Between 1964 and 1966 Andy Warhol and his assistant Gerard Malanga made 472 short portraits of different people, some famous and some strange, visiting the “Factory” in New York. One of them was Bob Dylan.
According to Malanga, the idea of calling these portraits “Screen Tests” was a joke, since they were not castings for a movie but were “a Hollywood parody.”
Little nose for art (plastic): In the pop magazine Spin, Dylan acknowledged in 1985 that he sold a painting by Andy Warhol (“Elvis Presley”) to buy a sofa. “I always wanted to tell Andy how stupid he had been and if he didn’t he would give me another painting …”
Dylan seems to have felt this parody and is irritated, without blinking. Reportedly from this encounter, Dylan obtained an Elvis Presley painting from Warhol, which he did not particularly like, and then traded it to his manager for a sofa.
This was the highlight of an encounter between great egos that did not get to have a true creative exchange – although Warhol, in his portraits, claimed to capture people’s souls with his Bolex.