Andy Warhol

3 Warhol the Pop Artist

One of the best working definitions of Pop Art I have come across appears at an online source called Biddington’s Pedigree and Provenance (biddingtons.com). It says;

“Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop Art developed in the late 1950^s as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell soup cans, comic strips and advertisements. The movement eliminated distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques.”

This is a perfect description of Andy Warhol’s work.

Lawrence Alloway, an English art critic, appears to have invented the term Pop Art some time in the middle to late 1950^s; he himself has said that he doesn’t quite remember when. He originally used it to refer to actual mass-produced products rather than to works of art concerned with these products, but it was a sufficiently useful and appealing label that it soon gained acceptance.

Alloway was connected with the Independent Group, a loose association of artists, architects and writers, based around London’s ICA*.

≡ The Institute of Contemporary Arts, a London gallery that has championed cutting edge, avant-garde art, since the middle of the twentieth century.

Rejecting the idea of a British aesthetic, they embraced American popular culture, technology, Hollywood movies and science fiction imagery.

The artists involved included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, the latter being responsible for a 1956 collage called Just What Is It that Makes Today’s homes so Different, so Appealing which is usually regarded as the first work of Pop Art. It features a body builder, a stripper with a lampshade on her head, the cover of Young Romance magazine, a television, a tape recorder and a can of processed ham. Most of the elements of Pop Art and pop imagery were thus represented.

However, despite these English origins, Pop Art feels like an essentially American rather than English form. American Pop Artists were mostly unaware of their British counterparts. In fact, individual artists in America seem to have had little contact with each other until after their first major exhibitions. But something was obviously in the air on both sides of the Atlantic.

It had much to do with World War II. For the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, America had looked to Europe for its art. Europe was supposedly the upholder of tradition, culture and civilization, as well as the breeding ground for new forms of art. Impressionism¹, Cubism², Surrealism³, and a host of other movements had all emerged from Europe.

1: The late nineteenth-century movement that marks the beginning of modern art, employing exuberant colour and vigorous brush strokes, often giving a sketchy ‘unfinished’ appearance. Generally concentrated on contemporary and vernacular subject matter. Artists include Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Degas.

2: A short-lived artistic movement that reduced physical forms to cubes, spheres and cylinders. It also contended that objects were best depicted by simultaneously showing them from multiple viewpoints. Artists include Picasso and Braque.

3: A post-Freudian artistic and literary movement involving the unrestrained exploration and expression of the unconscious and subconscious mind. Artists include Dali, Ernst, Magritte.

America was supposed to be the uncouth philistine cousin. By 1945 Europe had torn itself apart in two world wars, many of its major cities were in ruins, and the Allies had been victorious only after the intervention of the United States. Observers in both Europe and America saw that America might not be quite so uncouth and uncultured after all.

Abstract Expressionism was the first great post-war artistic movement. The name says it all. Based in and around New York, artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning created vast non-figurative canvases that used gestural painting to convey broad, passionate, if unspecified, feelings. It was possible to see this as an expression of post-war angst, although Pollock’s angst seems to have been inspired by his personal demons rather than by external events, and one might well have said that the artists still living in Europe had rather more to be angst-ridden about than did those in America.

Abstract Expressionism was lofty, serious, existential. It was spiritual but in a highly intellectual way. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t meant to be. It certainly had nothing much to do with American life as most people lived it. It is very easy to see Pop Art as a reaction against this rather grim high seriousness.

Giant, inchoate works by Rothko or Pollock may have caused a certain public outrage for being ‘the kind of thing a child could do’, but they were entirely defensible intellectually. But what intellectual argument might be brought to defend works of art that were so fiercely unintellectual as those of Pop? Could you defend a painting like Roy Lichtenstein’s Sponge (1962), which was merely a reworking of a cartoon panel showing a hand holding a sponge? Or a Claes Oldbenberg sculpture like Soft Typewriter (1963), a typewriter big enough for a giant to use, made from vinyl and kapok? Or how about Tom Wesselman’s Landscape № 5 (1964), which featured an almost life-size Volkswagen Beetle made of out of billboard materials?

The answer was that you could defend these works intellectually as comments on the environment or some such, but you really didn’t need to. Pop Art, like pop music, was a thing you either ‘got’ or you didn’t. If you had to have it explained, you would never truly understand it.

You can certainly make the argument that Pop Art is profoundly democratic. It takes ordinary, everyday life as its inspiration. It celebrates consumerism and the mass media. It deals with many of the things that high art had previously ignored, had indeed been opposed to, things like advertising, cars, aeroplanes, junk food, shiny surfaces, movie stars. It had glamour, colour and a sense of humour.

