Andy Warhol

2 A Brief Life of Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol sometimes used to say that he came from ‘nowhere’. In fact he was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928, but his parents came from the village of Mikova in an area called Carpathian Ruthenia, a place where Russia, Poland, Hungary and what is now Slovakia come together, a place found on only the most scrupulously detailed maps.

Warhol was the youngest of three sons (a daughter died at the age of six weeks). His parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, had emigrated to the United States in 1922, and were devout Byzantine Catholics. Ondrej was a manual labourer, and like many other Americans he lost his job in the Depression.

Andy Warhola, as he was then known (he did not change his name to Warhol until 1949), was a frail, mother’s boy. He suffered from rheumatic fever and was frequently kept home from school. While he convalesced he read movie magazines, comic books, and made drawings and collages. When he was well he was a great movie-goer, and he wrote to movie stars asking for their photographs and autographs. He was a particular fan of Shirley Temple, and the Warhol archive includes a signed photograph she sent him in response to one of his letters.

All this time he drew constantly, perhaps obsessively, and while still a schoolboy he attended art classes at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum. On leaving school in 1945 he was accepted by the art department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Once there, however, he had trouble with his studies, especially the parts that involved writing, and he was dropped at the end of his freshman year. After a spell selling fruit door to door with his brother he was reinstated and this time he did much better.

He won an art prize, he joined the student film club and attended lectures by the likes of the avant-garde composer John Cage and the experimental film-maker Maya Deren. In 1948, while still a student, he took a job at a Pittsburgh department store, painting backdrops for window displays. The store’s display department was populated by flamboyant homosexuals, Warhol’s first encounter with that world.

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Warhol goes to New York

Although Andy Warhol was to become the quintessential New York artist, he did not make his first visit to that city until 1948. He took his portfolio with him, went knocking on doors, and eventually found a sympathetic audience in Tina Fredericks at Glamour magazine, who gave him some freelance work.

After graduation in 1949 he moved to New York permanently, living initially in a slum apartment on the Lower East Side. He went back to Tina Fredericks who this time commissioned him to draw shoes for her magazine. Shoes were a perfect subject for Warhol. These drawings got him widely noticed and as a result he began to do a lot of work for other magazines and ad agencies.

He was very successful indeed as a commercial artist. His work included book jackets and newspaper advertisements, including one drawing of a sailor injecting himself with heroin, which first appeared as an ad for a radio programme called The Nation’s Nightmare and then went on to be used as an album cover. It eventually won him a gold medal from the Art Director’s Club.

Warhol worked hard and was soon earning enough money to justify hiring an assistant, a practice that would be important throughout his working life. Soon his mother sold her house in Pittsburgh and moved to New York to live with her son, initially sharing a bedroom with him in his apartment. They would live together, not always harmoniously, until her death in 1972.

Socially Warhol now moved in New York’s gay elite, a very discrete, not to say clandestine, scene. He went to expensive restaurants in the hope of spotting celebrities, with some success. It was also at this time that he started to go bald and began wearing a wig.

In his later career, Warhol consciously made little distinction between art and commerce, but when he was given his first one-man gallery shows in the early 1950^s he left out his commercial work and exhibited drawings based on the work of Truman Capote, then a series of paper sculptures decorated with drawn figures, then drawings of a dancer called John Butler.

In 1955 he had an exhibition of overtly homosexual drawings at the Bodley Gallery, and although reviews and sales were poor, some of the less explicit drawings were selected for a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art the following year.

Warhol’s work in this period was delicate and fey, and it made little impression on the serious world of fine art, which was then much taken with the aggressive energies of Abstract Expressionism*.

≡ Post-war, mostly New York-based artistic movement, that produced large, non-figurative, gestural, spiritualty complex paintings. Artists include Jackson Pollock, Mark Kothko, Willem de Kooning.

It was not a style that appealed to Warhol at all, but with the start of the 1960^s many things in the art world and the world at large were about to change.

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Warhol enters the 1960s

At the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Jasper Johns had a ground-breaking exhibition called Flags, Targets and Numbers. The show sold out and the Museum of Modern Art bought four major paintings. Johns had previously been a commercial artist, as had Robert Rauschenberg, who also had a successful exhibition at the Castelli. Both also happened to be homosexual. Warhol was jealous of their success but he could see possibilities for himself.

He began a series of black and white paintings of nose jobs, wigs, television sets, charts of dance steps, all based on cheap ads found in magazines. Then he painted cartoon characters — Dick Tracy, Batman and Popeye — then a Coke bottle. Although he was working in the area that would eventually bring him success, these early works failed to provide him with a breakthrough.

