Andy Warhol

4 Warhol the Portraitist

Andy Warhol’s quip that, ‘In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes’, which first appeared in the catalogue for a show he had in Stockholm in 1968, is the most quoted and most misunderstood of all Warhol’s many public utterances.

These days the line is generally used to criticize or dismiss someone who has briefly and apparently for no good reason found themselves in the limelight. They are denounced with the put-down, ‘Your 15 minutes is up’. These briefly famous people have supposedly got something they don’t deserve or aren’t entitled to, and now they can return to an ignominious and deserved obscurity. Once their 15 minutes is up, fame will presumably be left to the people who more truly deserve it.

Apart from the fact that there is something very snobbish and condescending about this attitude, I also think it is pretty much the exact opposite of what Warhol actually had in mind.

Warhol loved fame. He loved it in himself and in others. He aspired to it. He achieved it. He worked hard to keep it and increase it. You would not have found him complaining about the ‘problems’ of being famous. From this standpoint he would inevitably think that fame was something everybody might enjoy given half a chance.

And so, adopting one of his (admittedly not always wholly convincing) poses, that of the Coke-drinking, Campbell’s-soup-eating democrat, he made the not very startling observation that fame is rather unfairly and unequally distributed. Far more original was the idea that, at least in theory, at least on a temporary basis, and certainly somewhat ironically, the world might be a better place if fame were shared out more fairly, or at least passed around.

It is hard to tell if Warhol was ever much of a reader, and even if he were he would surely have gone to some lengths to disguise the fact, but this concept of the regular redistribution of fame and fortune is very similar to the plot of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Lottery In Babylon in which society is constantly reformulated on the basis of chance, so that at some time or another everybody has been a leader and everybody has been a slave. One is also reminded of Warhol’s own remark in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol;

“If everybody’s a beauty, then nobody is.” (p.62).

In a certain limited way, at the Factory, Warhol practised what he preached. He created his own superstars, people who were certainly not stars outside the Warhol circle, and some of them weren’t even very ‘super’ within it. Ingrid Superstar, for example, was a potato-faced girl from New Jersey whose aspirations to stardom seemed at best misplaced. Within the circle, however, she was a somebody. Warhol, of course, reserved the right to say who was this week’s superstar and who was not.

Members of the Factory crowd seem to have put a great deal of effort into pleasing Andy, into being his favourites. Whether they wanted to be famous for 15 minutes or longer, whether they wanted to be stars or not, they certainly wanted Warhol’s approval. They wanted to be insiders.

Was Andy Warhol really interested in people? Ultimately the answer has to be yes, if a qualified yes. You don’t spend as much time surrounded by as many people as Warhol did, and you certainly don’t spend as much time photographing, tape recording and filming them, if you are simply indifferent to them. Warhol could, after all, have stayed with the soup cans and the electric chairs. But perhaps he was interested in people the way an old-style lepidopterist is interested in butterflies. He observes them, studies them, is fascinated by them, but ultimately he wants to capture them, skewer them on a pin, and add them to his collection.

Warhol seems to have met every celebrity of his era, everyone worth knowing, plus many, many who weren’t. The number of people he made portraits of, either as paintings, prints or silk-screens, or simply by taking their photograph, is astonishing. Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview, puts the number in the tens of thousands. Imelda Marcos was one of the few he wanted but couldn’t get.

The list of his subjects reads like a who’s who of his times, and includes Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, Muhammad Ali, Grace Jones, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Rudolph Nureyev, Paul Anka, Philip Johnson, Merce Cunningham, Man Ray, Mickey Mouse, Joseph Beuys, Chairman Mao, Lenin, Jerry Hall, Albert Einstein, and of course, above all, Marilyn Monroe. If some of these names seem more significant and familiar than others, that is a sign of our own times as well as of Warhol’s.

Latterly Warhol was really only interested in making portraits of the rich and famous, although there were times when he would make an exception and accept a portrait commission from those who were merely rich.

At the start of his career he didn’t know anybody who was famous at all. In the 1950^s he was making drawings of what look like male models, but these are referred to in the catalogues as ‘Untitled’ so hardly qualify as portraits. He also made a lot of drawings of a store owner called Stephen Bruce who sold Warhol’s art through his store, but when it came to real stars he knew them only from media images, the way any other member of the public did. And so he made his first portraits using images taken from magazines and newspapers. There are a number of pencil drawings he made in 1962 of Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr and Ginger Rogers that explicitly reveal their sources to be publicity stills and movie magazines.

