Andy Warhol Read online

  One of these was certainly Ivan Karp. Warhol regularly visited Castelli’s gallery, which was where the artists he most admired showed their work. It was the gallery that he would most wish to have been part of. What he discovered on one of his visits was that he was not alone—others were on a path very close to the one he was trying to follow. Karp showed him the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who had just joined the gallery.

  Warhol was stunned that someone else was painting cartoons and advertising icons. Lichtenstein had painted an enlarged version of an icon showing, in color, a shouting girl in a bathing suit, holding a beach ball. It was originally a boilerplate icon in advertisements for a resort, Mount Airy Lodge. Without modifying the image—he even used the Benday dots—Lichtenstein simply enlarged it to the size an Abstract Expressionist painting. To be significant in those years, a painting had to be big. Any reader of the New York Post would have recognized the image but would have been astonished to see it hanging in large format on someone’s wall, without text. It would have been considered an aesthetic hybrid. Lichtenstein was painting to an exceedingly sophisticated audience. The fact is that, while hand-painted, the image had none of the Abstract Expressionist touches in paint handling that would have been noticed by anyone who bought the painting. Warhol told Ivan Karp that he had been doing the very same kind of painting, and invited him to visit his studio. Karp liked what Warhol was doing, but rightly objected to the messy paint.

  Warhol’s response to this criticism is deeply instructive in understanding how he made his moves forward. On this occasion, he enlisted the help of someone whose judgment he trusted. This was Emile de Antonio, a documentary filmmaker who, among other achievements, had made Point of Order—a film using footage from the McCarthy hearings in 1954. In the summer of 1960, de Antonio went to Warhol’s town house to have drinks:

  [Andy] put two large paintings next to one another. Usually he showed me the work more casually, so I realized that this was a presentation. He had painted two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was just a pristine black-and-white Coke bottle. The other had a lot of Abstract Expressionist marks on it. I said “Come on, Andy, the abstract one is a piece of shit, the other one is remarkable. It’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.” [Bockris, 98]

  It was almost a Before and After juxtaposition. What Warhol had been doing was adding marks that he thought were expected for a painting to be “who we are.” De Antonio made him see that the direction was the reverse of what he had believed it should be. He had to remove all the mock expressionist markings. He ought, in truth, to have done in this respect what Lichtenstein intuited was right. I have written about this episode in an essay called “The Abstract Expressionist Coca Cola Bottle.” The Coke bottle was, of course, an icon in its own right. If you want to paint it as an icon, you paint it as it is. It does not need any frills.

  The way forward was clear. It was a mandate and a breakthrough. The mandate was: paint what we are. The breakthrough was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply. Before and After is like an X-ray of the American soul. Warhol began to paint the advertisements in which our deficiencies and hopes are portrayed. His images after the change were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of blue-collar newspapers, the cover pages of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies, boilerplate for throwaway advertisements. It was as though he had received some commandment to lead the lowest of the pictorial low into the precincts of high art. There were no disclosures or confessions of what remains perhaps the most mysterious transformation in the history of artistic creativity. But that is not the whole of it. Warhol went from what one of Henry James’s characters describes as “a little artist man,” on the fringe of a fringe of the art world, to the defining artist of his era. That could not have happened had the world itself not undergone a parallel change, through which the transformed Warhol emerged as the artist it was waiting for.

  Warhol’s first exhibition after the conversion was in a space that belonged by rights to the Warhol of shoes and pussycats: the Fifty-seventh Street windows of Bonwit Teller. But the paintings on display for one week only, in mid-April 1961, belong to his new phase. There are five in all. Advertisement is based on a montage of black-and-white newspaper ads: for hair tinting; for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders; for nose reshaping; for prosthetic aids for rupture; and (“No Finer Drink”) Pepsi-Cola. In 1960, Pepsi-Cola had begun an advertising campaign in which it proclaimed itself the drink “For those that think young,” as if it were the elixir of youth that Ponce de Leon had come to the New World to discover. Bonwit’s window also included Before and After, advertising the nose you are ashamed of transformed into a nose to die for. The remaining paintings are of Superman, the Little King (on an easel), and Popeye. The ads reflect Warhol’s personal preoccupations—impending baldness, an unattractive nose, a loose, unprepossessing body. But the placement of the original images—in back-page ad sections of the National Enquirer and comparable publications of mass consumption—testifies to the universality of such nagging self-dissatisfactions, and the inextinguishable human hope that there are easy ways to health, happiness, and how to “Make Him Want You.” The paintings comment, almost philosophically, on the light summer frocks, displayed on mannequins placed before them. But the message is lightened by images of comic book personages with which everyone was familiar. Who, pausing to look at the display, would have predicted that Advertisement would find its way to Berlin’s National Gallery by way of the museum at Monchengladbach and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art? If such unpromising images can become fine art, there is comparable hope for the hardly more promising rest of us!

