<[this is a fan page>]////////Early years/pre-pop//////////Brigid was born to socialite parents, Murial "Honey" Berlin and Richard E. Berlin, into a world of Manhattan privilege. Her father was chairman of the Hearst media empire for 52 years. As a child, Berlin regularly mixed with celebrities and the powerful:
"I would pick up the phone and it would be Richard Nixon. My parents entertained Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and there were lots of Hollywood people because of San Simeon - Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Dorothy Kilgallen... I have a box of letters, written to my parents in the late 1940's and 1950's from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor."
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Her socialite mother frequently worried about Brigid's weight and constantly attempted to get her to lose it through any means, from giving her cash for every pound she lost at age 11 to having the family doctor prescribeamphetamines and dexedrine.Berlin recalled, "My mother wanted me to be a slim, respectable socialite. Instead, I became an overweight troublemaker."
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////////Berlin and Warhol from A to B and back again/////////After several years as a reluctant debutante and a failed marriage, Brigid Berlin met Andy Warhol in 1964 and quickly became a central member of his entourage. After moving to Hotel Chelsea, she took on the nickname Brigid Polk because of her habit of giving out 'pokes', injections of Vitamin B and amphetamines. These injections were readily available through the many 'Doctor Feelgood's' in New York and perfectly legal.Berlin appeared in many Andy Warhol films, including The Chelsea Girls, in which she is seen injecting herself while performing a monologue. After a role in the Edie Sedgwick film Ciao! Manhattan (1972), she appeared during the 1990s in John Waters' films. Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story (1999) is a remarkable documentary in which she tells her life story in intimate detail and breaks her diet by consuming an entire meal of key lime pies.Brigid was known for her obsessive taping and photographing of every day life. Selections from these tapes were later compiled to form the play Andy Warhol's Pork. Other tapes made by her were the basis for The Velvet Underground's first live album, Live at Max's Kansas City (recorded 1970, released 1972).Berlin was complicit in one of Warhol's most infamous pranks when, in 1969, Warhol announced that all of his paintings were the work of Berlin. Brigid enthusiastically followed this line when interviewed by Time. The prank led to a drop in the value of Warhol's work and both parties eventually retracted their statements. The question of authorship looms large in valuing Warhol's paintings to this day.In 1975, Brigid Berlin began work as a permanent employee for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, a position that she held until well after Warhol's death. Berlin would transcribe interviews and knit and needlepoint under the desk. Patricia Hearst a close friend of Berlins who began work at Interview in 1988 would observe "On my first day at work, I noticed two small pugs who seemed to have the run of the castle. They belonged to a woman who sat behind the front desk every day from 9:00 to 5:00, but who never seemed to answer the phone. Instead, she compulsively knitted, ate bags of candy and tended lovingly to the dogs."
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///////Art Work//////Brigid Berlin is also famous for her prolific art, which has been argued by many to have been both influential to Andy Warhol's artwork and simultaneously overshadowed by Warhol's celebrity and own artwork. Berlins 'Tit Paintings' were artworks created using her bare breasts.In which Berlin would dip her tits into multiple colored paints and then create a "print" by pressing them down onto canvas/paper(artworks executed using the painter's bare breasts). The Tit paintings are argueably Berlins most infamous work, and were exhibited by Jane Stubbs at a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1996. On occasion Berlin would publically create her 'Tit Paintings'integrating visual art and performance art that "is totally not about nudity, this is about, you know, art."-B,Berlin. She performed this live at the Grammercy International Art Fair. After experiencing the performance, filmmaker John Waters would later muse, that "I think that she's the most un-selfconscious nude person" and that "She has great self-esteem for a fat girl."-J.WatersAnother one of Berlin's art projects were her themed "Trip" book's. "When we were all on amphetamine in the sixties this is what we used to do - would be to draw in our trip books and I could spend my life drawing circles and filling the circle with circles and more dots and more circles around it and then coloring them all with Doctor Martin's watercolor dyes."-B.Berlin The most famous of Berlins trip books was her Cock Book.The Cock Book was initially a large blank page book entitled Topical Bible, which she purchased from a shop on Broadway. Topical rhymed with cockical so she decided to make it her Cock Book. Brigid schleped her Cock book around with her even when she went out at night to places light Max's Kansas City or the Factory and get others to fill each page with their rendition of a cock. Brigid was not to selective about who drew in it, because she was consumed with the idea of having it filled and completed. Contributers to the Cock book range from artists like Basquiat to Jane Fonda, whos cock adorns a matchstick pearl necklace to Leonard Cohen who opted out of drawing a cock, and instead wrote "let me be the shy one in your book". Berlin herself drew in the Cock book and so did Andy Warhol, who refused to sign his proper name or draw a proper cock. The Cock book was a artwork and entertainment for Brigid who "had more fun doing that than anything I've ever done in my life. I would come home, stoned from being up at Max's [Kansas City, a now-defunct New York club] and I would sit on the floor and work on the book. [laughs] Brigid's “Cock Book,†recently sold for $175,000 to artist Richard Prince.Both Berlin and Warhol used the medium of Polaroid photography obsessively, and are said to have been very competitive in the Polaroid film department. Wether it was over who had the the best equipment or the best film.In 1969-1970 Heiner Friedrich did a small showing of Berlins work called Polaroids and Tapes, and created a catalogue for the work of the same name. The experimental nature of Berlin's double exposed polaroids transcend the static, emotionless "icon" polaroids of Warhol's, clearly showing the power of her personal vision and photographic style. Common subject matter of Berlin's polaroids are self-portraits, Warhol superstars, and other artists and celebrities.
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