Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Arthur C. Danto

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady tew Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2009 by Arthur Danto.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.

Set in Janson type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danto, Arthur Coleman, 1924–
Andy Warhol / Arthur C. Danto.
p. cm. — (Icons of America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-300-13555-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art and
society—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
N
6537.
W
28
D
36 2009
700.92—dc22    2009021638

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO
Z
39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Icons of America

Mark Crispin Miller, Series Editor

Icons of America
is a series of short works written by leading scholars,
critics, and writers, each of whom tells a new and innovative story about
American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual,
event, object, or cultural phenomenon.

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History,
by Susan Jacoby
Andy Warhol,
by Arthur C. Danto
Frankly, My Dear:
Gone with the Wind
Revisited,
by Molly Haskell
Fred Astaire,
by Joseph Epstein
Gypsy: The Art of the Tease,
by Rachel Shteir
The Hamburger: A History,
by Josh Ozersky
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson,
by Gore Vidal
King's Dream,
by Eric J. Sundquist
Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and
American Dreams,
by Mark Kingwell
Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory,
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Wall Street: America's Dream Palace,
by Steve Fraser

Forthcoming titles include:

Toni Bentley on George Balanchine

Stephen Cox on “The Big House”

Tom DeHaven on Superman

To Barack and Michelle Obama,
and the future of American art

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on Notes

ONE

The Window at Bonwit's

TWO

Pop, Politics, and the Gap Between Art and Life

THREE

The Brillo Box

FOUR

Moving Images

FIVE

The First Death

SIX

Andy Warhol Enterprises

SEVEN

Religion and Common Experience

Bibliography

Index

There is no way in which I could write a new biography of Andy Warhol. My competence lies elsewhere. Fortunately, there are several quite good “lives” of Warhol that I could draw on, since my book is, roughly, chronological, and such writers as Victor Bockris, David Bourdon, and, more recently, Steven Watson have, collectively, constructed a fair narrative of Andy's life—of how he lived and how he died—and they had the benefit of knowing him and many of those around him. I have nothing to contribute to that. As a writer, I have published in philosophy primarily, including the philosophy of art; and secondarily as an art critic, chiefly in
The Nation
, a magazine of opinion which, beginning with Volume One, Number 1, on July 4, 1865, has always had an art critic. There is a connection between the two endeavors,
and between them and this book. My philosophy of art was developed in two pieces of writing—an article titled “The Art World,” published in the
Journal of Philosophy
in 1964, and, in 1981, a book,
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Both of these were responses to developments in contemporary art that took place mainly in New York, in the 1960s, among them two exhibitions by Andy Warhol, held at the Stable Gallery, in 1962 and in 1964. The work in both these shows, but especially in the second show, necessitated, so it seemed to me, an entirely new approach to the philosophy of art, and I think that most aestheticians and philosophers of art would agree that the writings just mentioned must be given substantial credit for redirecting the philosophy of art to take account of the immense artistic revolution that took place in the early to mid-1960s, in which, as an artist, Andy Warhol played a prominent role. But the art through which Warhol achieved historical importance was internally connected with his candidacy as an American icon. He was able to achieve iconic status because of the content of his art, which drew directly from, and which indeed celebrated, the form of life lived by Americans, including what Americans ate, and who Americans considered icons in their own right, mainly figures from mass culture, like movies and popular music.

In a way, Warhol transcended his chosen subjects in the eyes of the world. His art was typically interpreted by European intellectuals as critical both of American mass culture and of the products of American capitalism, like Campbell's soup. Seen as a critic of
American culture, Warhol—and the Pop artists generally—were given considerable credit by Europeans, and were taken seriously by them as artists in a way that they were not, at first at least, by the American art world, which had finally begun to accept the fact that America had, for the first time in history, produced world class art through the paintings of the so-called New York school—the great Abstract Expressionist canvases produced during and after World War II. In American art circles, it came as a shock that the Pop artists should repudiate this immense aesthetic achievement, and paint what looked like simpleminded pictures of soup cans or Donald Duck. It was widely felt that important painting had to be difficult—but anyone in the culture could get what Pop art showed immediately. Whether the Europeans were right or not, that Pop art was critical of American culture, they at least felt that there was more to the new art than met the eye. Andy, at least, seemed eager to present himself to the European art world as anything but frivolous. He and his dealer, Ileana Sonnabend, were at odds over how his first show at her gallery in Paris should be presented. He wanted to call it “Death in America,” and to consist of paintings of car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs, and be based on silk-screen images of tabloid newspaper photographs, but often in candy colors. In the end Sonnabend accepted the content, but not the title. It was simply called “Warhol.” It was certainly a serious show, which the Europeans respected. He could not have had that show in America at that point—January 1964.