Even after he had achieved a certain level of success as an artist, it was not, at first, the kind of success that brought him into contact with Hollywood stars. His portraits of Brando, Elvis and Liz Taylor again came from printed sources.

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Marilyn Monroe

Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe were necessarily taken from photographs, since he began using her image only after her death, and of course his paintings of her are not portraits in the same way that his silk-screens of, say, Mick Jagger or Grace Jones are. They are in no sense taken from life. They all manipulate and use Marilyn’s image for aesthetic or symbolic effect. They celebrate her image and perhaps her life, but by no means are all of them glamorous, and some of them are downright eerie. They show her face as a mask, somewhere between a life-mask and a death-mask. They remind us of beauty and death in equal proportions.

The Marilyn Diptych* of 1962, for example, is two vast canvas panels each with 25 Marilyn faces, arranged in a five by five grid.

≡ Diptych: a painting made on two joined but detachable panels.

The left half shows more or less identical images but they’re garishly coloured, the hair is bright yellow, the lips fire engine red, the skin bubble gum pink.

The right panel has 25 images printed in black straight onto the canvas, some so heavily inked as to be almost obliterated, while others fade out into nothingness towards the top right corner of the panel. As a metaphor for the transience of glamour and beauty, for the inevitability of death, particularly of a movie star, this fading and thinning of colour and ink is just about perfect.

Marilyn’s Lips, also 1962, is another diptych, this time showing long rows of Marilyn’s slightly parted lips. They are disembodied, floating on the canvas, and the piece seems to contain references to Man Ray’s lips in the sky, to Dali’s Mae West sofa, perhaps even to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. But essentially the lips look stamped out, mass produced; the icon is reduced to its detachable elements.

In all the Marilyns, the use of different, often ‘wrong’, colours profoundly affects the way we read the face. They are like the effects produced by make-up or perhaps by changes in movie lighting. There is a 1967 portfolio of ten silk-screens, each 36 inches square, each using a different set of colours. Some colour combinations leave Marilyn’s glamour more or less intact (if a little cartoonish and overstated), and the image remains that of the Marilyn we know. Others do violence to the image, transform it, leaving Marilyn looking sinister or sickly or deathly.

You could, if you wanted, read some misogyny into this manipulation and distortion of the face of a beautiful woman. Marilyn’s beauty is toyed with, falsified, sometimes destroyed; but that doesn’t seem to be quite what Warhol is up to. The obsession and fascination, with glamour, transience and death feels genuine.

When Warhol came to revisit these images of Marilyn in the Reversal series made between 1977 and 1986 he created a number of works called Multi-colored Marilyns, sometimes using as few as four repeated images, sometimes using as many as 18. But multi-coloured isn’t the most obvious way you would describe them. The canvases are mostly black. Repeated images of Marilyn, as though in a black and white photographic negative, cover most of the surface, and a background wash of colours shows through in just a few places, where the eyes, eyebrows and lips are. The teeth however, because white in the orginal, are now an alarming dense black. The image of Marilyn Monroe is still just about recognizable, although arguably it wouldn’t be if we hadn’t seen it in so many Warhol silk-screens, but now she looks like a ghost, something sinister and deathly, something from the other side. These are true portraits of the dead Marilyn Monroe.

Perhaps Warhol’s most controversial early portraits were those of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men. The architect Philip Johnson had designed the New York State Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair, and he gave a number of Pop Artists space on the outside of the building to display their art.

Warhol silk-screened 13 grainy portraits, police mug shots of what we must now call ‘alleged criminals’. The work consisted of 25 panels, each four feet square, showing side and front views of the men, and since some of the panels were left blank, not every man was shown in both views.

Trouble came because, according to Johnson, these 13 men weren’t really the most wanted at all. Some had already been caught, served their time and released, and some of them were living at home with their families. Under pressure from the Fair’s organizers and amid accusations of censorship, the panels were duly sprayed silver.

