In Gropius-Bau What’d Andy Do? A Speer Lichtdom Erect

1981 pic by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Andy Warhol at 860 Broadway with the caption identifying the stuffed dog, but not the Albert Speer-related paintings behind him, via @twixnmix via @voorwerk I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn. Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since. At first, the only mentions of Speer and Warhol I can find are of the architect taking hollow comfort in Warhol’s admiration, as in this quote from Marcel Ophül’s 1976 documentary on wartime atrocities, The Memory of Justice:…