Original 5 x 3.25 invitation for Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, ‘Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote,’ which was held at the Hugo Gallery in New York City from June 16 to July 3, 1952. In very good to fine condition, with paper loss to the edges.
When 20-year-old Andy Warhol arrived in New York, the young and fast-rising author Truman Capote was the embodiment of all of Warhol's desires. An artist and an original creative personality, Capote became a literary and social star in postwar New York in an astonishingly short period of time. Prior to NYC, Warhol had become obsessed with Capote after viewing the dust jacket of the author’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. He began sending Capote daily postcards and routinely showed up at the writer’s doorstep. Capote ignored Warhol and let the mail pile up.
Warhol turned Capote's rejection into inspiration for his first show, which consisted of fanciful blotted line drawings of boys and butterflies, creations that must have been more elaborate and finished versions of the pictures that Warhol had sent Capote in early 1950. Reportedly Capote and his mother came to see the show before it closed in July, but a look at the dates shows that Capote was on his way to Europe in mid-April, almost two months before Warhol’s exhibit opened. None of Warhol’s drawings were sold that evening.
Capote said of this time period: ‘Andy Warhol had this obsession about me and used to write to me from Pittsburgh...When he came to New York, he used to stand outside my house, just standing there all day waiting for me to come out. He wanted to become a friend of mine, wanted to speak to me, to talk to me. He nearly drove me crazy.’
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