Andy Warhol Read online

  The years 1959 and 1961 constitute a zone of biographical change between two stages of Warhol’s life, a zone of transfiguration. He was transformed from a highly successful commercial artist into a member of the New York avant-garde—something he lusted after with all the passion of Miss Big Nose yearning for the look of Miss Tiny Turned-up Nose. It was a transformation underscored by the imagery of Before and After as art. Before Warhol, Before and After would have been a piece of boilerplate commercial art, whose maker would be long forgotten. By 1961, greatly enlarged, it became a work of high art. Reproductions of Before and After before and after this transformation took place look exactly alike. The difference, one might say, is invisible. Part of what made Warhol the icon he became has to do with the fact that initially almost nobody would have acknowledged a difference between the two images. Warhol did not simply replicate a grungy piece of commercial art. He made the distinction between a piece of grungy art and a piece of high art at once invisible and momentous. But that meant that he changed not so much the way we look at art but the way art was understood. That meant that between 1959 and 1961, the seeds of a visual and indeed a cultural revolution were planted.

  Before and After: American Iconic Dream. Andy Warhol, Before and After, 1960. Synthetic polymer paint and silk screen ink on canvas, 54 × 70 in. © Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY

  What happened when Andy Warhol became the cultural icon Andy Warhol was not simply a biographical transition, in which a successful commercial artist became a serious avant-garde artist. It was a social transition, in that certain individuals of great importance in keeping track of the frontiers of art recognized that Warhol had done something of significance as far as the shape of that frontier was concerned. Artistic change has to be recognized and accepted as such by what we shall designate (to follow usage) as “the art world” of that time—certain curators, dealers, critics, collectors, and, of course, other artists. That art world was in this respect prepared for Andy Warhol. He entered an ongoing discourse, and contributed to the direction this discourse took over the next years. By itself, that did not suffice, of course, to make him an icon. For that, a culture far wider than the art world of the very early 1960s was required, and Warhol himself had to be perceived in ways that went far beyond questions of the frontiers of art. Certainly, his being an artist was central in his becoming an icon—but how many artists, after all, go on to become icons? Very few. Only Warhol, for example, in the Pop art movement, who collectively changed the face of art in the mid-1960s, in fact rose to iconic stature. Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, and James Rosenquist were the chief Pop artists, and none of them really became icons save within some sector of the art world, if even there. They were each wonderful artists. But Warhol was to become the artist of the second half of the twentieth century. He became an artist for people who knew very little about art. He represented an ideal form of life that touched his world from many sides. He embodied a concept of life that embraced the values of an era that we are still living in. In certain ways he created an iconic image of what life was all about. No other artist came close to doing that.

  The change from artist to icon happened fairly rapidly. By 1965, for example, the transformation was complete. In October of that year, Andy and his “Superstar,” Edie Sedgwick, attended his first American retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. There was a crowd of at least two thousand rapturous persons, most of them students. No one had expected a crowd that large, and the curator, Sam Green, to be prudent, removed most of the paintings from the walls, leaving the gallery all but bare. But the crowd had not come so much to look at the art as to see Warhol and his consort. Chants of “Andy and Edie! Andy and Edie!” went up. People were jostled and trampled. It became a problem of crowd control much like what was happening at rock concerts. Andy, Edie, and their party found safety on an iron staircase, where, like demagogues on balconies, they waved at the crowds below. Finally a hole was axed in the ceiling, and the celebrities were able to escape to the floor above. Crowd behavior like that was almost standard with certain dreamboat musicians, like the Beatles, or Frank Sinatra before them. But it was unheard of at art events, where the institutional atmosphere of the museum enjoined quiet and respect. The change did not escape Warhol’s notice. “To think of it happening at an art opening,” he said. “Even a Pop Art opening. But then, we weren’t just at the art exhibit—we were the exhibit” (Bourdon, 213–14).

  The history of Modernist art was a history of anger and resentment. As far back as the Salon des Refusés of 1863, on the instruction of Louis Napoleon, paintings rejected by the selection committee were hung in a separate gallery, where viewers could make up their own minds. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe was the target of jeers and shouts of derision. There were riots in Paris when Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi was first presented, or when Stravinsky’s Sacre de Printemps was first performed. There was jeering in the gallery where Matisse and the Fauves were displayed in the Salon of 1905. This did not happen with art in the 1960s. On the contrary, it was felt, particularly by younger audiences, to be their art, to be part of their culture. By 1965, everyone knew in a general way the kind of art Warhol was making. The crowds at the ICA created, spontaneously, an event that would not have arisen with Lichtenstein or Oldenburg, and certainly not for the painters in the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Nor really did it happen anywhere with Minimalist art, which replaced Pop as the mainstream avant-garde art in the mid-1960s. Pop art’s successor was pretty much a big yawn as far as the general population was concerned. But with Pop, the change in art was perceived as radical, the meaning of art for ordinary persons had changed, and much of this was something that Warhol had done. At least, in his case, because of his art he had begun the ascent to the status of an icon.

