We read somewhere the other day that Andy Warhol was buried wearing dark glasses and one of his silver wigs. The wig makes some kind of sense, but dark glasses in a closed coffin seems rather strange. Still, it's not as strange as the burial of another famous American artist, Ed Kienholz. Art critic Robert Hughes described his departure like this.
"His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West.”
You can see the event unfold on the DVD The Cool School: How LA learned to love modern art from Arthouse Films.
Images: The Packard as coffin
