What do we know about Andy Warhol? Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. Quite a lot compared with many other artists, yet only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre. The exhibition ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ at the private Herbert Foundation in Ghent draws attention to two often overlooked aspects of this multifaceted icon of 20th-century Pop Art: printed matter and film.
The exhibition brings together books, magazines and posters from the Herbert Foundation’s archives, alongside 22 films on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Although Warhol is not represented in the Foundation’s collection, he occupies a significant place in its archives. We can therefore confidently regard the artist’s legacy as part of Annick and Anton Herbert’s ‘Collection Imaginaire’ – a selection of artists whom the founders considered important to their intellectual and artistic circle, even when their works were not physically present in the collection.
Those who visited the large-scale ‘Warhol. The American Dream Factory’ exhibition at La Boverie in Liège in 2020-2021 will remember its silver-coloured evocation of the Factory – Warhol’s legendary New York studio of the 1960s, where he produced his silkscreens and made films, surrounded by a motley crowd of artists, musicians, actors, models and simply people drawn to the atmosphere of the place.
In Ghent, you can see some of the best-known examples from Warhol’s cinematic output of around 600 films. His film practice was based on a simple principle: the camera was set up and left running with minimal intervention from the artist. The resulting images appear spontaneous, almost indifferent to the quality of execution, yet on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be carefully constructed. In a way, this becomes a metaphor for so much of what the Pop artist ‘created’.
His subjects were the same diverse characters who gathered around his studio. Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol made around 500 miniature ‘film portraits’ known as ‘Screen Tests’. One of the most mesmerising features a very young Susan Sontag, the legendary American writer and intellectual. Ten years after appearing before Warhol’s camera, she published her celebrated ‘On Photography’ (1977), a series of essays exploring how the camera turns the world into an object of observation, consumption and appropriation.
The magazine ‘Interview’, which Warhol founded in 1969, became another one of his ‘factories’ – a factory of images. Here, he brought together journalism, photography, film, fashion and popular culture, turning interviews with celebrities into an artistic medium in their own right.
At the exhibition, you will recognise the faces on his covers at a glance. The publication was initially called ‘Inter/VIEW’ and focused on cinema, but gradually evolved into a cult magazine devoted to celebrities, art, fashion and New York’s cultural scene. Warhol used the magazine as an extension of his artistic practice. He was less interested in conventional journalistic interviews than in the person as a public image.
Artists, musicians, actors, designers and other prominent figures all appeared in its pages. Many interviews were recorded and then published almost verbatim, preserving the rhythms and peculiarities of natural speech. No editing – something quite unusual: we journalists tend to spend a long time shaping interviews for print.
Photography and visual presentation played a particularly important role. Warhol transformed celebrities into a kind of magazine ‘portrait’, and Interview gradually became part of the same cultural universe as The Factory.
The Herbert Foundation in Ghent grew out of the private collection of Anton (1938–2021) and Annick Herbert (1940–2025), which began as a personal passion and gradually developed into one of the most coherent collections of international art from the second half of the 20th century.
The tradition of collecting art existed in the family before Anton. His father, Tony Herbert (1902–1959), was an art collector who built an important collection of Flemish Expressionism. His son, however, chose a very different artistic world. Together with his wife, he turned to the art of their own generation – Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Arte Povera, Land Art and new artistic practices of the 1980s.
The starting point came in 1973, when the Herberts acquired 64 Lead Square (1969) by Carl Andre. From then on, the collection grew not as an encyclopaedia of contemporary art, but as a personal dialogue with its time. Like Peggy Guggenheim before them, Anton and Annick met artists, talked to them, followed their work and gradually developed their own connections between individual works. The collection came to include artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Gilbert & George and Gerhard Richter.
The main collection is housed and displayed in a separate complex on Raas van Gaverestraat – a spacious, light-filled setting overlooking Ghent’s tiled rooftops.
Around 2005, the Herberts decided to stop collecting new names. From then on, their aim was to explore the collection they had already built in ever greater depth. An archive grew alongside it – today comprising more than 30,000 documents: letters, photographs, drawings, rare artists’ books, catalogues, magazines, invitations, posters, audio and video recordings.
In 2008, the Herbert Foundation was established, bringing the collection and archive together under one roof. For the Foundation, the couple chose a former window-frame factory in Ghent, preserving much of its original character.
The Foundation has an atmosphere that feels less like a conventional museum and more like a private collection opened to the public. It offers a deeply personal view of two people’s engagement with their time – preserved alongside the artworks, documents and memories of the artists they knew and followed.