Andy Warhol Read online

  Andy Warhol

  Andy Warhol

  Arthur C. Danto

  Published with assistance from the Mary Cady tew Memorial Fund.

  Copyright © 2009 by Arthur Danto.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,

  in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.

  Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written

  permission from the publishers.

  Set in Janson type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Danto, Arthur Coleman, 1924–

  Andy Warhol / Arthur C. Danto.

  p. cm. — (Icons of America)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-13555-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art and

  society—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  N6537.W28D36 2009

  700.92—dc22 2009021638

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Icons of America

  Mark Crispin Miller, Series Editor

  Icons of America is a series of short works written by leading scholars,

  critics, and writers, each of whom tells a new and innovative story about

  American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual,

  event, object, or cultural phenomenon.

  Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, by Susan Jacoby

  Andy Warhol, by Arthur C. Danto

  Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited,

  by Molly Haskell

  Fred Astaire, by Joseph Epstein

  Gypsy: The Art of the Tease, by Rachel Shteir

  The Hamburger: A History, by Josh Ozersky

  Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, by Gore Vidal

  King’s Dream, by Eric J. Sundquist

  Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and

  American Dreams, by Mark Kingwell

  Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory,

  by Jonathan Zimmerman

  Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, by Steve Fraser

  Forthcoming titles include:

  Toni Bentley on George Balanchine

  Stephen Cox on “The Big House”

  Tom DeHaven on Superman

  To Barack and Michelle Obama,

  and the future of American art

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Notes

  ONE

  The Window at Bonwit’s

  TWO

  Pop, Politics, and the Gap Between Art and Life

  THREE

  The Brillo Box

  FOUR

  Moving Images

  FIVE

  The First Death

  SIX

  Andy Warhol Enterprises

  SEVEN

  Religion and Common Experience

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  There is no way in which I could write a new biography of Andy Warhol. My competence lies elsewhere. Fortunately, there are several quite good “lives” of Warhol that I could draw on, since my book is, roughly, chronological, and such writers as Victor Bockris, David Bourdon, and, more recently, Steven Watson have, collectively, constructed a fair narrative of Andy’s life—of how he lived and how he died—and they had the benefit of knowing him and many of those around him. I have nothing to contribute to that. As a writer, I have published in philosophy primarily, including the philosophy of art; and secondarily as an art critic, chiefly in The Nation, a magazine of opinion which, beginning with Volume One, Number 1, on July 4, 1865, has always had an art critic. There is a connection between the two endeavors, and between them and this book. My philosophy of art was developed in two pieces of writing—an article titled “The Art World,” published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1964, and, in 1981, a book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Both of these were responses to developments in contemporary art that took place mainly in New York, in the 1960s, among them two exhibitions by Andy Warhol, held at the Stable Gallery, in 1962 and in 1964. The work in both these shows, but especially in the second show, necessitated, so it seemed to me, an entirely new approach to the philosophy of art, and I think that most aestheticians and philosophers of art would agree that the writings just mentioned must be given substantial credit for redirecting the philosophy of art to take account of the immense artistic revolution that took place in the early to mid-1960s, in which, as an artist, Andy Warhol played a prominent role. But the art through which Warhol achieved historical importance was internally connected with his candidacy as an American icon. He was able to achieve iconic status because of the content of his art, which drew directly from, and which indeed celebrated, the form of life lived by Americans, including what Americans ate, and who Americans considered icons in their own right, mainly figures from mass culture, like movies and popular music.

  In a way, Warhol transcended his chosen subjects in the eyes of the world. His art was typically interpreted by European intellectuals as critical both of American mass culture and of the products of American capitalism, like Campbell’s soup. Seen as a critic of American culture, Warhol—and the Pop artists generally—were given considerable credit by Europeans, and were taken seriously by them as artists in a way that they were not, at first at least, by the American art world, which had finally begun to accept the fact that America had, for the first time in history, produced world class art through the paintings of the so-called New York school—the great Abstract Expressionist canvases produced during and after World War II. In American art circles, it came as a shock that the Pop artists should repudiate this immense aesthetic achievement, and paint what looked like simpleminded pictures of soup cans or Donald Duck. It was widely felt that important painting had to be difficult—but anyone in the culture could get what Pop art showed immediately. Whether the Europeans were right or not, that Pop art was critical of American culture, they at least felt that there was more to the new art than met the eye. Andy, at least, seemed eager to present himself to the European art world as anything but frivolous. He and his dealer, Ileana Sonnabend, were at odds over how his first show at her gallery in Paris should be presented. He wanted to call it “Death in America,” and to consist of paintings of car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs, and be based on silk-screen images of tabloid newspaper photographs, but often in candy colors. In the end Sonnabend accepted the content, but not the title. It was simply called “Warhol.” It was certainly a serious show, which the Europeans respected. He could not have had that show in America at that point—January 1964.

