Screen Tests

Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits created by Pop artist Andy Warhol between 1964 and 1966. Filmed primarily at the Factory, the portraits generally depict their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. Of the approximately 500 Screen Tests Warhol produced, 472 survive, featuring a wide range of Factory regulars and visitors, many of whom were prominent figures in the downtown New York cultural scene of the 1960s. The films represent a new form of portraiture, presenting a slowly moving image of a person. They connect both to Warhol's experimental films, emphasizing stillness and duration, to his broader interest in documenting the personalities who comprised his social and artistic milieu.

Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits created by Pop artist Andy Warhol between 1964 and 1966. Filmed primarily at the Factory, the portraits generally depict their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. Of the approximately 500 Screen Tests Warhol produced, 472 survive, featuring a wide range of Factory regulars and visitors, many of whom were prominent figures in the downtown New York cultural scene of the 1960s. The films represent a new form of portraiture, presenting a slowly moving image of a person. They connect both to Warhol's experimental films, emphasizing stillness and duration, to his broader interest in documenting the personalities who comprised his social and artistic milieu. ==Background== The Screen Tests were initially inspired by a 1962 New York City Police Department booklet entitled The Thirteen Most Wanted, which showed mug shots of wanted criminals. The same booklet was the source of the images in Warhol's short-lived mural entitled Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the 1964 New York World's Fair, together with a series of paintings using the same images. A second source for the Screen Tests was Warhol's interest in photo-booth portraits, which he had begun to use in 1963 for paintings such as Ethel Scull 36 Times and his first Self-Portrait series. These photo-booth portraits document the appearance of a sitter across successive moments in time. ==Selected list of Screen Test subjects== Many of the 472 surviving Screen Tests depict notable cultural figures. The following is a selected list of subjects who have Wikipedia articles, intended to illustrate the breadth of individuals Warhol filmed: ==Legacy== Film critic Philip Dodd listed the Screen Tests among his favorite films in 2002 when he voted for the Sight and Sound poll. In 2009, The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh commissioned musical duo Dean & Britta to curate the DVD release of 13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. They wrote songs to accompany a collection of Screen Tests. The soundtrack was released in 2010¹. Author Kate Zambreno wrote about the screen tests in a 2019 collection of essays titled Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing. In 2024, Warhol's Screen Tests were presented in a gallery setting for the first time as a selection titled Poetry and Pose: Screen Tests by Andy Warhol, at the Ki Smith Gallery on the Lower East Side of New York. Every portrait from various subject's single sessions were compiled for the first time. ==References==

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