Wednesday 30 September 2009

Stuffed Great Dane




The Andy Warhol Museum, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. It holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives from the Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol.
The museum, housed in a renovated seven-floor warehouse building, displays more than 500 works of art, drawn from its extensive collections of works by Andy Warhol. Access to the library is guarded by Cecil, the stuffed Great Dane.
Warhol was also a collector of taxidermies. He owned a lion, a peacock, a penguin and a moose head. The most famous animal in his collection, however, was the Great Dane, Cecil, who stood guard at the Factory’s door, Warhol’s original New York studio in the 1960’s before an adequate security system was installed. Many superstar visitors posed with Cecil during visits to the Factory. Cecil also appears in Warhol’s video Factory Diaries.
The dog, whose real name was "Ador Tipp Topp", was born in Germany in 1921. As a puppy, he was purchased by an American, who entered him in many competitions, including Westminster where he won a blue ribbon. After his death in 1929, Ador was sent to a taxidermist who was building a collection of champion dog breeds at Yale’s Peabody Museum. By the 1960s the collection had been relocated to storage and Ador’s remains were sold to a Yale drama student for ten dollars. The dog was eventually passed on to an antiques dealer, who claimed the dog had belonged to filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Warhol believed the story and purchased the dog in the late 1960s for 300 dollars. It is believed the antiques dealer made 290 dollars on the deal!.

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