  The European art world in the twentieth century was necessarily more complicated than the American art world, because more was at stake. Art in Europe was heavily politicized. Abstract art, for example, under both Hitler and Stalin, was politically unacceptable. It remained unacceptable in Soviet Russia throughout the Cold War. German artists, on the other hand, came to feel, after World War II, that abstraction expressed the political values of democracy. And since under Hitler, a certain kind of kitschy realism was felt to express the values of Nat
ional Socialism, figural art became politically suspect after the war. So by the 1960s, when Pop art seemed to question the values of Abstract Expressionism, it seemed a particularly liberating moment. Pop seemed politically important in Germany because it seemed to repudiate abstraction. This increased Warhol’s stature on the Continent. He was seen not only as a critic of capitalist production, but as a critic of American high culture as well. When the first serious monograph on Warhol, by Rainer Crone, was published in Germany, it became a best seller. It took a long time for Warhol to become intellectually respectable in America. Instead, he became an icon. He became part of the culture he celebrated—a star who loved hotdogs and Coca-Cola, and worshipped Marilyn and Elvis.

  My own interest in Pop art, and especially in Warhol, lay elsewhere. I had moved to New York after the war because of the immense excitement I found in the art of the New York School, in which I had hopes of making a career as an artist. I was a veteran, with educational benefits that I decided to use to study philosophy. Though I had some success as an artist, philosophy proved to be more interesting to me, and when the 1960s began, I was a tenured professor at Columbia University, on sabbatical in Europe, where I was writing my first book. It was at the American Library in Paris that I saw my first piece of Pop art as a black-and-white reproduction in ARTnews. It was called The Kiss, by Roy Lichtenstein, and it looked like it had been cut out of the comics section of an American newspaper. Suffice it to say that I was stunned. I was certain that it was not art, but as my year in France unfurled, I came increasingly to the view that if it was art, anything could be art. I made up my mind to see as much Pop art as I could when I returned to America.

  I am no more interested in writing an autobiography than I am in writing a new biography of Warhol, but I feel it important to explain his importance for me, as well as to prepare the reader for the emphasis of this book. It is really no more a piece of art history than it is a biography, but rather a study of what makes Warhol so fascinating an artist from a philosophical perspective. Visiting his second show at the Stable Gallery in April 1964 was a transformative experience for me. It turned me into a philosopher of art. Until that point, great as my interest in art and especially in contemporary art had been, I had no special interest in the philosophy of art itself. I simply saw no interesting way to bring philosophy and art together. The show consisted of hundreds of what looked like commonplace grocery boxes, piled up as they would be in a supermarket stockroom. Among these were Brillo Boxes, which looked like the real thing. The Brillo box might be considered an American icon, I suppose, but only because Andy Warhol made it one. It is his most famous work and I consider it his masterpiece, for reasons I shall give in the course of this book. It is, as a piece of commercial design, a knockout. Ironically its designer was a commercial artist with high ambitions as a fine artist—in fact he was an Abstract Expressionist, named James Harvey, from Detroit. But for me the question was not what made it so good but what made it art. The Brillo Box helped me solve a problem as old as philosophy itself, namely how to define art. More even than that, it helped explain why that is a philosophical problem in the first place. Needless to say, an adequate definition of art had to cover art in a universal way. It has to explain why the Mona Lisa is art, why Rigoletto is art, why Washington Crossing the Delaware is art. It has to explain why anything is art. A lot of people in those years were quite prepared to say that the Brillo Box was not art. I felt that they were wrong, of course, and I really loved Brillo Box. But the nice thing about it for philosophy was that it is so simple a work—a mere oblong box with printing on its top and sides. Nothing complex about it, really, in comparison with your typical piece of Abstract Expressionist painting.

  What makes Andy an icon, of course, is not that he is so instructive philosophically, though that is an important aspect of his virtue as an artist. What makes him an American icon is that his subject matter is always something that the ordinary American understands: everything, or nearly everything he made art out of came straight out of the daily lives of very ordinary Americans. Anyone who lives the American form of life can tell you what a grocery box looks like, and where to find one, and what you want one for. Or can tell you where to find a can of Campbell’s soup, how to prepare it, and in general how much it costs.