  Of the two Coca-Cola bottles, done approximately two years apart, only the later one shows us what we are, according to Andy’s mentor, Emile de Antonio. (left) Andy Warhol, Large Coca-Cola, c. 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 85 × 57 in. © Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY; (right) Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, 1961. Casein and crayon on linen, 69 ½ × 52 ¼ in. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY

  Years later, in the early 1980s, Warhol offered Advertisement to a Dr. Marx, a prominent German collector of contemporary art, through Heiner Bastien, a German curator who regarded Warhol as a great artist. According to Bastien, “We considered him generous to Marx because he pulled out all his old paintings. In the end he even pulled out his ‘Advertisement,’ because I said it would be wonderful to have this first painting in the collection. I don’t think we are yet capable of understanding how radical what Andy did really was. He has probably drawn a picture of our times that reflects more about our time than any other art. It seems as if he had some sort of instinctual understanding of where our civilization is going to” (Bockris, 435).

  Andy’s first show, held in the windows of Bonwit Teller in New York in April 1961, reveals his feeling for the human condition. Photograph by Nathan Gluck

  What almost nobody in 1961 would have seen, had they passed the window at Bonwit Teller, is that it was full of art. They thought they were looking at women’s wear, with some vernacular images taken from the culture by some imaginative, in all likelihood gay, window dresser. Who could have seen it as art in that year? Not me, for sure. Not most of the art world, then still caught up with Abstract Expressionism. It would not have been until 1962 that I was aware of Pop from an illustration in ARTnews, showing what looked like a panel from an action comic, like Steve Canyon, showing a pilot and his girl kissing, and titled The Kiss. Lichtenstein would have seen it as art, as would Ivan Karp. So wou
ld de Antonio and Henry Geldzahler, the young curator of Modern American Art at the Metropolitan Museum. A few dealers, a few collectors.

  What made it art, then? Warhol would certainly have been unable to explain. He affected a certain inarticulateness, stumbling and mumbling. It could not have lain in the difference in size between the advertisements as they appear in the newspapers and as they appear on the large panels Warhol used for the window at Bonwit Teller. One can imagine Before and After postersize over the windows on subways or buses in New York, or even as rather dramatic billboards in Times Square. One of the Pop artists, James Rosenquist, actually worked for Artkraft Strauss sign corporation, painting giant billboards around the city. My view is that all the advertisements “appropriated”—the term was not used in the 1960s, and when it did become a form preempting images, as it did in the 1980s, its meaning was entirely different—have something in common. They all refer, to use the title of Grace Paley’s collection of stories, to “the little disturbances of man.” They refer to sagging stomachs, aching limbs, blemished skin, curly hair one wants to have straightened and straight hair one wants to have curled, and the like. They offer help. But collectively they project an image of the human condition, and that is why they are art. The cartoons have another meaning. Their characters are American idols. Their virtues are beyond ours. Popeye’s strength makes him the Hercules of his age. Nancy is wise beyond her years. And Superman is Superman, who has the attributes of a Bodhisattva—heeder of the cries of the world. They too promise help. They too promise hope. In the end, the window of Bonwit Teller was a showroom of the world of passersby. Everyone understood the images, because the world they projected was everyone’s world. The world projected by Abstract Expressionism was the world of those who painted its paintings.

  Warhol was not the first to raise, in its most radical form, the question of art. He redefined the form of the question. The new form did not ask, What is art? It asked this: What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not? In its own way it is like a religious question. Jesus is at once a man and a god. We know what it is to be a man. It is to bleed and suffer, as Jesus did, or the customers whom the ads address. So what is the difference between a man that is and the man that is not a god? How would one tell the difference between them? That Jesus was human is the natural message of Christ’s circumcision. It is the first sign of real blood being drawn. That he is God is the intended message of the halo he wears—a symbol that is read as an unmistakable outward mark of divinity.

  TWO

  Pop, Politics, and the Gap Between Art and Life

  There is no clear explanation of why a number of artists in and around New York City in the early 1960s, most of whom were known to one another distantly, if at all, should, each in his own way, begin to make art out of vernacular imagery—cartoon images from syndicated comic strips, or advertising logos from widely used consumer products, or publicity photographs of celebrities like movie stars, or pictures of things bound to be familiar to everyone in America, like hamburgers and Coca-Cola. In Spring 1960 Warhol bought a small drawing of a lightbulb by Jasper Johns at Leo Castelli’s gallery. When shown Lichtenstein’s large canvas that reproduced an advertisement for a Catskill resort, Warhol was mainly surprised that someone else was doing paintings of boilerplate advertisements, of the kind he was to display the following year in the Bonwit Teller window. As it happened, he was the fourth artist Karp had visited within a few months who worked with such imagery. A constellation of artists, all producing paintings of a kind as new as their content was familiar, was less a movement than the surface manifestation of a cultural convulsion that would sooner or later transform the whole of life. “This is a tremor of the twentieth century,” Karp thought to himself. “I felt it, and I knew it and I was awake to it.”

