Before the Soup Cans: Andy Warhol's Life in Cloth
In 1955, if you'd asked a New York textile manufacturer to name their most reliable illustrator, several would have said Andy Warhol. Not the artist. The jobbing commercial designer who turned up on time, understood repeat patterns, and could make a pretzel or a clown look good enough to print onto silk. This is the Warhol that Museum Cobra in Amstelveen puts on show until 6 September 2026, in Andy Warhol, The Textiles: more than sixty designs from his years working to commission for American textile manufacturers, shown in the Netherlands for the first time.
Textile of Ice Cream Cones, silk by Stehli Silks, pink and blue dress, 19621963 © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Long before Pop Art gave Warhol a name, he was producing fabric designs for firms including Stehli Silks, Fuller Fabrics Inc., and M. Lowenstein and Sons. The work he made in the 1950s and early 1960s was playful and unashamedly commercial: ice cream sundaes, pretzels, buttons, and confectionery, printed in repeat and destined for dresses, furnishings and interiors rather than gallery walls. It is tempting to see this work as a footnote, a young illustrator paying the bills. The exhibition argues otherwise. Look closely and the habits that would define Warhol's later screen prints are already there in the flattened contour lines, the deadpan repetition, the sense that an image gains a strange new life once it is multiplied.
Textile of large nautical flags, skirt, circa 1957-1958 © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Working in textiles also meant working within constraints that gallery art rarely imposes. A pattern has to repeat cleanly across a bolt of cloth. It has to survive being cut, sewn and worn, which rules out anything too fragile or fussy. Colour had to hold up to dye lots and factory printing, and a motif that looked charming as a single sketch had to still work multiplied fifty times across a yard of cloth. Warhol seems to have relished rather than resisted these limits, using them to sharpen a visual language built on directness and humour. The exhibition presents the designs both as fabric lengths, some in several colourways, and as finished garments, making it easy to trace how a motif moved from illustration board to dress form.
Shoes Textile, blouse, Jayson Classics, circa 19571958 © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol: The Complete Textiles and Fashion, Paul Maréchal
For anyone wanting to go deeper, Paul Maréchal's new book Andy Warhol: The Complete Textiles and Fashion spans three decades of this overlooked practice, drawing on previously unpublished designs and archival material to trace Warhol's collaborations with fashion designers and manufacturers from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
Acrobatic Clown textile, circa 1955 © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Warhol spent years being told what to draw, in what colours, for what fabric, by what deadline. Museum Cobra makes the case that this apprenticeship in other people's demands taught him something no art school could: how an image behaves once it stops being precious and starts being produced.
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Further Information:
Andy Warhol, The Textiles is on show now at Museum Cobra, Amstelveen, NL.
Andy Warhol: The Complete Textiles and Fashion, by Paul Maréchal is available now in the Selvedge Bookshop
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Image Credits:
Lead: Ice Cream Desserts © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
All further images as credited in captions.