  The commonplace world of everyday industrial objects has of course been looked down upon, aesthetically, by those who cherish good taste. And the commonplace imagery on billboards and in comic books and pulp magazines has been considered aesthetically irredeemable by the same arbiters of aesthetic judgment. Fast foods pollute the body the way the comics, not long ago, were felt to corrupt the mind. When I was a student in Paris, Coca-Cola was held to cause cancer. America was, to cite a title by the expatriate Henry Miller, an “air conditioned nightmare.” In the nineteenth century, the Art and Crafts Movement condemned industrially manufactured furniture. Art, until 1960, stood implacably against the common culture in this sense. All at once in the early 1960s there were real artists who took the contrary position, celebrating the vernacular in paintings that appropriated the flat colors and heavy outlines of commercial art. The tastes and values of ordinary persons all at once were inseparable from advanced art. That art, from my perspective, showed the way to bring to the muddles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical philosophy. Without Warhol, I could never have written The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. This book accordingly is the acknowledgment of a debt.

  I never met Andy Warhol, though I stood next to him at the opening of an exhibition of a body of prints—Myths—at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho, while he autographed an announcement of the show for my new wife, Barbara Westman. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of him at a party, or at a show. We lived very different lives. Philosophy was so distant from the downtown New York life he lived that when, in “The Art World,” I wrote that “Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist, displays facsimiles of Brillo cartons, piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of the supermarket,” I was reasonably certain that no reader of the Journal of Philosophy, where this was published in 1964, had a clue whom I was talking about. Few philosophers were likely to haunt the Stable Gallery, the Green Gallery, or even the Janis Gallery, where Pop was on view. Years later, after I had become an art critic as well as a philosopher, my wife and I attended the auction of Andy’s estate and marveled at the exquisiteness of his taste in French Art Deco furniture, as well as in art. In this, as in everything, he was ahead of his time, even if he knew nothing better to do with his extraordinary swag than pile it up, as in a treasure chamber, in his East Side town house.

  Acknowledgments

  I am particularly grateful to Professor Bertrand Rougé of the University of Pau for his objections to my view of Andy Warhol’s installation at his second exhibition at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan, in April 1964. These appear in The Philosophy of Arthur Danto, in the series The Library of Living Philosophers (The Open Court Press, 2009). My current view of that show owes a great deal to having had to deal with Rougé’s perception. The features of the individual grocery boxes have to be explained with reference to how they should look in supermarket stacks. That concession leaves intact the ontological character of how to account for the differences between the actual boxes of the Lebenswelt— the world of common experience—and the somewhat Futuristic, somewhat design-y, style of the Warhol cartons. Art historically speaking, they are late examples of Arte Metafisica.

  Few of the corrections I owe to others have required this degree of rethinking: mostly they have been accepted as gifts, as has their readiness to read my work. I owe an inexpressibly rich debt to David Carrier for a long and searching correspondence. My gratitude to my wonderful colleague, Lydia Goehr, is existential. Alison McDonald has brought a vast art world knowledge to her reading of the text. Noel Carroll has been a constant source of philosophical knowledge and artistic understanding. Richard
Kuhns is the indispensable friend of a lifetime: I could not write anything that meant anything without seeking his wisdom and human awareness. I owe to Ti-Grace Atkinson what special knowledge I may have of the devious Valerie Solanas, my sensitivity to the deep issues of feminism—and I cherish the truth that the master painter Sean Scully has never allowed his uncertainty regarding this book’s subject in any way to stand in the way of acknowledging the certainty of his friendship with its author. Finally this book and many of its peers owe their existence to Georges and Anne Borchardt, and their acumen, literary and practical. And for the beauty of her soul, her marvelous sense of comedy, her keen eye and her good sense and the gift of her love, I have been blessed—blessed!—by my marriage with Barbara Westman.

  A Note on Notes

  The format is simple. Parenthetical references in the text are to the books listed in the bibliography. I have placed a word that refers to a title, together with page numbers. I have sought a readable text, in enjoyable language, and have kept references to a minimum.

  Andy Warhol

  ONE

  The Window at Bonwit’s

  In Victor Bockris’s biography Warhol, there is a chapter titled “The Birth of Andy Warhol: 1959–61.” This obviously does not refer to Andy Warhol’s birth as a baby, which took place in 1928, in Pittsburgh, to immigrant Ruthenian parents. It refers, rather, to a set of changes in Warhol’s identity—the breakthrough, in effect, through which he became an icon. One of the works that helps visualize the breakthrough is a painting done in 1961, which consists in a greatly enlarged version of a simple black-and-white advertisement of the kind that appears in side columns and back pages of cheap newspapers. It advertised the services of a plastic surgeon, and showed two profiles of the same woman, before and after an operation on her nose. The left profile shows her with a large, witchlike nose, the right one with a cute turned-up nose, like a cheerleader’s or a starlet’s—the kind of nose that readers with beaky noses dream of having. Since we read from left to right, there is a relationship of before and after between the two images, and indeed Warhol titled his work Before and After, of which he painted several versions. As such, it was the embodiment of the kind of dream that haunts people concerned with changing their looks in order to be, they think, more attractive. Replacing before with after is the path to beauty as they conceive it, and to happiness.