Milton Berle (stitched photo), 1986
Six gelatin silver prints stitched with thread (unique)
Signed and dated on mount verso, with Robert Miller Gallery 1987 exhibition label on frame verso.
27.5 x 31.5 inches
Feb 13, 2023
Photographic imagery was central to Andy Warhol’s groundbreaking pop art works from the 1960s. He initially used appropriated imagery from popular culture but over time he increasingly used his own photographs as source material. He almost always had a camera with him (he favored a Polaroid and a 35-millimeter compact Minox) and as he mingled with stars he made his own celebrity portraits. This stitched work is based on Warhol’s portrait of Milton Berle who, during TV’s First Golden Age, was known as “Mr. Television” thanks to his unrivaled popularity.
In the 1980s Warhol began to focus even more directly on photography, making multiple prints from his archive of black and white negatives and hiring an assistant to stitch them together. This unique Milton Berle grid was included in his debut exhibition of stitched photographs, presented in January 1987 at The Robert Miller Gallery, in what ultimately became his final one-person show during his lifetime. Reviewing the show in the New York Times, Andy Grundberg noted that Warhol’s multiple-image photographs were just as challenging to accepted notions of picture-making as the serial images in his silkscreen paintings from the 1960s.
Along with photography, TV was always a great enthusiasm of Warhol’s. He was active in television throughout his career: he worked early on as a graphic designer for the networks, gave innumerable (deadpan) TV interviews over the years, and produced his own programs in the 1980s. One of his final TV appearances was a guest role on The Love Boat in 1985, an episode which also featured Milton Berle.