Once again Warhol went for fame if not glamour. The men in the portraits certainly look brutish, aggressive and disreputable, but Warhol is not simply celebrating their status as criminals, he is portraying them because he thought they were the most famous criminals at that moment, the top 13 criminals.

In fact it appears that Warhol would have been quite content to continue using extant images as the basis of his art. It was largely the fear of legal action by the copyright owners of the photographs that made him stop. Warhol was becoming rich enough to be worth suing.

He saw the advantages of creating his own source material, and because of his own growing fame he was soon in a position to meet and portray the kinds of subject who had once seemed to belong to a quite different world. These people did not ‘sit’ for their portrait in quite the way that a subject would sit for a more conventional portrait painter. Rather they took part in a photoshoot with a make-up person and many assistants. Warhol would take a great many Polaroids of them and then work from a photograph rather than from life.

These sessions had many witnesses and are the source of numerous anecdotes. Victor Bockris, for example, reports on the session when Warhol travelled to photograph Muhammad Ali at his training camp in Pennsylvania. Ali delivers endless ranting monologues on the evils of racism, prostitution and homosexuality, while Warhol clicks away with his Polaroid camera and is finally moved to say to Ali;

“Could we do some where you’re not…er, talking?” (in Traveler’s Digest, Winter 1977, pp.3–5).

The Ali session was part of his series of portraits of American sports stars, a reasonably Warholian theme, and his portraits of certain iconic Pop celebrities seemed fair enough. But his active pursuit of Imelda Marcos or the Shah of Iran, desperately wanting them to be his subjects, showed not only a blind quest for money, but arguably an absence of moral sensibility.

However, although Warhol may have been a court painter, of sorts, the best of his portraits of the famous are surprisingly revelatory. They don’t take the celebrities quite at their own value, and it is not simply a matter of making them look bad or ugly as a way of cutting them down to size. His portrait of Jane Fonda, for example, does not appear deliberately unflattering, her glamour remains essentially intact, and yet the portrait also reveals an anxiety, a tension, a steely hostility that one had always suspected yet never quite seen in the actress.

A lot of the rich and powerful men look like very nasty pieces of work indeed, and many of the beautiful women appear self-regarding and empty. In a telephone call to David Bourdon, quoted in Bourdon’s Warhol he claimed;

“I can make ordinary people look good but I have trouble making beautiful people look good.”

It would be pointless to make any great claims for Warhol as a scathing social critic, but a remark like that suggests that he wasn’t quite the uncritical poodle that a lot of people try to make him out to have been.

Warhol’s own role as both insider and outsider is a curious one. Growing up poor in Pittsburgh, his contact with the world of fame and glamour was as distant as anyone else’s. He went to the movies, read movie magazines, then he wrote to some of the stars asking for signed photographs. Not everybody would have taken that final step of trying to make contact with the stars, and you might argue that this indicated he was more than just the average movie-goer. Equally, you could think it was an action that in someone else would have confirmed forever their status as nothing more than a fan, as someone who would always be on the outside looking in, pressing his face against the glass.

Warhol’s success meant that he moved to the other side of that glass. By the 1970^s Warhol might have appeared to be the ultimate insider. He was a friend of Liz Taylor and Liza Minelli, he was inviting Bianca Jagger to stay at his estate in Montauk. He was meeting (and admittedly occasionally sparring with) Hollywood’s old royalty — with Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall. He was as big a star as any of them and probably richer than most. The wheel might seem to have come full circle for the movie fan from Pittsburgh, but it was never quite as simple as that. Warhol the star remained starstruck.

Whenever he encountered these stars he had his camera and his tape recorder with him; the tools of the undying fan. Also, of course, the tools of the paparazzo and the investigative journalist. One wonders if he sometimes carried an autograph album.

Warhol may have felt the need for props. The photographer at the party is always popular and never has to account for himself. And perhaps the camera and tape recorder were also used as a shield that saved him the trouble of having to engage directly with the world. But they must surely also have created an impermeable barrier between Warhol and the stars he was so keen to meet. At the very least they must have forced the stars to keep their guard up, to remain in their star persona. And this, I suppose, is what a true fan might very well want. He would be far more interested in the star’s public image than in any private reality behind it.

