Warhol signed the back of the Polaroid with a red marker pen and the souvenir was stolen from Gibson for the sake of the autograph. It was later purchased by a private collector for an undisclosed sum. Picture courtesy of the Tate Modern Printed Ephemera Collection, London, England.
Polaroid taken by Warhol of Gibson and Factory superstar Magenta at the Chelsea Hotel where the writer was living at the time. It was on this occasion that Gibson quipped ‘In the future everyone will be shameless for fifteen minutes’ after spotting that Warhol’s pants were hanging open. Warhol misheard the remark.
Gibson was born in Collingford, England and moved to New York in the Sixties where he soon became a permanent fixture of the Andy Warhol crowd in the Factory on East 47th Street. He wrote the screenplays for many of Warhol’s most notorious movies, including ‘Man Getting Eight Hours Sleep’, and the even more ambitious ‘Looking at the Sky through an Open Window’ – the director’s cut runs for twelve hours seventeen minutes. When he finally left the Factory Warhol gave Gibson several paintings as a parting gift. An ‘Orange Marilyn’ which Gibson would later be forced to trade for a steak and egg breakfast is now thought to be worth in excess of $16 million. He presently lives with his dogs in a trailer park in Bluff, Utah.
