Last Updated on February 28, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
In the summer of 1985, Jeff Bruette drew a life-changing assignment at work. His employer, Commodore, had just hired a new graphics spokesman named Andy Warhol, but he didn’t know anything about computers. Commodore selected Jeff Bruette to teach him the necessary computer skills.
Andy Warhol’s connection to Commodore
Commodore had an executive named Steven Greenberg who worked out of the Rockefeller building in New York, separate from Commodore’s offices in the Seagram building where Irving Gould had space. Greenberg handled Commodore’s external public relations and knew Andy Warhol personally. He wanted Warhol to demonstrate the Amiga, and Warhol liked the idea. They worked out a deal that included an unconventional payment method.
The assignment confused Bruette though. Why would Commodore hire someone who didn’t know anything about computers? He was telling a co-worker about his new assignment, and the coworker asked him who it was. He said “I don’t know, Andy, last name starts with a w, Warhol maybe?” And the coworker said, “Oh, the Campbell’s Soup can guy.” And this only confused him more. Why was Commodore obsessed with the guy who designed the Campbell’s Soup can? Maybe the guy who designed the Coca-Cola can wasn’t available…
Bruette told me he didn’t realize Andy Warhol was famous until celebrities like Ric Ocasek, singer/songwriter for the band The Cars, started visiting him during his sessions.
He also said that enhanced their working relationship. Since he didn’t know who Warhol was when he showed up at his studio, the two approached it like a peer relationship. Warhol just saw him as a graphic artist teaching a fine artist how to use a computer.
Andy Warhol didn’t take to the Amiga naturally
In 1985, Warhol was 55 years old and had minimal exposure to computers up to that point in his life. The previous year, Steve Jobs had tried to gift him a Macintosh, but Warhol hadn’t returned his calls. In October 1984, he was at Sean Lennon’s birthday party, and Jobs had gifted the young Lennon a Macintosh. Warhol and another artist, Keith Haring, were at the party, and they were curious. Steve Jobs gave Warhol a quick computer lesson that resulted in Warhol successfully drawing a circle, but that was the end of it. Since the computer didn’t have color, he lost interest.
Bruette told me nothing from that earlier lesson stuck with Warhol. And took a while for his Amiga lessons to stick. He said they would have a lesson in the morning, break for lunch, and they would have to start the afternoon session with a refresher on the basics of using the mouse. Warhol never quite got the concept of launching different programs either. He couldn’t remember the name of the paint program he was using to colorize his images, so Bruette resorted renaming the file from “ProPaint” to “Andy” to make it easier to remember that part of the process.
By some accounts, by the time July rolled around, Warhol had mastered the Amiga. But that’s not how Jeff Bruette describes it. Warhol had learned enough about the system to be able to adapt some of his artistic processes to use the Amiga. He saw the potential the machine had for creative expression, but to say he was comfortable with it is overstating things.
Andy Warhol’s process
Warhol had a prototype A-Squared frame grabber that he could use to connect a JVC analog video camera to his Amiga. He could then have his subject pose in front of the camera, adjust the frame to his liking, have the subject adjust to their pose, adjust the camera to get a high contrast monochromatic image that resembles what you would get if you photocopied a color photo, and then he could capture the image and save it. Before the Amiga, he had to take a series of photos with a Polaroid instant camera, find the one he liked best, and then photocopy the image and work from the copy. The process with the Amiga was much faster.
The A-Squared frame grabber is very rare. Bruette says he’s only seen two of them besides the one Warhol had.
Warhol also used this setup to get the infinity effect in one of his self-portraits. He sat down in front of the Amiga, then positioned the camera in front of it to create the infinity effect, with Warhol sitting in front of a computer displaying an image of him sitting in front of the computer.
Editing the images
To turn his video captures from the A-Squared into a trademark Andy Warhol image, he would load the file into ProPaint, select the color palette that he wanted, then he would run flood fills over the image. It’s a simple formula we can replicate today with a phone and a computer by taking an image, converting it to black and white, cranking up the brightness and contrast, then using the paint bucket in a modern paint program. It’s the selection of colors, the composition, and the choice of subject that makes it an Andy Warhol piece.
But the other thing to keep in mind was there was no other computer on the market at the time that was capable of manipulating a color image in that way, at least not with a selection of 4,096 different possible colors. No other computer on the market could capture a live image that quickly and easily either.
Andy Warhol’s flood fill Amiga story
There is a well-known story, originating with Amiga engineer RJ Mical, that the engineers panicked every time they saw Andy Warhol use the flood fill. Jeff Bruette disputes this. While conceding that versions of ProPaint with a crash-prone flood fill function may have been floating around the Commodore offices, the function generally worked in the copies of the software he had been using. “If the shape had a large number of tributaries, the flood fill might get lost trying to figure out how to fill all of it,” he said. But taking the Debbie Harry image as an example, the only flood fill that might have posed a danger would have been her hair. The rest of the image was straightforward. And if they’d taken away flood fills from Warhol, they might as well have taken away color.