  But let’s return to “The Birth of Andy Warhol,” and the period in which he had painted Before and After. No one can have known that, with the change in decade, from the 1950s to the 1960s, the whole of Western culture was entering a period of convulsive change. No one could have anticipated the tremendous change in attitude that lay ahead, especially in youth culture, in 1968. It was a decade in which boundary after boundary was broken and washed away. The boundary between vernacular and high art was breached in the very early 1960s. It was a way of overcoming the gap between art and life. My theory is that when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art. The age of Romanticism first became visible in the way English gardens were laid out, “natural” as opposed to formal. In 1964, the Beatles made their first visit to America, wearing long hair, testing a boundary between the genders. That very year, the boundary between the races was attacked as Freedom Riders went into the American South to help black citizens redeem their civil rights. The campus upheavals of 1968 put under attack the boundaries between the generations, and young people claimed a right to determine the curriculum, and to study the subjects closest to them, including courses in ethnic and gender studies that would have been unheard of in the previous decade. But their demands went beyond the institution of the university, into the region where the most far-reaching political decisions were made. Meanwhile, radical feminism emerged in the late 1960s, putting under attack traditional boundaries between the lives of men and women, the latter demanding equality or even more, autonomy. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots put under attack the boundaries between straight and gay sexual differences, deeming them irrelevant to civil life. Late in the decade, Warhol created a kind of cabaret, with the in-house rock group The Velvet Underground, and other entertainments, which he called “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” “Exploding” and “Inevitable” somehow capture the volatility of change that marked the 1960s. But the transit
ion from Andy Warhol, commercial artist, to Andy Warhol, art icon, while perhaps inevitable, was not explosive. It was, initially, an uncertain kind of groping toward an art that did not really exist yet, and an identity neither Warhol nor anyone close to him would have been able to pin down. And the “discourse” I spoke of, which he ultimately found a way to enter, was as yet ill defined and uncertain. That makes Bockris’s metaphor of birth particularly apt. The fetus gropes blindly in the dark, heading toward a world it could not have visualized, in the warm cavity that had so far constituted its entire atmosphere.

  There had to have been, in 1959 or 1960, some kind of internal change in Warhol. He had come to New York City as a graduate from art school, and had made it as an immensely successful commercial artist. The song says that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, but what Warhol meant to do was to make it in New York in a different way, at a different level and at whatever cost. He wanted to make it as a very different kind of artist. It is difficult to imagine that what he wanted to become was one of the Abstract Expressionists, who dominated the New York art world in those years. As we shall see, his first moves were made under the protective coloration of an Abstract Expressionist philosophy of pigment. But what one might call the Abstract Expressionist philosophy of art had, and could have had, no appeal for Warhol. The view was that the painter reaches deep into his or her unconscious mind and finds ways to translate what Robert Motherwell called “the original creative impulse” into marks, impulsively deposited through broad gestures, onto the painting or drawing’s surface. When Warhol said, in his aphoristic style, “If you want to know who Andy Warhol is, just look at my face, or at the surface of my work. It’s all there,” he was rejecting this romantic view of the artist’s soul (Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, 457). The Pop artists and the Abstract Expressionists had markedly opposed conceptions of what artists did. The Pop artist had no inner secrets. If he revealed things to viewers, they were things the viewer already knew or knew about. For this reason, there was already a natural bond between artist and viewer, which entered, in Warhol’s case, into the way he became an icon. He knew, and was moved by, the same things his audience knew and was moved by.

  Beyond question, though Abstract Expressionism ran out of steam in roughly 1962, there was already in the late 1950s a revulsion against certain aspects of it as an orthodoxy—against, for example, what hostile critics spoke of as its “paint cookery.” There was, for example, Hard-Edged Abstraction, which looked for well-defined forms and clean, uniform colors, where the artist controlled the relationships between shapes, and did not count on the accidentalities of touch and pigment that made the Abstract Expressionist surfaces so exciting. But this was not, one might say, the way that art wanted to move forward. Hard-Edge attacked what seemed to constitute the heart of contemporary painting, namely the expressiveness of paint as paint, and the impulsiveness with which the painter interacted with it, and the spirit of improvisation and, indeed, liberation, that made Abstract Expressionism really unlike any movement in the history of art. Whatever was to replace it had to retain that or something of that. It was easy to understand how artists who had become masters through Abstract Expressionism, like Mark Rothko, could have thought that it would last a thousand years—as long at least as the Renaissance paradigms had prevailed. Abstract art had become an option around 1912 at the earliest, New York School abstraction with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the later 1940s. It ran its course in less than two decades.

