![]() Warhol’s retinue included his boyfriend Jon Gould, artist Christopher Makos, Bob Colacello, editor of Warhol’s publication Interview - who found time to personally lobby Carl Bergman, of Carl’s Pharmacy in Aspen, to start carrying the magazine - and the group also called in on two of Aspen’s boldest-faced names of the moment: Jack Nicholson and John Denver. The first trip of this period was in August 1981, when he visited the Powerses in Carbondale and went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which was hosting a solo exhibition of his work. Warhol visited Aspen regularly in the first half of the 1980s, often to celebrate New Year’s Eve, each time diligently logging the names and his impressions of people he met in his diaries. Warhol told The Aspen Times, in September 1981, that he had come to Aspen ‘many times’ to see his land, but that he had no intention of building on it, as it was ‘too pretty.’ (Jasper Johns owned plots adjoining Warhol’s, and Robert Rauschenberg had one too). Along with supporting his work, Powers also helped Warhol put together a local land purchase - 40 acres in Missouri Heights-acquired in 1972. Works from their collection will be exhibited at the Powers Art Center in Carbondale this winter, concurrent with ‘ Andy Warhol: Lifetimes’ at the Aspen Art Museum. His partner, Kimiko, was the subject of one of Warhol’s earliest and best-known society portraits, photo- graphed and first printed in June 1972. Powers remained a champion of Warhol’s work in the decades that followed. Among these were works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg and Warhol’s 200 Campbell Soup Cans (1962), alongside artist interviews and commentary by Powers himself. Dubbed ‘the Fab issue’, the contents included a flip book of Warhol’s film Kiss (1963) coverage of an LSD conference in Berkeley, California a report on local off-grid living and a 12-card selection of pop and op art paintings from the collection of Carbondale-based collectors John and Kimiko Powers. In 1966, it was none other than Warhol who designed Aspen’s third issue. In 1964, Phyllis Johnson, then resident in Aspen, used the city’s name - ‘a symbol of the freewheeling life’, she believed-for the title of a new publication: Aspen, a pioneering magazine in-a-box. One of the few works that did sell, however, went to Elizabeth Paepcke, wife of Aspen city father Walter Paepcke, founder of the Aspen Skiing Company and the Aspen Institute, and originator of the utopian ‘Aspen Idea.’ ![]() Exhibition notes uncovered by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik - whose voluminous archival research also unearthed the artist’s cattle brand - indicate that the show, which was almost certainly Warhol’s first outside New York, did very badly indeed and that the tour sold almost nothing. An exhibition of early blotted line drawings by his friend Patricia Moore was held at Aspen’s Four Seasons Club that winter before touring across the west. Still working in advertising, and just beginning to land gallery shows in Manhattan, he was enjoying early national exposure and would soon have a two-page spread in Life magazine. The first record of Warhol in Aspen is in December 1956. It was a bittersweet final link in the chain connecting Warhol to Colorado, and specifically to Aspen: one that spanned 30 years, from his earliest days as an exhibiting artist through the height of his fame. Days before Andy Warhol’s death in February 1987, his friend John Powers sent him a certificate from the Colorado Board of Stock Inspection certifying its approval of Warhol’s personally designed livestock brand: ‘A/W’, with a sideways ‘W’.
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