ANDY WARHOL & PLAYBOY MAGAZINE

Andy Warhol, the king of Pop Art and perhaps the greatest artist of the 20th century, was a beloved Playboy contributor. He began his long partnership with Playboy when Art Paul hired him to create a piece for the October 1961 issue of Show Business Illustrated, Hefner’s short-lived, glossy entertainment mag. This work, The Night the Roxy Opened, is classic pre-Pop Warhol, displaying the blotted ink lines of his early-advertising art. Paul was so pleased with Warhol’s creation that he went on to commission the artist multiple times over the course of nearly 25 years. Perhaps among the more iconic of these later contributions are Double Torso and Rabbit Head Logo. Double Torso appeared in a landmark January 1967 pictorial titled “The Playmate as Fine Art” in which Art Paul asked eleven contemporary artists—Salvador Dali and Tom Wesselmann among them—to use the Playmate as their muse. The painting was one of only three “ultra violet” works Warhol made in the 1960s—viewers could only see the painting by viewing it under black light. Rabbit Head Logo appeared on the cover of the magazine in January 1986 and has become one of the most widely known and valuable pieces in the Playboy Collection. To my knowledge, it is one of only four Rabbit Head works Warhol created in his lifetime. Playboy still owns Rabbit Head Logo, but has sold both Double Torso and The Night the Roxy Opened.

Playboy.com
August 3 2011