Andy Warhol
The 1960s
It was during the 1960s that Warhol transformed himself from an advertising illustrator who made art, into one of the most famous American artists alive. In many ways, Andy Warhol and his circle helped define the decade.It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donohue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and popular.
Warhol's work from this period revolves around American popular culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings - many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal - this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period. Take, for example, Warhol's comments on the appeal of Coca-Cola:
| “ | What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. | ” |
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—The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again, 1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4 |
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This quote both expresses his affection for popular culture, and evidences an ambiguity of perspective that cuts across nearly all of the artist's statements about his own work. Does he really think that the fact that Liz Taylor drinks the same thing that everyone else drinks demonstrates the promise of democracy? Or is this a cynical joke about the confusion of democracy with capitalism? His aphorisms and observations are freqently cited (e.g. "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes"), but people still argue about how to read these statements.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on Pop Art in December 1962, during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception - though throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.
As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career - in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory", Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape record his phone conversations). During this decade, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Ultra Violet. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some, like Berlin, remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world (e.g. writer John Giorno, film-maker Jack Smith) also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this period. By the end of the decade Andy Warhol was himself a celebrity, appearing frequently in newspapers and magazines alongside Factory cohorts like Sedgwick.
Shooting
Valerie Solanas, a marginal figure in the factory scene suffering from paranoia, turned up at the studio on June 3, 1968, and shot Warhol and Mario Amaya. Earlier that day Solanas had been turned away from the Factory after asking for the return of a script she had given to Warhol. The script, apparently, had been misplaced. Warhol was seriously wounded by the attack - he was declared clinically dead at the hospital, and barely survived. He suffered physical effects for the rest of his life (he had to wear a corset, for example, to support his abdomen). The shooting had a profound effect on Warhol's life and art. The Factory scene became much more tightly controlled, and for many this event brought the "Factory 60s" to an end.
Solanas was already something of a cult figure in New York before this event. She had previously founded a "group" (she was its only member) called the "Society for Cutting Up Men" (S.C.U.M.) and authored the scabrous S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a radical feminist attack on patriarchy. She appears in the Warhol film "I, A Man". Over the years, Solanas's manifesto has found something of a following. (The philosopher Avital Ronnell wrote an introduction to a new edition of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, published by Verso Press in 2004.) Solanas was arrested the day after the assault (coincidentally, the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot). By way of explanation, she said that "He had too much control over my life."
The 1970s
Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the 1970s would prove a much quieter decade. This period, however, saw Warhol becoming more entrepreneurial. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol devoted much of his time to rounding up new, rich patrons for portrait commissions — including Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, Brigitte Bardot, and Michael Jackson. He also founded, with Gerard Malanga, "Interview" magazine and published "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" (1975). In this book he presents his ideas on the nature of art: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."
Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity 3 and, later in the 70s, Studio 54, nightspots in New York City. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and as a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square".
The 1980s
Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success in the 1980s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the "bull market" of '80s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and the so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and members of the Transavantguardia movement, which had become influential. In 1985, Andy Warhol was selected as one of the Absolut Vodka artists, and several of his paintings incorporating the Absolut Vodka bottle in it were used in advertisements, bringing his art to the attention of a broader audience.
Paintings
By the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol was a very successful commercial illustrator. His detailed and elegant drawings for I. Miller shoes were particularly popular. These illustrations consisted mainly of "blotted ink"
drawings (monoprints) - a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.
In the early 1960s Warhol tried to exhibit some of his drawings using these techniques in a gallery, only to be turned down. He began to rethink the relationship between his commercial work and his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist. Instead of treating these things as opposites, he merged them and began to take commercial and popular culture more explictly as his topic.
At the time what we now know as Pop Art was an experimental form that was being adopted independently by several artists (e.g. Roy Lichtenstein) who would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists (e.g. Robert Rauschenberg). Eventually, he pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself - to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs - and removed all traces of the artist's "hand" in the production of his paintings.
