Andy Warhol, The Empire,: Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

9 - 15 October 2006
Overview
Empire, 1964 by Andy Warhol, Black and White/Indie Film, Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, at Coskun Fine Art

Black and white, silent, 8 hours 5 minutes at 16 framers per second

 

Andy Warhol made one of his most famous and controversial films, Empire, between 25 and 26 July, 1964.  Aiming his camera out of a window of the Time-Life Building, he recorded the Empire State Building for six hours, from the twilight of 8:00 p.m., through the darkness, and  until 2:30 a.m. Ignoring Hollywood film conventions, Warhol made a film that contained only one image and extended, rather than condensed, real time.  Not only did he use, unedited, all of the footage he shot, but, when the new work premiered the following March, he projected the film in slow motion, bringing the final running time to slightly over eight hours and creating a truly epic portrait of this iconic landmark. The multiple silk screened “Statue of Liberty”(1963) paintings prefigure the slowly mutating impressions of the Empire State Building in this film made a year later. 

 

Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc

 

Copyright The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute.  All rights reserved.

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