By the end of 1960 most of those who would come to be considered major Pop Artists — Claes Oldenberg, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselman, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist — had all had successful exhibitions in New York. Andy Warhol at this time didn’t even have a gallery.

Then, according to legend, a fledgling gallery owner called Muriel Latow met Warhol, and he asked her to give him some ideas for the things he should paint. Her first suggestion was that he should paint money. The second was that he should paint a can of soup.

Warhol’s mother went out and bought one can of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup and he began work, making individual ‘portraits’ of each can, seen against a plain white background. Warhol had found his subject. The paintings were first shown in Los Angeles in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery, were a huge success, and their fame spread internationally.

Given the recent history of art it may seem odd to think that paintings of soup cans could be considered outrageous or shocking, and no doubt the controversy was stoked by the media, yet some of the outrage was undoubtedly real, caused by the feeling that Warhol was somehow insulting and conning his public. What helped to fuel the debate was the fact that in an important sense you didn’t need actually to see these works of art in order to get their point, in order to have an opinion about them and be able to join in the debate. The very idea of a so-called serious artist painting soup cans was outrage enough. In that sense Warhol was always something of a conceptual artist.

He began to make paintings of iconic yet banal, all-American subjects — Green Stamps*, ‘Glass — handle with care’ labels, postage stamps, dollar bills — and he continued working with soup cans and Coke bottles, creating multiple rather than single images.

≡ Stamps that were given out with purchases in shops and supermarkets in the 1960^s as a kind of bonus system. Stamps were stuck into books and redeemed against consumer items.

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Warhol discovers mass production

In 1962 Warhol began to use silk-screening in his work, a process that enabled him to make repeated yet often slightly differing images. In May 1963 he told Time magazine;

“Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechancial. Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine. Wouldn’t you?”

Right from the beginning, Warhol was always very quotable.

The silk-screen process enabled him to make art in great quantities, and he often left some of the manual work to assistants. He went to his collection of movie magazines, and used extant images as the basis for portraits of Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Liz Taylor, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, and of course Marilyn Monroe.

Later he began dealing with profoundly American forms of violence and death: images of car crashes, the electric chair, the atom bomb, race riots. At that point in the 1960^s there was no shortage of loaded material. His images of Jackie Kennedy mourning her husband’s death have become part of the iconography of the event itself.

The 1960^s also offered new, more extreme forms of celebrity. In a world of Beatlemania, there was room for the right sort of artist to become a pop star too, and Warhol looked and acted the part in a way that the likes of Johns or Rauschenberg simply didn’t. Besides, their art was complex, awkward and ambiguous in ways that Warhol’s apparently wasn’t, although this is in no way to deny the depth of Warhol’s work. Warhol very soon became far and away the most famous of the Pop Artists.

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Warhol goes to the movies

Given Warhol’s prolific output at this time it may seem surprising that he still found time to be an avid movie-goer, but somehow he did. His tastes were very broad; both mainstream and avant-garde. He began to attend screenings at the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, where the stars of the emerging American ‘underground film’ showed their work.

These relentlessly subversive, rough-edged, often sexually very explicit movies appealed greatly to Warhol. He thought he could do something similar, if not better. He bought a Bolex movie camera and told people, “I’m going to make bad films.”

Warhol’s movies are much more talked about than they are seen, and sometimes they are much easier to talk about than they are to watch. In movies such as Kiss, Eat, Sleep, Blow Job and Empire, the conceptual element was once again highly important. You didn’t actually have to see a five-and-a-half-hour film of a man sleeping, or an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building to get a firm, if sometimes mistaken, idea of what they were like and what they were about.

The best of them were not narrowly conceptual, however. Movies like Chelsea Girls or Beauty #2 or even the simple screentests, show Warhol’s fascination with people, especially if they were beautiful young men or women, or if they were bikers or drag queens, or in some other way extraordinary. This was surely why Warhol was able to perform the extraordinary feat of introducing avant-garde film to a mass audience. The public shared his fascination.

Making movies was expensive, so Warhol continued to make silk-screens, largely to finance his movies. Both silk-screening and movie-making were labour intensive, requiring the employment of numerous assistants. They also required large premises and so Warhol moved to a warehouse, a place that came to be known as the Factory.

It was a single room, 100 feet by 40, and its interior was eventually painted entirely silver by Billy Name, a photographer and to a large extent the caretaker of the Factory.

