Goethe Scenes

Warhol Sends His Regards

Moving house is a tedious, exhausting job and you always end up losing something. But, if you’re very lucky, you might find genuine treasures among all that stuff you didn’t know what to do with but never dared to throw away. Suddenly, there are unexpected greetings from long forgotten days. That’s what happened to the Goethe-Institut New York, which has to vacate its premises on Fifth Avenue for three years due to urgently necessary renovations. A staff member came upon a dusty, inconspicuous box on a shelf in one of the offices. On it was a note with the distinct instructions: “Please do not touch!” Made curious by the forbidden, she opened the box. The contents: seven fat, gold embossed leather folders. A closer look revealed them to be long-lost duty diaries documenting the history of the institute since 1954 in press clippings, photos, guest lists, programmes and lecture manuscripts. One of the folders also contained photographs from a party held at the Goethe-Institut in 1984 for the opening of the New York film festival. The guests were by all means of celebrity calibre as the pictures showed: universal artist Andy Warhol, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as the young actress Eszter Bálint, who had just played a leading role in Jarmusch’s road movie Stranger than Paradise. They were all there. These great photographic documents remind us that it is sometimes worthwhile to disregard the rules. And that fashion in the eighties was ... well ... peculiar.