There is a very telling, also quite funny, photograph in Exposures of Bianca Jagger apparently shaving her armpit, and one’s first impression might be that this is a candid picture, that Warhol has caught Bianca off guard, and is offering us a candid glimpse of her as we have never seen her before. But when you look more closely at the photograph, you see that there is no shaving foam in the armpit, indeed there is no hair to be shaved off. Bianca is posing for the camera. She is a star pretending to have a candid moment, caught by Warhol.

Of course this is just fine with Warhol. The kind of exposure he is concerned with (here at least) is more that of publicity than of revelation. It remains, however, a very appealing picture of Bianca Jagger.

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Warhol the self-portraitist

As I said in the introduction, I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that ‘Warhol was his own greatest creation’. Yes, he most certainly created an image for himself, both visually and philosophically, and it was an appealing and attention-grabbing image, and a great help in getting publicity, but without the art it would have been meaningless. After all, his superstar Ultraviolet presented the most striking visual image to the world, but what good did it do her? Looking at it the other way, the artist Joseph Beuys has an instantly recognizable image, but it has hardly made him a household name like Warhol.

Self-portraits of Warhol exist from as early as 1942, and in his senior year at the Carnegie Institute, 1948-49, he caused a stir by entering a self-portrait in a college show. The work was rejected. It was called The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose, and although the painting does indeed show a Warhol-like character picking his nose, it is surely the punning, frivolous title with its casual insult to motherhood, that caused offence rather than the image itself.

There is obviously a reference to plastic surgery in that title, and we know that Warhol was very unhappy about his own appearance, going so far as to have facial plastic surgery in 1957. He regarded the operation as a failure.

Warhol is hardly the first art student to have spent a lot of time experimenting with his own look, drawing himself, taking a lot of pictures of himself in photobooths. And obviously there is a long and noble tradition of artists who have created self-portraits.

It seems to me that rather too much is made of Warhol’s alleged blankness. The face that gazes out from the self-portraits is certainly immobile and not obviously expressive, but it is possible to see a variety of things in it: a severity, a wariness, perhaps a sort of inert hostility. At other times he looks alarmed, deathly, deliberately grotesque.

Warhol’s look is always iconic, but it is not fixed, especially in the beginning. Early photographs show him as a bespectacled, bow-tie wearing dandy or nerd. The look is unusual but not fashionable or cool or Pop. By the time of the Factory years Warhol looks far more current, as though he might be a member of a pop group, in Beatle boots, hooped tee-shirt and dark glasses. Dark glasses are always a reinforcement of cool, and suggest a distance, a detachment, a refusal to look the world in the eye, or to let the world see into yours. But the photographs from these years, and there are a great many of them, are generally created by others. When it came to making his own self-portraits he generally took the shades off.

Over the years, in his self-portraits, he subjected his own image to most of the same transformations that he used in his portraits of other people; multiple repetitions, the use of garishly inappropriate colours. He also treats himself more harshly than he does most of his subjects. Sometimes he looks just terrible: sinister, sickly, sometimes with camouflage colours blotched across his face, sometimes done out in terrible drag, in bad make-up and wigs.

It is hard to say quite what the wig meant to Warhol. Certainly, it hid his bald head, but it also drew attention to the fact that he was bald. Perhaps he was embracing falseness as a Pop joke, refusing to make a pretence, or at least revealing the pretence, but that doesn’t altogether explain why the wigs had to be quite so cheap and nasty looking. Did he know how ridiculous he sometimes looked? And did he care? And was that the whole point?

Photographs of Warhol’s house, unseen until after his death, show Warhol wigs framed behind glass, looking like alarming, giant spiders, which suggest he was well aware of how strange and absurd they looked. Perhaps there was a sort of masochism going on here. If a man perceives himself as ugly and sexually unattractive, he may well decide to embrace that ugliness rather than disguise it, and make himself look even uglier.

Warhol’s self-portraits, as works of art, are not in themselves ugly, of course. Once again art transforms the banal or the ordinary into something beautiful and startling. This is art’s power, and in creating his self-portraits Warhol took control of that power and exercised it to transform his own image.

Summary

Warhol met and made portraits of thousands of the most famous personalities of his era.

His portraits often deal with the media image as much as with the ‘real’ person.

Warhol became a ‘society portraitist’ but his work is not always flattering or uncritical.

In his self-portraits he is at least as hard on himself as he is on others.