To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by the artist Roy Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, for his first major exhibition he painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he had for lunch most of his life. Warhol loved money, so he later painted money. He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.
From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol frequently employed silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. In other words, Warhol went from being a painter to being a designer of paintings. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, in different versions and variations following his directions.
Warhol produced both 'comic' (e.g., soup cans) and 'serious' (e.g., electric chairs) works. Warhol used the same techniques - silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors- whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters (as part of a 1962-1963 series called "Death and Disaster"). The "Death and Disaster" paintings (e.g. "Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man", "Orange Disaster") transform personal tragedies into public spectacles, and signal the prominence of images of disaster in the media, indicating how we become numbed to such images through mass reproduction.
The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style - artistically and personally affectless. This was mirrored by Warhol's own demeanor, as he often played "dumb" to the media, and refused to explain his work. The artist was famous for having said, in fact, that all you need to know about him and his works is already there, "on the surface." Before this blankness, the lack of signifiers of sincerity, the viewer is tempted to read beyond the surface to try and discover what the 'real Andy' thinks. Is Andy horrifed by death or does he think it is funny? Are his soup can paintings a cynical joke about the cheapness of mass culture, or are they homages to the simple comforts of home? His refusal to speak to how his work ought to be read made it all the more interesting - he left its interpretation entirely up to his audience.
One might say that Warhol's work as a Pop Artist was always somewhat conceptual. His series of do-it-yourself paintings and Rorschach blots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that show oxidated urine stains) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works -- and their means of production -- mirrored the mores and atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory." Biographer Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings":
| “ | Victor... was Andy's ghost pisser on the Oxidations. He would come to the Factory to urinate on canvases that had already been primed with copper-based paint by Andy or Ronnie Cutrone, who was a second ghost pisser, much appreciated by Andy, who said that the vitamin B that Ronnie took made a prettier color when the acid in the urine turned the copper green� Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when he first began the series, in December 1977, he did� and there were many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint.' Andy always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his studio... | ” |
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—Holy Terror - Andy Warhol Close Up, New York, Harper/Collins, 1990, p. 343 |
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One could say that these "piss paintings" could be seen as a parody of Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock (who was famous for pouring paint all over his canvases, often directly from the can). One could also find in them a reflection of some subsets of the gay underworld of New York of that era, including fascination with and sexual focus on urine and excretory matter in general. Demi-monde New York nightclubs of that period include "The Toilet," a spot featuring public urination acts (to include being doused by others, or drinking their urine) and others of a similar nature, such as "The Anvil." Andy visited these spots, although he was not recorded as a subject of undinistic practices, but rather, as so often, as an observer. In any case, he was wholly familiar with the undinistic, urolognic, and other "watersports" practices of the day. (For references, consult Colacello with regard to "The Toilet" and "The Anvil," and Wikipedia on urophilia, undinism, and other urine-centered fascinations).
Warhol took so many things as his subject (from soup cans to celebrities to electric chairs) that some might think he simply appropriated popular images, and gave them a "Warhol look". Sometimes, however, there was a personal connection between the artist and his subjects. For instance, his paintings of cans of Campbell's Soup not only function as deadpan comments on commercial industry and advertisement, they also pay homage to an intrinsic part of Warhol's life and memories. When Warhol was a child, his mother often fed him Campbell's Soup, and he loved it very much as an adult. The soup represented a feeling of being "home". Like the "piss paintings", however, the soup cans also function as a joke about Abstract Expressionism, which some people described as "soupy" paintings because of the way that artists like Pollock spilled and splashed paint on their canvases. Other works similary function as statements about art. Warhol painted dollar signs and dollar bills, for example, as allegorical comments on the relationship between art and money. Art appears here as a commodity: the paintings of dollar signs or dollar bills represent the "secret" of art - that it is all about money. These works thus do more than merely depict dollar bills. They touch on our ideas about artistic value, and the relationship between art and the market.