The European art world in the twentieth century was necessarily more complicated than the American art world, because more was at stake. Art in Europe was heavily politicized. Abstract art, for example, under both Hitler and Stalin, was politically unacceptable. It remained unacceptable in Soviet Russia throughout the Cold War. German artists, on the other hand, came to feel, after World War II, that abstraction expressed the political values of democracy. And since under Hitler, a certain kind of kitschy realism was felt to express the values of National Socialism, figural art became politically suspect after the war. So by the 1960s, when Pop art seemed to question the values of Abstract Expressionism, it seemed a particularly liberating moment. Pop seemed politically important in Germany because it seemed to repudiate abstraction. This increased Warhol's stature on the Continent. He was seen not only as a critic of capitalist production, but as a critic of American high culture as well. When the first serious monograph on Warhol, by Rainer Crone, was published in Germany, it became a best seller. It took a long time for Warhol to become intellectually respectable in America. Instead, he became an icon. He became part of the culture he celebrated—a star who loved hotdogs and Coca-Cola, and worshipped Marilyn and Elvis.

My own interest in Pop art, and especially in Warhol, lay elsewhere. I had moved to New York after the war because of the immense excitement I found in the art of the New York School, in which I had hopes of making a career as an artist. I was a veteran,
with educational benefits that I decided to use to study philosophy. Though I had some success as an artist, philosophy proved to be more interesting to me, and when the 1960s began, I was a tenured professor at Columbia University, on sabbatical in Europe, where I was writing my first book. It was at the American Library in Paris that I saw my first piece of Pop art as a black-and-white reproduction in
ARTnews.
It was called
The Kiss
, by Roy Lichtenstein, and it looked like it had been cut out of the comics section of an American newspaper. Suffice it to say that I was stunned. I was certain that it was not art, but as my year in France unfurled, I came increasingly to the view that if it
was
art, anything could be art. I made up my mind to see as much Pop art as I could when I returned to America.

I am no more interested in writing an autobiography than I am in writing a new biography of Warhol, but I feel it important to explain his importance for me, as well as to prepare the reader for the emphasis of this book. It is really no more a piece of art history than it is a biography, but rather a study of what makes Warhol so fascinating an artist from a philosophical perspective. Visiting his second show at the Stable Gallery in April 1964 was a transformative experience for me. It turned me into a philosopher of art. Until that point, great as my interest in art and especially in contemporary art had been, I had no special interest in the philosophy of art itself. I simply saw no interesting way to bring philosophy and art together. The show consisted of hundreds of what looked like commonplace grocery boxes, piled
up as they would be in a supermarket stockroom. Among these were
Brillo Boxes
, which looked like the real thing. The Brillo box might be considered an American icon, I suppose, but only because Andy Warhol made it one. It is his most famous work and I consider it his masterpiece, for reasons I shall give in the course of this book. It is, as a piece of commercial design, a knockout. Ironically its designer was a commercial artist with high ambitions as a fine artist—in fact he was an Abstract Expressionist, named James Harvey, from Detroit. But for me the question was not what made it so good but what made it art. The
Brillo Box
helped me solve a problem as old as philosophy itself, namely how to define art. More even than that, it helped explain why that is a philosophical problem in the first place. Needless to say, an adequate definition of art had to cover art in a universal way. It has to explain why the
Mona Lisa
is art, why
Rigoletto
is art, why
Washington Crossing the Delaware
is art. It has to explain why anything is art. A lot of people in those years were quite prepared to say that the
Brillo Box
was not art. I felt that they were wrong, of course, and I really loved
Brillo Box.
But the nice thing about it for philosophy was that it is so simple a work—a mere oblong box with printing on its top and sides. Nothing complex about it, really, in comparison with your typical piece of Abstract Expressionist painting.

What makes Andy an icon, of course, is not that he is so instructive philosophically, though that is an important aspect of his virtue as an artist. What makes him an American icon is that
his subject matter is always something that the ordinary American understands: everything, or nearly everything he made art out of came straight out of the daily lives of very ordinary Americans. Anyone who lives the American form of life can tell you what a grocery box looks like, and where to find one, and what you want one for. Or can tell you where to find a can of Campbell's soup, how to prepare it, and in general how much it costs.