• Previously undeveloped Andy Warhol films have been recovered and will premiere in a one-night-only screening.
• The hour-long trove includes new Screen Tests, unused footage, and rare glimpses of Warhol’s Factory and collaborators.
• The newly processed reels also reveal Warhol filmed erotic scenes years before Blue Movie, reshaping views of his ambitions.

A trove of previously undeveloped films shot by Pop icon Andy Warhol and his team has been recovered. These videos, never-before-seen by even Warhol himself, will be made public during a special, one-time-only screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art next Monday.

In the near decade between 1963, when Warhol acquired a 16mm Bolex, and 1972, he produced more than 600 films. This prolific output provides important evidence of the artist’s pioneering creative vision and brings to life his avant-garde cultural milieu.

The newly discovered moving image work—totaling over an hour in length—includes eight new Screen Test portraits of Warhol collaborators and unused footage shot for his films Batman Dracula, Sleep, and Couch. The most significant find is several rolls of pornographic footage that shed new light on Warhol’s ambitions in the 1960s. They prove that the artist had been capturing explicit scenes on the couch of his famous Factory studio long before making Blue Movie, the salacious 1969 feature that would inspire a “porno chic” phenomenon.

Newly processed Andy Warhol film (ca. 1960s). USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art / The Andy Warhol Museum.

The long-forgotten rolls of film were discovered by chance in 2015, around the time that many of Warhol’s fragile film gems were being digitized. MoMA’s film archivist, Katie Trainor, and Greg Pierce, former director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, were looking through an archive of Warhol films held by MoMA at a facility in Pennsylvania. When they first stumbled on the box labelled “raw stock,” they assumed the rolls would be empty, but on closer inspection they found evidence that they had been used.

It wasn’t until 2024, however, that 86 undeveloped rolls were finally processed at Colorlab in Washington, some 60 years after they were first shot. Of these, 38 were still full of remarkably well-preserved imagery.

“Aside from one film roll that Colorlab is still attempting to salvage, there is no more undeveloped footage to be discovered in MoMA’s Warhol film collection,” Josh Siegel, curator of MoMA’s film department, told me over email. “That isn’t to say there isn’t more to be discovered, even in the films we already know. Warhol is the gift that keeps on giving.”

Newly processed Andy Warhol film (ca. 1960s). USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art / The Andy Warhol Museum.

The eight new additions to Warhol’s Screen Tests series—black-and-white filmed portraits that are each about four minutes long—feature various Warhol followers, including Dennis Hopper and Jane Holzer, of whom portraits already exist in the other 472 Screen Test films. However, one subject, Naomi Levine, an artist and actress that appeared in multiple Warhol films, is entirely new to the series.

Among other highlights is a short film of a couple cavorting blissfully in Central Park that archivists believe was one of Warhol’s earliest experiments with his new camera from the summer of 1963.

Newly processed Andy Warhol film (ca. 1960s). USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art / The Andy Warhol Museum.

Some of the films offer an insight into Warhol’s day-to-day life during the height of his Pop art fame. One example from 1964 records a show by the minimalist Frank Stella at Leo Castelli Gallery, an epicenter for new happenings in art. In another video from March 12, 1966, Warhol and members of the band Velvet Underground can be seen packed into a rented R.V. on the road to Ann Arbor, where they were due to perform at the University of Michigan.

One of the legendary parties Warhol threw at the Factory was captured on March 8, 1966. The studio is also the setting for several erotic films that are only now coming to light. One labeled “Jerry & Girl,” shot for Couch, sees Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga and a woman make good use of the titular piece of furniture. A threesome, fellatio, and masturbation are among the acts caught on film.

Newly processed Andy Warhol film (ca. 1960s). USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art / The Andy Warhol Museum.

These recovered works back previously unfounded suggestions that Warhol was a “pornoisseur,” as Pierce put it to the New York Times. He plans to use them as the basis for a new essay exploring Warhol’s ambitions as a pornographer, which may have been suppressed until now because of legal issues around the highly explicit footage.

Then again, Siegel warns against painting Warhol as a “‘mere’ pornographer,” highlighting how his Screen Tests and Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) hold hints of religious iconography.

“For Warhol, the sacred and the profane were inseparable,” he said. “Warhol was a true voyeur and always drawn to images of the nude body, as evidenced by his life drawings from the 1950s of men in beefcake poses or having sex. I hesitate to overstate the importance of the nude films any more than the discovery of never-before-seen Screen Tests or unused footage from Couch and Sleep. I’m just as fascinated by Warhol the quasi-religious artist as I am by Warhol the man who liked to watch.”

“Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed From the 1960s” is screening at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, on February 2 at 6:30 p.m.

This story was updated on February 12, 2026, at 12.50 p.m. ET, to include comments from Josh Siegel.