A Lens on the Glitterati: Jim Hedges on the Photography of Jean Pigozzi and Andy Warhol

When the art collector and curator Jim Hedges was growing up in the South, New York was a “bright shining star” to which Interview Magazine was his “gateway drug.” 

“You know, as a 12 year old little boy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, dreaming about the big city and Studio 54 and the New York City art world…Warhol and his cult of personality, his cult of celebrity, the landscape that he was a part of, were all very, very enticing to me,” Hedges tells host Lyn Winter on Episode 2 of the latest season of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast.

Now Hedges is the owner of one of the largest collections of Andy Warhol photographs in the world, and he is the new Curator of the Arts for the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel-Air, where his show Jean Pigozzi - The Photographs: Beverly Hills to Cap d’Antibes, is currently on display until May 31, 2023.

Hedges reflects on how a career in investment banking turned into pursuit of another hot commodity: art, especially Warhol’s photography: “For Warhol, it was really the source material for 99% of all the artwork that he ever made. In other words, he would take a picture of Marilyn Monroe… and use that as source material to make the painting… And then I found that this work was actually rather undervalued… and I started to think of it as an investment and ultimately a business.”

From Warhol he turned his attention to Jean Pigozzi, another photographer with, “incredible access to celebrity and the movers and shakers. And they both documented these worlds in a very compelling and sort of singular voice.”

Now some of Pigozzi’s seductive images, taken in hotspots from Beverly Hills to Cap D’Antibes, are on display, some for the first time, at the Beverly Hills Hotel: a nighttime shot of Muhammad Ali framed perfectly in the window of a limousine; Yves Saint Laurent and his muse Loulou de La Falaise in Paris; Mick Jagger with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the South of France.

Not only are the images stunningly glamorous, but so is the classic Hollywood hotel setting, says Hedges. “The experience of going to a white cube kind of art gallery that is austere and unwelcoming is not as great as sitting in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel and looking at Johnny Pigozzi’s photos or walking through the gardens of the Hotel Bel-Air…That's a better way to experience art.”

Season Four of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season Four Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kathy Gohari

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

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