Again, as with pop music, its playfulness was part of its appeal. It was obviously in some ways serious and significant, while still being attractive and engaging at a visceral, immediate level. Pop was brash. It was unsubtle. It used the tricks of advertising and commerce. It also appeared, at the time, to be completely disposable, although history has shown that the best of it is surprisingly durable.

There is however, at least, one sense in which Warhol’s work seems not to be quite pure ‘Pop’ at all, and that is in the manner of its detachment. Pop music, especially, is a hot medium. It is born out of passion and demands a passionate response from its audience. Much the same could be said for most popular movies and television. But Warhol’s art is cool and detached. The best popular culture, especially 1960^s pop music, is deeply unironic. It says what it means in a way that Warhol never quite does.

Pop Art was certainly instrumental in the process of blurring, perhaps even ending, the distinction between high and low art, and in this way Pop Art sometimes plays a double game. Many of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, for example, are in some sense about important subjects: love, marriage, parental conflict, war. Take, a painting like Whaam (1963), which shows one jet fighter shooting down another. Now, the horrors of war are a perfectly valid subject for great art — it was good enough for Goya, after all — but this subject matter is apparently neutralized or trivialized because Lichtenstein takes his image from a cartoon, albeit an especially striking and well-drawn cartoon. He then raises the stakes again, and transforms this trivial cartoon into high art by making it into a huge painting on canvas, over 30 feet by 14.

The opposition between high and low, between great themes and the banal depiction of them, remains in a sort of balance or oscillation, and this playful ambiguity is at the very heart of Pop Art. It always challenges the viewer to decided how fax it is serious and how far it sees seriousness as absurd.

The way the American Pop Artists viewed their own culture was necessarily different from the way it appeared to outsiders. For English Pop Artists, for Peter Blake and David Hockney, say, American culture was alien and exotic. American cars, food and household products were literally unobtainable in austere post-war Britain. In America this was clearly not the case. A Cadillac was obviously not available to everyone, but at least it was familiar, it was an object that you could see as part of your own world.

Warhol’s impoverished, immigrant background placed him in a special, though not uncommon, relation to that culture. Yes, the American dream asserted that wealth and success were potentially available to everyone, but how exactly might a poor, not especially well-educated young man in post-war Pittsburgh participate in that dream? Consumption was one obvious solution. And if one couldn’t afford to buy an all-American Cadillac, you could certainly afford to drink all-American Coca-Cola, or to eat all-American Campbell’s soup.

One of the joys of American democracy, as asserted by Warhol himself, is that the Coke bought by the rich man is every bit as good as the one bought by the poor man. In the matter of soft drinks, at least, money cannot buy you an advantage.

There is always the question of whether an artist chooses his subject matter or whether the subject matter chooses him. It has been said that the young, aspiring Andy Warhol constantly asked everyone he met for ideas that he could use in his art, and yet clearly he did not accept any and every suggestion. Selection was everything. In selecting soup cans, Coke bottles, Green Stamps or dollar bills, he was making aesthetic decisions and favouring ubiquitous American images, and although these images can be read as having great symbolic weight, Warhol uses them lightly, perhaps even frivolously. Certainly he makes Jasper Johns’ reworkings of the American flag, for instance, look decidedly ponderous.

Sometimes Warhol’s choice of subject matter may be deliberately banal but it is seldom innocent. In the cases of the Coke bottle and the Campbell’s soup can, for instance, both are highly successful pieces of industrial design. Indeed Warhol had to come to a financial arrangement with both companies to avoid copyright problems. The Brillo box, which he turned into a sort of replica sculpture, was, by a strange irony, actually designed by a painter called James Harvey, an unsuccessful Abstract Expressionist.

Warhol’s subject matter then, like that of most of the other Pop Artists, is so to speak quoted. It is put in inverted commas. It is, if you like, ‘found’. And although you might argue that a can of soup is no less (or more) suitable as a subject for art than, say, sunflowers or waterlilies, the fact remains that Warhol is not selecting subjects in the way that Monet or Van Gogh were. He is creating a work of art out of a product that has already been created by someone else.

In this he is pursuing a line of artistic practice that probably starts with Marcel Duchamp. In 1917 Duchamp signed a urinal with the name R. Mutt, called it Fountain and originated the concept of the ‘ready-made’. Whereas a collage appropriates an object from the world and incorporates it in a work of art, Duchamp asserts that a thing is art simply because an artist says so. Indeed, after Duchamp it might appear that the artist’s chief function is to point at just about anything and call it art. Warhol was not averse to doing that.