Warhol’s fame drew a vast crew of oddballs, some far more picturesque than others, a mix of high life and low life, street junkies, heiresses, transvestites, rent boys and poets. It was an archetypal 1960^s environment. There was a good deal of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and the Factory even had its own rock band, the Velvet Underground, and this eventually led to Warhol becoming briefly involved in multimedia events such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable*.

≡ A multi media event and environment involving rock bands, dance, and the projection of slides and film.

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Warhol and Valerie Solanas

The Factory was hardly a nurturing environment. In some ways it resembled a court with its members trying to find favour with Warhol. For his part he took pleasure in seeing people antagonize each other, and these tensions and confrontations often became the raw material for his movies. One of his less stable actresses, Valerie Solanas, was soon to change things completely.

Solanas was a self-styled feminist. She had founded and was the only member of an organization called SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, though her political activities hadn’t extended much further than writing a manifesto.

It would be absurd to make any claims or excuses for Solanas, but some of the things she put in her manifesto are not so mad that she wouldn’t have found plenty of radical feminists who, in 1968, shared her views. Even today one would not have to go far to find agreement for her complaint that;

“We all know that ‘Great Art’ is great because male authorities have told us, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciate greatness,” (p.28 SCUM Manifesto).

Solanas appeared in a Warhol movie called I, a Man and afterwards she gave him a script she had written, entitled Up Your Ass, which she wanted him to make into a film. Warhol apparently loved the title, but when he failed to take on the project Solanas, not unnaturally, requested the return of the script, and when he told her he had lost it she asked for money. Warhol was always notoriously bad at giving money to his collaborators, and Solanas was no exception.

On the morning of Monday 3 June 1968, Solanas went to the Factory (which by now had changed location) looking for Warhol. On being told that he wasn’t there she waited outside until his arrival in the late afternoon. She followed him into the lift and then into the Factory itself where she produced a gun and fired twice at Warhol without hitting him. With her third shot, however, she struck him in the right flank, the bullet exiting through the left side of his back.

The bullet damaged both Warhol’s lungs, his liver, spleen, gall bladder and intestines. At the hospital he was clinically dead for an hour and a half, but he survived after a five-and-a-half-hour operation that included the removal of his spleen.

The shooting was a major news story, although there were those who thought it was some kind of Pop Art publicity stunt. The story would no doubt have run longer in the media had it not been rapidly replaced by another shooting, the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Valerie Solanas claimed she had shot Warhol in the name of feminism although, as has often been pointed out, Warhol makes rather a poor symbol of macho male patriarchy. Solanas also claimed she did it because Warhol was controlling her life. This was not literally true, and yet there were those who thought that Warhol had reaped what he had sown. If, for your own amusement, you surrounded yourself with strange, potentially dangerous, unstable people, there was an inevitablity, perhaps even a certain justice, in one of them turning against you.

Ultimately Solanas received only a three-year jail sentence. It might well have been longer, but Warhol refused to be a witness in her prosecution.

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Warhol recuperates

Warhol’s recovery was long and slow, and he remained in intermittent pain for the rest of his life, yet by August 1968 he was at home painting again. Crucially, the price of Warhol’s work rose dramatically after the shooting. In 1970 a soup can painting sold at auction for $60,000, which at the time was a record for a work by a living American artist. That same year a travelling exhibition of Warhol’s work started a long, international tour that included London, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago and eventually New York. This greatly enhanced his reputation in America and abroad.

After the shooting Warhol changed his social allegiance to what the art historian John Richardson describes as High Bohemia*.

≡ Term used to describe Warhol’s working and social environment, which included movie stars, fashion designers, various heiresses and members of the European aristocracy.

He wanted a safer environment, and his working and social life would now centre around movie stars, fashion designers, as well as various heiresses and members of the European aristocracy. He even had dealings with the likes of Imelda Marcos and the Shah of Iran.

In 1969 he founded inter/VIEW magazine (which later changed its spelling to Interview) and used his celebrity contacts to fill its pages with images of and interviews with his new acquaintances. Often photographs from the magazine would form the basis of portraits. Warhol was rich by now, but the Factory was still an extremely expensive operation to run. In order to make money, Warhol set himself up as a society portraitist, and got his assistants to work very hard to get portrait commissions. At this time just about anyone with $25,000 could have their portrait done by Warhol. So as well as creating portraits of stars and celebrities, he also made portraits of many wealthy, anonymous industrialists and their wives.