  The successful rebellion had to take a different form from Hard-Edge Abstraction, and it had begun with artists who became beaux ideals for Warhol—Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and, in a somewhat different way, Cy Twombly. Johns in particular had mastered the Abstract Expressionist brush. As a painter, he was at least the equal of any of the masters of the New York School. There was something delicious in the way he laid paint down on panels. But his subject was not himself, but commonplace forms from what phenomenologists speak of as the Lebenswelt—the world of common experience: numerals, letters, maps, targets. In a way, Johns sought subjects that everyone recognized, but he was particularly interested in the relationship between these entities and their representations. A painted numeral just is a numeral, a painted letter just is a letter. A painted flag is a flag. That it is beautifully painted is neither here nor there. He found a way of turning reality into art, in the sense that his subjects overcame the difference between representation and reality. Rauschenberg worked with real things from the beginning. If he painted a real thing, it was in the most direct and literal way—he slathered paint on it. His famous “combine” Monogram consisted mainly of a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire around its midriff. And he then slathered paint on the goat’s head and parts of its body. His combine Bed was made of a quilt and a pillow fitted into a wooden bed frame and hung on the wall, and—of course—he slathered it in such a way that there would be little temptation to sleep in it. It was as if the presence of paint sufficed to turn reality into art. Twombly was more abstract then either of his friends. He scribbled on canvas, or on paper. His drawings and paintings were in this respect a bit gestural and in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. They were primitive in the sense that scribbling was the kind of mark that real children really make. It stands to writing the way babbling stands to speech. But it was without question real. It surged across the surface, but it was not in any way arbitrary. It was something everybody knew.

  These figures, and especially Rauschenberg and Johns, were powerful influences for Warhol. There was also the fact that they were lovers, as Rauschenberg and Twombly had been. The fact that they were gay interested Warhol greatly, since this was his own sexual orientation. They were very masculine, and for this reason Warhol was diffident about approaching them. He said that he felt that he was “too swish” to find acceptance. The code of conduct of gay males was evolving in such a way that swish was decreasingly acceptable. The thrust was to be as aggressively masculine as possible. By the mid-1960s, Warhol changed his look completely. He became skinny. He wore leather jackets and blue jeans. He was seeking entry into two worlds, the art world and the gay world, as both had begun to evolve. The art that engaged him is not easy to characterize in sexual terms, but the art that had made him respected in the commercial world of the 1950s had been markedly effete. It was almost a form of folk art, with kittens and cherubs, in which his signature form was defined by a broken line filled in with pale bonbon washes in blue and pink, yellow and green. They often carried handwritten inscriptions, in his mother’s engaging calligraphy. The aesthetic was that of upscale greeting cards. It was, in effect, the aesthetic of his commercial art, especially for I. Miller shoes—high-heeled pumps with fetishistic overtones. In a way, pictures of shoes have the right kind of content for the sorts of images that engaged him as a proto–Pop artist, but they would have had to be divested of the glitter of his shoe ads, and project an uninflected image, showing a shoe as it would appear in a simple advertisement, purged of its glamour, with its price printed next to it. It would have to have the down-to-earthness of the Before and After ad.

  The deep psychological question is what explains why Warhol should have put aside the fey aesthetics of his early illustrated books and chosen in their place the bare declarative aesthetic of the proletarian representations he began to favor. The cheap tabloid became for him a kind of quarry, and he began to paint two kinds of images: images from the comic pages, like Dick Tracy and Superman, Popeye, Nancy, or The Little King, and images from the advertising section, crude, direct logos in black and white, unambiguous and, one would say, without art.

  Today, the comic panel strikes everyone as the archetypical Pop art image. There is, however, a deep difference between the comic images of Roy Lichtenstein, like Mickey Mouse or Blondie, and Warhol’s rather more complex images. Lichten
stein’s images reproduce, almost mechanically, the images as they appear in comic books or newspapers. He reproduces the means of reproduction, namely the dots of the Benday screen, so you get, in effect, handpainted copies of images as they appear or would appear, on lowgrade newsprint, using dots. A lot of Lichtenstein’s images come from action comics, in which pilots zap enemy planes, and the comic word “Zap!” appears in the same frame. Or the inner thoughts of pretty girls appear written in thought balloons above their heads, connected to the thinkers by bubbles. Warhol’s differ in various ways, but chiefly through the way in which words are blurred out by scumbled paint, so words or, better, fragments of words are visible only in part. And the viewer is very aware of the materiality of the paint, which has been allowed to drip. Lichtenstein applies paint the way the comic artist would, within carefully drawn boundaries. Warhol applies paint the way an Abstract Expressionist artist would, allowing it to drip. “You can’t do a painting without a drip,” he told Ivan Karp, who was director of the Castelli Gallery. This is what I meant by saying that he used Abstract Expressionist gestural painting as protective coloration. The drips did not come from some inner conviction. They did not refer to that moment of trance when the Abstract Expressionist painter moved the paint around without tidying up. “The drip” in fact was felt in those years to be a discovery. It was a sign of authenticity. Not for Warhol. It was, for him, an affectation, a form of branding his work as now. What was special about these works was the effort to fuse mass art with high art—to paint the ultrafamiliar, like Popeye or Nancy, using paint like—or somewhat like—the Abstract Expressionists did. It was as if he were painting Abstract Expressionist cartoons. It was a stab at stylistic synthesis that did not go over with art world experts who felt strongly that Warhol was gifted.