This 13"h x 19"w overall (9.5"h x 14"w image size) digital photographic print on Epson Professional Photo paper is from an edition of 50 total prints signed, numbered and titled by the artist, photographer Nat Finkelstein (on verso). Published in 2007.
Pilgrim Clothes had hired designer Betsey Johnson to develop a new line of clothing for them. To introduce the new line, they hired Andy Warhol to stage a launch party at Paraphernalia, the company's flagship store on Madison Ave. Music for the shindig was provided by the Velvet Underground, who'd just returned from their road trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan.
According to photographer Finkelstein - "We staged a party in a fishbowl - a store window on Madison Avenue. Crowds gathered...the idea was that everybody who saw the party would buy clothes there. The girls showed the new fashions while they were dancing to the Velvet's music."
From 1963 to 1968, the post-war Pop Art world partied at artist Andy Warhol’s mid-town New York City studio known as The Factory. 231 East 47th Street was where Warhol and his cohorts - artists, poets, porn stars, musicians, drug addicts and his “Superstars” - created his silkscreens and lithographs and his films, and it became the center of the Hip Universe.
For three years (1964-67), photographer Nat Finkelstein was on the scene, documenting the explosive emergence of Pop Art, a subversive spectacle created by the constantly calculating Andy Warhol (his book Andy Warhol: The Factory Years is "an extraordinary photographic account of the twisted, the addicted, the nameless, and the famous"). As the unofficial photojournalist and active member of the inner circle there, Finkelstein discreetly photographed many emerging stars, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Nico, Edie Sedgwick (of Factory Girl fame) along with the very-photogenic Warhol and other legends of art and literature such as Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali.
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