Museum to Preserve Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes of Fame, and Tad More : Art: Collection in artist’s hometown, Pittsburgh, will bring together tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, photographs and more. Opening is set for spring.

To Andy Warhol, who mocked fame while wallowing in its glitzy excesses, a museum devoted to his art and life might seem ironic.

But the man whose view of celebrity was short and sweet will be the star of an eight-story museum in his hometown--a sure sign that Warhol’s fame outlasted the 15 minutes he allotted everyone else.

“I think he would have enjoyed a double dose,” said Thomas Armstrong, a friend of the late artist and director of the museum.

Warhol’s work, life and times will be chronicled in great detail and on a grand scale at the museum, scheduled to open in the spring of 1994. The converted warehouse, not so different from Warhol’s Factory studio in New York, sits across the Allegheny River from the department store where Warhol worked as a window-dresser before setting off to make his name and fortune.

The museum will house an enormous collection of his work in various disciplines. More than 800 paintings, as well as 400 to 500 drawings, tens of thousands of photographs, reels of audiotape and copies of his avant-garde films and Interview magazine will fill the galleries and archives.

“I think it could become a kind of pilgrimage point, like Graceland is for Elvis fans,” curator Mark Francis said.

“People shouldn’t be coming thinking that they’re going to see his bedroom--it’s a different sort of museum,” he said. “But I do think it can be as popular as that.”

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Dia Center for the Arts, both of New York, are contributing art, and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute is providing the space and money for the $35-million project.

“It’s going to take years for the museum to show everything that’s been given to it,” said Archibald L. Gillies, president of the Warhol Foundation.

Keeping a collection fresh and changing is important to the success of a museum devoted to a single artist, said Marshall Rousseau, director of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. Beyond that, the artist has to have a following.

“The thing that’s made us, and made us successful, is Dali, because there’s tremendous interest in his work,” Rousseau said. “People come here to see Dali. They don’t come to see someone else.” Sixty percent of the museum’s 300,000 visitors a year are tourists, he said.

The Warhol museum’s Francis has spent the last year combing through the paintings, prints and other images of cultural icons cranked out assembly-line style over three decades by the preeminent pop artist. The curator and his staff have been cataloguing the work and selecting items for the opening exhibition.

“We want to concentrate on the riches of the collection. There’s much more work than we can show at any one time,” he said. “We want to give a sense of what’s there and tell the whole story.”

Francis said his goal is to make the museum interesting to all visitors, from Warhol aficionados to people whose knowledge of the artist is limited to his Campbell’s soup cans and celebrity portraits.

“People enter Warhol’s world at different kinds of points, and we want them to come in at that point and then to see all these other points so they’ll leave . . . with a much richer sense of what Warhol was all about,” he said.

The soup can paintings will be there, as will the familiar silk-screened portraits of such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Also on display will be lesser-known works, such as a 36-square-foot print of a skull and a 25 1/2-foot-long rendering of the Last Supper, both to be hung in special two-story galleries.

An archive will be established, containing boxes--”time capsules”--Warhol filled over the decades with objects from his eccentric daily life.

“It could be anything, including food. . . . It was somebody’s birthday, so Andy put a piece of cake in the box,” Armstrong said. “It all sort of contributed to the sort of background music of his existence.”

Gillies said one objective of the museum is to provide a unique view of the era in which Warhol worked and how the artist viewed that time.

“Warhol was at a watershed in American history--the 1960s--and he both reflected it and he helped create it,” Gillies said.

“It’s going to be kind of bringing together the avant-garde with the populist,” Francis said. “That was one of his fantastic skills for many, many years--was to just to have this kind of very popular feel at the same time as being kind of extraordinarily ahead of his time.”