Warhol’s High Bohemia reached critical mass with the brief advent of Studio 54, the notorious New York nightclub, of which Warhol was a regular habitue. As with the original Factory it was a place steeped in sex and drugs, though this time the music of choice was disco rather than rock and roll. Again it was a place where high and low life met, but Warhol’s involvement was now far more peripheral. He was a visitor, not an inhabitant. His 1979 book of photographs, Exposures, records this world with wide but far from innocent eyes.

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Warhol in decline

Warhol had always been an avid collector but his increasing wealth now meant he could acquire seriously on a large, not to say obsessive, scale. He and his mother moved into a townhouse on New York’s East 66th Street and he turned it into a sort of private museum, one in which most of the rooms were kept locked and where nobody, not even Warhol, ever viewed the collection.

He continued to work hard. He did a series of portraits of athletes, collaborated successfully with the artist Jamie Wyeth. He created two series of images, one called Skulb, one called Shadows, that today look like some of his most important work. He also made paintings using sexual imagery, one called Torsos, one called Sex Parts, the latter being extremely explicit.

At this point in the late 1970^s, Warhol’s high profile and his unashamed commercialism began to breed a certain contempt. There was a growing tendency to think of Warhol as at best irrelevant, at worst absurd. The 1970^s ended for him with an exhibition of 56 pairs of portraits, of the likes of Bianca Jagger, Sylvester Stallone, Yves St. Laurent and Liza Minelli. Critics complained that these works of art were as shallow as the people they depicted, that Warhol had fallen under the spell of glamorous banality.

Those who felt he was a spent force had their prejudices further reinforced by a series of works he made in 1980 called Reversals, which revisited some of his most famous images, but now he silk-screened them ‘in negative’. This may have looked like a backwards step at the time, but today these works look impressively powerful.

His credibility was hardly helped when he also worked for Mercedes Benz, producing Warholesque screenprints of their cars. And it plunged even further when he worked as a model for hire, appearing in ads for companies such as Sony, TDK, Coca-Cola and Golden Oak furniture.

In the early 1980^s he was commissioned to create Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, which included Einstein, Kafka and Golda Meir. Then he collaborated with the younger artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring, in a more or less successful attempt to prove that he was still relevant and in touch with the contemporary scene.

Also in the early 1980^s he produced a cable show called Andy Warhol’s TV although it was never a very successful or profitable venture. Later he did another show called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes for MTV which didn’t do much better. He would always say that the failure of these television shows was a cause of great disappointment to him.

In 1986 he began a series of works based around Leonardo’s Last Supper, over 100 in two years, and in January 1987 he had his first exhibition as a photographer. We now know that at this time he was regularly attending Mass and becoming increasingly serious about the Catholic faith that he had never entirely abandoned. He even served meals to the homeless at New York’s Church of the Heavenly Rest.

However, as far as the world at large was concerned, at that point in the late 1980^s Andy Warhol was a working artist, with successes and failures, with supporters and enemies, with a reputation that was constantly being reassessed, rising and falling with the vagaries of public and critical taste. In any case, he apparently had a long working life still ahead of him.

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The death of Warhol

In February 1987 Andy Warhol was diagnosed as having an infected gall bladder and was advised to have it removed. With some reluctance he agreed. He was admitted to hospital and the routine operation seemed to go smoothly enough, but Warhol died the night after the operation.

There is some suggestion that the private nurse employed to attend him left her post at some time in the night. Certainly when she checked on him at 5.45 a.m. he had turned blue. A resuscitation team failed to revive him and he was pronounced dead at 6.31 a.m. on the morning of 22 February 1987.

In the aftermath of his death there would be endless legal wranglings concerning his treatment by the hospital, the value of his estate, and the fate of his paintings. His cultural importance was quickly confirmed, however, when the New York Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective in 1989, and in 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum was opened in his native Pittsburgh, an enduring monument to the man and his art. His reputation has only increased with the years.

Looking back on Warhol’s work it is easy to see that he was always much possessed by death; in the early works involving suicides and car crashes, in the later ones with skulls and shadows. His own self-portraits often look like death masks. However, two years before his death, in his book America, he had said, “Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you.” Who would ever have guessed that Andy Warhol could be so easily embarrassed?

Summary

Warhol’s family background was East European Catholic.

He was a successful commercial artist before he was a fine artist.

He was the most famous and I successful of the Pop Artists and played the part to the hilt.

In 1968 he was shot by Valerie Solanas, but survived after being clinically dead for an hour and a half.

His social allegiances gradually changed from New York pop low life to High Bohemia.

He died unexpectedly and comparatively young after an operation to remove his gall bladder.