However, Warhol did not simply sign existing soup cans. Initially at least, he actually painted them. It is worth noting that some of Warhol’s soup can paintings are a lot less deadpan than is often supposed. They are stylized. They are appropriated but they are transformed too, sometimes made cartoon-like, sometimes shown with a peeling label, sometimes crushed or with a can opener stuck in the top, sometimes given false or arbitrary colours. When seen up close, they have a handmade look to them.

In any case, not all Warhol’s subject matter is banal at all. After his early success creating art with more or less ‘neutral’ subjects, he selected subject matter that was heavily loaded. His Death and Disaster series uses images of race riots, car crashes, the atom bomb, the electric chair, the John F. Kennedy assassination. These things are anything but banal, and Warhol’s attitude may be detached but it is hardly indifferent.

How could an artist be indifferent to the Kennedy assassination? You might argue that multiple representations of it lead to indifference, but that is Warhol’s point too. Equally, you might well wonder how an artist could turn the Kennedy assassination into art without seeming sanctimonious or sentimental. The answer is that Warhol addresses the subject obliquely and brilliantly, by concentrating on Jackie Kennedy, the presidential widow. In a variety of works, with titles like Jackies, Nine Jackies, Sixteen Jackies, Warhol shows multiple media images of her, some grief-stricken at the funeral, some of her smiling long before the assassination. The images coexist and clash against each other. They show life in the midst death, death in the midst of life, and are surely some of Warhol’s most humane works.

It is hard to tell whether Warhol’s taste for what might be called ‘tabloid’ subject matter was natural and instinctive, or whether he deliberately chose lurid subjects in the knowledge that they would endear him to a mass audience while simultaneously annoying the pious world of high art. Sometimes he literally reproduced the front pages of tabloid newspapers, in works such as A Boy For Meg (1961) or 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) (1962).

But whether instinctive or calculated, his fascination with fame, money, glamour, violence, death, consumer products and sexuality made him not only a man who was in touch with his own times, but also an artist who was able to predict the coming media saturation and the attendant cult of celebrity. His obsession with movie stars, some living, some dead, seems especially prophetic.

When Warhol came to make his portraits of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, it was essentially no different from making an image of an atom bomb explosion or the Kennedy assassination. He had access only to extant, mass media images. These were iconic but they were also constructed. Popular culture carefully manufactures its myths and icons. It finds them, modifies them, packages them and sells them. The movie star is as much of a product as a can of soup. If this sounds a fairly trite observation today, it must be said that it is the work of Pop Artists in general, and Warhol in particular, that has made it seem that way.

Again, it is hard to know from our current standpoint how far Warhol was extraordinarily prescient in choosing to depict Elvis and Marilyn, or whether Elvis and Marilyn have achieved their colossal iconic status partly as a result of Warhol using them in his art. No doubt a little of both. Certainly being portrayed by Warhol wasn’t enough to turn Troy Donohue into an icon, but his portraits of Liz Taylor and Natalie Wood have certainly conferred a sort of symbolic status on them that they might otherwise lack.

Even in these portraits, of course, a selection process was going on. We know that Warhol owned many movie and publicity stills and part of his skill as an artist lay in choosing just the right one to use in his work. The single image he selected of Marilyn Monroe was one that contained her essence and could bear the weight of the many reworkings he made of it. By contrast, the still he used for his Elvis portraits (Elvis in western gear with a gun) derives much of its power from being slightly atypical. The more truly iconic Elvis would be curling his lip and shaking his pelvis. By the time Warhol has added a couple of slightly out of register red lips, this is no longer the Elvis we are used to at all.

Warhol’s later symbolic subject matter — guns, skulls, daggers, shadows, endangered species, the hammer and sickle — certainly provide images with plenty of weight and significance, yet they seem to come less directly from the world of Pop.

The bottom line is that a work of art doesn’t achieve its power simply because it uses powerful subject matter. A work of art is not about an object, it is an object, an object that we want and need to look at. Warhol always makes us want to look.

It can hardly be emphasized enough how skillfully and brilliantly Warhol uses colour and composition. His paintings seem almost scientific in their ability to engage us and draw our attention. This is why Warhol’s work is not simply Duchampian, not simply a matter of signing soup cans, of simply asserting that art is what the artist says it is. Warhol’s work is great art because it enthralls the viewer and connects at the very deepest level.

Summary

Pop Art takes as its subject consumption, popular culture and the mass media.

Its subject matter is always ‘quoted’.

It was a reaction against the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism.

Pop Art blurred, probably forever, the distinction between high and low art.