The close call with Andy Warhol’s Debbie Harry image
The famous image of Debbie Harry was not created during the demo. They did a rehearsal earlier in the day, during which Andy Warhol stepped through the process of capturing an image of Debbie Harry and flood filling it.
Later in the day, when they were doing it for real, the lighting conditions were different, and the the initial image he captured didn’t have as much contrast. Ideally, he would have adjusted the camera to make up for the difference in lighting, but he was under a time limit, so he did what he could with the image he captured. Problem was, his fills didn’t go where he wanted them to go, and everything he did to try to correct it just made it less recognizable. So the actual image that he created during the live demo was unusable.
Fixing the demo in the publicity video
Having the earlier copy proved fortuitous. Bruette converted the image back to a monochromatic image resembling what Warhol started with, and then during the editing, anytime the camera showed Warhol working on the image, they cut to new footage of Bruette stepping through the process.
“So when you watch Commodore’s video of the event, when Andy Warhol says he’s moving the mouse and selecting a color and then selecting a fill, that’s me,” he said.
Bruette never told the story for 39 years, because it calls the entire provenance of the Warhol image into question. Except ABC News had been present earlier in the day and shot footage of the rehearsal. In the clip ABC aired, you briefly see Warhol applying the flood fill to her hair. Bruette located the original raw footage on Getty Images and licensed it, so he is in possession of the original raw footage, which captures more of the image creation process. It also makes it safe to tell the story, since he has proof it happened the way he said it did.
Andy Warhol and the Amiga after the demo
It’s easy to get the impression that after the demo, Andy Warhol abandoned the Amiga. But that wasn’t the case. Warhol used the Amiga for special effects in his MTV talk show, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.
Bruette said they remained friendly after the Amiga introduction, and Warhol would occasionally call him to ask questions. He also called Bruette in to assist him when Amiga World magazine interviewed him. The Amiga World interview resulted in 8 more images on the signed Warhol disk. Warhol realized his 4:3 images wouldn’t work on a magazine cover, so he asked if it would break anything if he flipped the monitor on its side. Bruette said no, but he would have to turn the mouse as well. Warhol did so, and used the mouse in that odd way to create 3:4-perspective portrait images suitable for the magazine cover.
They fell out of touch in 1986 when Bruette left Commodore to move to California. “We didn’t have cell phones back then, and the only way he knew to contact me was to call my desk phone at Commodore,” he said. Sadly, Andy Warhol died in February 1987.
After Commodore, Bruette went to work for Aegis, the company Commodore sold ProPaint to. Aegis marketed ProPaint under the name Aegis Images. But he soon ended up working in television himself, working on the TV series Max Headroom (the real one, not the Chicago-area incident) and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. Amazing Stories ran on NBC from September 1985 to April 1987 and Max Headroom ran from March 1987 to May 1988 on ABC. Spielberg’s studio had contacted him to come and visit, and he said they needed a device called a Genlock to do what they were wanting to do. And he happened to have a prototype Amiga genlock in the trunk of his car, which got him hired on the spot.
How Bruette came into possession of the Warhol art
Bruette said that saving the image was something of an afterthought. He grabbed a floppy, saved the image, and then handed it to Andy Warhol. Warhol handed it back to him and suggested he keep it. Bruette then asked, “Will you sign it then?” But neither he nor Warhol had a Sharpie, but a member of Warhol’s entourage did.
The two-of-a-kind Debbie Harry print
The rare print was another story. Bruette left Commodore in 1986 on good terms, and would come back to visit on occasion. After signing in with the front desk, they let him walk freely throughout the offices without needing an escort. One day when he was visiting, he walked into the office of a departing Commodore vice president as she was clearing out her personal effects. Bruette noticed the print sitting in the office, and she asked Bruette if he wanted it. He said of course, rolled it up into a cardboard poster tube to protect it, and brought it back home. Bruette kept both the disk and the print stored safely over the years as keepsakes, but they were just stored away with other keepsakes from that time in his life.
A friend who was staying with him recognized the significance of Bruette’s copy years later, in 1999. He asked why it wasn’t in a frame, and Bruette said it was something he never gotten around to. His friend, who knew a lot about art, assured him that it needed to be in a frame. Bruette then said, “Well, if that belongs in a frame, why not go all out and include the disk I have with the image on it?” In August 2024, Bruette came forward and announced he had the lost Andy Warhol Amiga art.
There’s some disagreement over how many prints exist. Debbie Harry said in her autobiography that two were made. Bruette said he’s been told Commodore was allowed to make three, but nobody knows what happened to the third print or even if it was ever made.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.