Andy Warhol, the artist who survived an assassination attempt and then died in the most absurd way


Andy Warhol
1928 / Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Writing the radical SCUM Manifesto (which, among other things, called for the destruction of the government, the elimination of the monetary system and the annihilation of the male sex) earned Valeria Solanas a place in the Olympus of radical feminism. But what really gave him those 15 minutes of fame that all people are entitled to was trying to assassinate Andy Warhol.

By 20minutos

Solanas, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, resented the popular plastic artist, who gave her a small role in his film I a Man (1967) but later refused to produce a film for which she had written a script. When she went to claim her manuscript, Warhol told her that she had lost it.

Convinced that Warhol was trying to take over her work, the woman showed up at his office on the afternoon of June 3, 1968 with a revolver and, shouting that the man from Pittsburgh was controlling her mind, fired several shots at him while he was standing by. telephone. Later, she turned herself in at the Times Square police station.

Before being tried for those shootings, Solanas was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital and, when the trial finally took place, she was sentenced to three years in prison (part of that time was spent locked up in a psychiatric center).

In reality, Solanas was a tremendously intelligent woman (she graduated in psychology on a scholarship basis) and her mental health problems were related to a series of traumatic life experiences: she had been raped by her father during childhood and found herself thrown on the street (prostituting herself and hooked on drugs) since she was fifteen.

In April 1988, she was found dead at the age of 52 on a dirty mattress in a hotel room in San Francisco, more alone than one, without a penny and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings.

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