Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson

Celebrity News

Kanye hires Warhol kin to paint Kim

The one thing that not even Kanye West can buy? A Warhol painting of his fiancee, Kim Kardashian.

Turns out the rapper has figured out a way to accomplish just that, though. He’s commissioned Andy Warhol’s cousin Monica Warhol, an artist who lives and works in Tucson, Ariz., to paint Kardashian.

“She’s an icon. She’s famous for nothing. Andy would have loved her,” Monica told me. “Kim is beautiful. She’s so manufactured. She looks like a human Barbie.”

Just as Andy did, Monica makes silk-screen works from photographs. “I never studied Andy. I never owned a book about him until about a year ago,” she said. The mimicking of his style is not conscious. She loves screen-printing, she said, because it’s “extremely physical.” Unlike Andy, who delegated labor to a bunch of hired hands, Monica does all the work herself.

Monica, a mother of six, never met the Prince of Pop, who died in 1987 when she was 10 and growing up in Pittsburgh. “My grandfather and Andy’s father were brothers. My Aunt Betty took me to the cemetery every week, where we’d pray over Andy’s grave, because my aunt said he was pretty flaky and was probably in purgatory.”

Like Andy, she’s found her niche in pop culture. Two portraits of the rapper Flo Rida that Monica made can be seen in the video for his song “How I Feel.” She’s painting a likeness of Lenny Kravitz, after meeting him in the Church Boutique in Los Angeles.

She’s also painted Richard and Robert Dupont, the twins who hung out at Warhol’s Factory.

But an artist’s life is hard. “It would be easier to get cancer, because there might be a cure,” Monica said. “When you are an artist, that’s it. You can’t change it.”