  Once it emerges that several artists were engaged in similar projects, we explain it by saying that there was something in the air, and we no longer simply look for biographical explanations. Later in this chapter I shall write about Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, which have seemed to many to refer to his biography—that he ate that soup on a daily basis, for example. But in fact it would have seemed to Warhol that painting that kind of subject was a step toward becoming one of Castelli’s artists, and showing in his gallery, which specialized in a certain kind of cutting edge art. Castelli had taken on Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—the artists Warhol admired most. He had just taken on Lichtenstein, whose art was close to what Warhol himself was producing, though Warhol had evidently been unaware of him. As Castelli’s director, Karp was on the lookout for artists doing art of just this sort—he would have had no interest in Warhol if he were painting abstractions. And Karp knew ten or twelve collectors also interested in this type of art whom he could bring to Warhol’s studio. Warhol did not yet have a gallery, but he belonged to an art world—a complex of dealers, writers, collectors, and, of course, other artists, that was disposed to taking his work seriously. And that art world was poised to become the defining institution of the mid-1960s, built around the kind of art the media was bound to notice and write about. When that happened, Warhol was to become very famous indeed, even if much of the press was negative. He became, in brief, a sensation.

  The term Pop art was first used in 1958 by Lawrence Alloway, a British critic, initially to designate American mass-media popular culture, Hollywood movies in particular. Alloway’s contention was that these, like science fiction novels, were serious and worth studying, as much so as art films, high literature, and the products of elite culture in general. But by some sort of slippage, the term came exclusively to designate paintings—and sculptures—of things and images from commercial culture, or objects that everyone in the culture would recognize, without having to have their use or meaning explained. Warhol’s first show in Bonwit’s window was part of what would become an art movement the following year. Comic strip personages—Nancy, Superman, Popeye, the Little King, Dick Tracy—entered American artistic consciousness in the early 1960s in somewhat the same way that the imagery of Japanese prints entered advanced French artistic consciousness in the 1880s, with the difference that, however popular the prints were in Japan, they were exotic in France, while the American comics, with few exceptions, were dismissed as trash everywhere except in the art world, where they were exciting images because they implied a revolution in taste. These images had ascended, through Warhol and Lichtenstein, into the space of high art. It was their popularity that recommended them to the Pop artists, which gave a kind of political edge to their promotion as art to be taken seriously.

  How different this brash and irreverent art was from the culture of Abstract Expressionist painting, where meanings were personal and arcane, and expressed through pigment so energetically brushed, dripped, or splashed across large expanses of canvas that viewers were left with little to say in response except, “Wow!” Not that there was much to say in front of Pop art, since everyone knew what it was about. The question was what made the elements of everyday life all at once so compelling—what could the interest be in comic strip figures, or soup labels or icecream cones? Why would anyone want to paint, or make effigies, of them? Everyone in the culture was already so entirely literate in their meaning and rhetoric that the only question they seemed to raise was in what respect they could be considered art. From the perspective of the Abstract Expressionists, they could be so considered only by the “gum-chewing pinheaded” delinquents who, a noted critic declared, were beginning to populate the galleries, saying, presumably, “Wow,” when they were not merely whistling through their teeth.

  So it is not uncommon for commentators to explain this art simply as a predictable reaction against Abstract Expressionism. But there were many forms a reaction could take. Abstracti
onists could go back to nongestural abstract painting, as the so-called Hard-Edged Abstractionists did. Or painters could go back to landscapes and still lifes. But there was something in-your-face about Pop art. Yes—everyone knew who Superman and Mickey Mouse were. But it took some special courage to accept a painting of either of them as high art. In my preface, I describe the shock with which I first saw, in 1962, a black-and-white reproduction of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting The Kiss in ARTnews, the leading and most authoritative art publication of the time. It looked like a panel from Terry and the Pirates or Steve Canyon, but it was instead used to illustrate a review of Lichtenstein’s first one-person show at Castelli’s. I found it deeply disturbing, though I ultimately came to feel that, if that was art, anything could be art—anything! Years later, I heard Lichtenstein say that his aim was to overcome the distinction between high and low art by getting a painting of a comic strip panel into an art gallery. There was something revolutionary, something of what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values,” in Lichtenstein’s attitude. It condemned to irrelevance everything that belonged to art appreciation. Artists who made this turn were not simply reacting to Abstract Expressionism, they were revolutionizing the concept of art. They were pressing against a boundary. Imagine someone hanging a painting of a tin of shoeshine polish in his or her home, rendered literally, so one could not admire the brio of the brushwork—a painting that could have appeared in a magazine as an advertisement for shoe polish. What could that mean? It would mean at least that the owner of the painting had himself crossed a boundary, and was making a statement about art, and about himself.