When Pop Art Took a Bullet: The 1968 Shooting of Andy Warhol

On the afternoon of June 3rd 1968 radical writer Valerie Solanas marched into Andy Warhol’s new Union Square studio carrying two handguns and a folder full of grudges. Within minutes three shots tore through the Pop artist’s stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus and lungs, leaving him briefly declared dead before surgeons revived him. The incident fractured the glittery façade of 1960s counter-culture and became one of the most notorious attacks in modern art history.

“He had too much control over my life.”
— Valerie Solanas, the Andy Warhol shooter, told police

Solanas was a marginal Factory figure best known for her incendiary SCUM Manifesto, a self-published tract that urged women to topple “the male sex.” She believed Warhol had stolen or suppressed the manuscript of her play Up Your Ass, and in the weeks before the shooting she peppered his office with angry calls. Her paranoia culminated in the attack, after which she told police, “He had too much control over my life”.

The 33-year-old artist was rushed to Columbus–Mother Cabrini Hospital, where chest surgeon Dr Giuseppe Rossi opened his chest, massaged his heart, removed a damaged spleen and part of a lung, and pumped in 12 units of blood during a five-and-a-half-hour operation. Warhol spent eight weeks in recovery and emerged wearing a surgical corset that he would never again remove.

Solanas’ bullets grazed London art critic Mario Amaya and jammed when she tried to shoot Warhol’s manager Fred Hughes, allowing her to flee before calmly surrendering in Times Square that evening. A court later deemed her competent, and she served roughly three years for first-degree assault before a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia secured her release.

Warhol never fully recovered. He abandoned most experimental filmmaking, tightened security around his circle and turned his focus toward portrait commissions. In 1969 he co-founded Interview magazine as the public-relations arm of a new business empire, explaining that he wanted a press pass and “a paper that printed only good news”. A decade later he confessed in his diary, “I said that I wasn’t creative since I was shot, because after that I stopped seeing creepy people”.

Why This Matters:

The Solanas attack reshaped Warhol’s art, his business model and the mythology of the Factory, while forcing feminist leaders to distance themselves from violent rhetoric. It remains a cautionary tale about the thin line between artistic fame and personal danger.