unfold.
The earliest work in the series, Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana (1963), captures the two artists in an unguarded exchange, a social document that fixes the informal milieu from which Pop would emerge. In Warhol Holding Marilyn Acetate I (1964), Kennedy posed Warhol behind the clear acetate of Marilyn Monroe from which his most celebrated silkscreens would soon be painted, collapsing artist and subject into a single frame. Robert Indiana Holding Love (1964), made at Coenties Slip, remains the only existing photograph of Indiana with the painting that would become one of the most reproduced images in American art. Together, from Warhol Flowers III to Warhol with Race Riot Sandwich Board — the only print ever pulled from its intended edition — the selection forms a coherent record of two artists at the threshold of their legend.
As Eric C. Shiner, former Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, has written of the series: "The Kennedy photos are perhaps the most intimate portraits of Andy that I have ever seen — capturing him at the point of his emergence". That intimacy underpins each work on view, in which Warhol is seen, as Shiner puts it, "literally through his work".
William John Kennedy (1930–2021) was a New York-based photographer and editorial contributor to LIFE magazine, whose private photographic practice produced the primary visual record of Warhol and Indiana during a pivotal moment in Pop Art history. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, which acquired 100 of his photographs in 2012, describing them as "rare and highly significant", in addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Newfields / Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.
