WARHOL AND ARNOLD SCHWAZENNEGER

The iconic pop artist’s foundation sent boxes of photos to academic art museums. UC Davis got a youthful governor at the threshold of fame. SACRAMENTO — – Nobody at the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis knew what to expect from the box of 150 photos that arrived this week from the andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The gallery is one of 183 academic art museums that were given a box of photos from the foundation’s archive of 23,543 pictures taken by the prolific artist. The public opening of the box at UC Davis on Friday was billed by museum officials as an event resembling journalist Geraldo Rivera’s famous unveiling of Al Capone’s vault on live national television. But this event actually uncovered something interesting. Among the contents were five vintage photos of California’s first couple. There is a Polaroid of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing for his Warhol portrait in 1977; the one of Maria Shriver shows her posing around the time the two got married in 1986. Another photo features Schwarzenegger and Shriver with their wedding cake. Opening the box, said gallery director Renny Pritikin, “was kind of like a time machine, going back to days of Warhol’s glory and seeing the life he lead among these artists and celebrities of society.” Schwarzenegger was just becoming a celebrity when he met Warhol. That was after the release of “Pumping Iron,” the documentary that made Schwarzenegger a star. At Schwarzenegger’s request, the film’s publicity agent arranged a luncheon with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Warhol was there. The bodybuilder and the artist shared an uncanny ability to attract publicity, and the two became friends. Schwarzenegger was “moving from bodybuilding into movies,” said former Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mathews, author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy. “It was a period in his life where he sort of got culture.” Warhol painted multi-paneled portraits of both Schwarzenegger and Shriver. One of the panels of the vivid Shriver portrait hangs in the governor’s office. The others hang in the first family’s residence in Brentwood. The rest of the photos in the box were an assortment of random people and objects. There was also a photo of golf legend Jack Nicklaus in the mix.

-L.A Times