If at first you don’t succeed, then dust yourself off and try again, right?
For you viewing pleasure/mood board/Pinterestumblrs, Gothamist have provided a facsimile of a rejection letter sent to Andy Warhol from the Museum of Modern Art in response to his then underwhelming watercolour drawing entitled ‘Shoe‘, both of which you can see below:
Limited gallery and storage space? Let’s be frank, Alfred: it’s a pretty middling mule at hand here, which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t give an arm and a leg for it. Produced in the mid-50s, a time Warhol describes in The Philosophy as “greeting cards and watercolours and now and then a coffeehouse poetry reading” (*smug me alert*) ‘Shoe‘ would have to be worth a pretty penny these days and just goes to show that any aspiring artists out there shouldn’t be put off by rejection, be it an unanswered email or a handwritten note*.
MoMA now owns 168 Warhols, which draw seas of grinning idiots that only Moses could part. Plus the Internet now owns Warhol, which is something I think he’d rather enjoy. BRB, getting a burger.
*Never gonna happen.
Main Image: Self-Portrait, 1986, Andy Warhol.
