Tag: andy warhol

In Gropius-Bau What’d Andy Do? A Speer Lichtdom Erect

thomas hoepker photo of andy warhol from 1981, with andy in jeans, a white shirt and green and blue rep tie, standing sheepishly, as if andy had any other posing mode, next to a stuffed great dane mounted on a pedestal, and with a stacked diptych in red above white of a black silkscreened image of albert speer's lichtdom, the cathedral of light the nazi architect created for a nazi party rally in nuremberg in 1934. the screenprinting process abstracts the beams of light, which are inverted and painted black, and form a slightly conical structure that would have been visible in the cloudy night sky.
1981 pic by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Andy Warhol at 860 Broadway with the caption identifying the stuffed dog, but not the Albert Speer-related paintings behind him, via @twixnmix via @voorwerk

I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn.

Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since.

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