Andy Warhol (3 page)

There had to have been, in 1959 or 1960, some kind of internal change in Warhol. He had come to New York City as a graduate from art school, and had made it as an immensely successful commercial artist. The song says that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, but what Warhol meant to do was to make it in New York in a different way, at a different level and at whatever cost. He wanted to make it as a very different kind of artist. It is difficult to imagine that what he wanted to become was one of the Abstract Expressionists, who dominated the New York art world in those years. As we shall see, his first moves were made under the protective coloration of an Abstract Expressionist philosophy of pigment. But what one might call the Abstract Expressionist philosophy of
art
had, and could have had,
no appeal for Warhol. The view was that the painter reaches deep into his or her unconscious mind and finds ways to translate what Robert Motherwell called “the original creative impulse” into marks, impulsively deposited through broad gestures, onto the painting or drawing's surface. When Warhol said, in his aphoristic style, “If you want to know who Andy Warhol is, just look at my face, or at the surface of my work. It's all there,” he was rejecting this romantic view of the artist's soul (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 457). The Pop artists and the Abstract Expressionists had markedly opposed conceptions of what artists did. The Pop artist had no inner secrets. If he revealed things to viewers, they were things the viewer already knew or knew about. For this reason, there was already a natural bond between artist and viewer, which entered, in Warhol's case, into the way he became an icon. He knew, and was moved by, the same things his audience knew and was moved by.

Beyond question, though Abstract Expressionism ran out of steam in roughly 1962, there was already in the late 1950s a revulsion against certain aspects of it as an orthodoxy—against, for example, what hostile critics spoke of as its “paint cookery.” There was, for example, Hard-Edged Abstraction, which looked for well-defined forms and clean, uniform colors, where the artist controlled the relationships between shapes, and did not count on the accidentalities of touch and pigment that made the Abstract Expressionist surfaces so exciting. But this was not, one might say, the way that art wanted to move forward. Hard-Edge
attacked what seemed to constitute the heart of contemporary painting, namely the
expressiveness
of paint as paint, and the impulsiveness with which the painter interacted with it, and the spirit of improvisation and, indeed, liberation, that made Abstract Expressionism really unlike any movement in the history of art. Whatever was to replace it had to retain that or something of that. It was easy to understand how artists who had become masters through Abstract Expressionism, like Mark Rothko, could have thought that it would last a thousand years—as long at least as the Renaissance paradigms had prevailed. Abstract art had become an option around 1912 at the earliest, New York School abstraction with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the later 1940s. It ran its course in less than two decades.

The successful rebellion had to take a different form from Hard-Edge Abstraction, and it had begun with artists who became
beaux ideals
for Warhol—Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and, in a somewhat different way, Cy Twombly. Johns in particular had mastered the Abstract Expressionist brush. As a painter, he was at least the equal of any of the masters of the New York School. There was something delicious in the way he laid paint down on panels. But his subject was not himself, but commonplace forms from what phenomenologists speak of as the
Lebenswelt—
the world of common experience: numerals, letters, maps, targets. In a way, Johns sought subjects that everyone recognized, but he was particularly interested in the relationship between these entities and their representations. A painted numeral
just is a numeral, a painted letter just is a letter. A painted flag is a flag. That it is beautifully painted is neither here nor there. He found a way of turning reality into art, in the sense that his subjects overcame the difference between representation and reality. Rauschenberg worked with real things from the beginning. If he painted a real thing, it was in the most direct and literal way—he slathered paint on it. His famous “combine”
Monogram
consisted mainly of a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire around its midriff. And he then slathered paint on the goat's head and parts of its body. His combine
Bed
was made of a quilt and a pillow fitted into a wooden bed frame and hung on the wall, and—of course—he slathered it in such a way that there would be little temptation to sleep in it. It was as if the presence of paint sufficed to turn reality into art. Twombly was more abstract then either of his friends. He scribbled on canvas, or on paper. His drawings and paintings were in this respect a bit gestural and in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. They were primitive in the sense that scribbling was the kind of mark that real children really make. It stands to writing the way babbling stands to speech. But it was without question real. It surged across the surface, but it was not in any way arbitrary. It was something everybody knew.

These figures, and especially Rauschenberg and Johns, were powerful influences for Warhol. There was also the fact that they were lovers, as Rauschenberg and Twombly had been. The fact that they were gay interested Warhol greatly, since this was his own sexual orientation. They were very masculine, and for this
reason Warhol was diffident about approaching them. He said that he felt that he was “too swish” to find acceptance. The code of conduct of gay males was evolving in such a way that swish was decreasingly acceptable. The thrust was to be as aggressively masculine as possible. By the mid-1960s, Warhol changed his look completely. He became skinny. He wore leather jackets and blue jeans. He was seeking entry into two worlds, the art world and the gay world, as both had begun to evolve. The art that engaged him is not easy to characterize in sexual terms, but the art that had made him respected in the commercial world of the 1950s had been markedly effete. It was almost a form of folk art, with kittens and cherubs, in which his signature form was defined by a broken line filled in with pale bonbon washes in blue and pink, yellow and green. They often carried handwritten inscriptions, in his mother's engaging calligraphy. The aesthetic was that of upscale greeting cards. It was, in effect, the aesthetic of his commercial art, especially for I. Miller shoes—high-heeled pumps with fetishistic overtones. In a way, pictures of shoes have the right kind of content for the sorts of images that engaged him as a proto–Pop artist, but they would have had to be divested of the glitter of his shoe ads, and project an uninflected image, showing a shoe as it would appear in a simple advertisement, purged of its glamour, with its price printed next to it. It would have to have the down-to-earthness of the
Before and After
ad.

The deep psychological question is what explains why Warhol should have put aside the fey aesthetics of his early illustrated
books and chosen in their place the bare declarative aesthetic of the proletarian representations he began to favor. The cheap tabloid became for him a kind of quarry, and he began to paint two kinds of images: images from the comic pages, like Dick Tracy and Superman, Popeye, Nancy, or The Little King, and images from the advertising section, crude, direct logos in black and white, unambiguous and, one would say, without art.

Today, the comic panel strikes everyone as the archetypical Pop art image. There is, however, a deep difference between the comic images of Roy Lichtenstein, like Mickey Mouse or Blondie, and Warhol's rather more complex images. Lichtenstein's images reproduce, almost mechanically, the images as they appear in comic books or newspapers. He reproduces the means of reproduction, namely the dots of the Benday screen, so you get, in effect, handpainted copies of images as they appear or would appear, on lowgrade newsprint, using dots. A lot of Lichtenstein's images come from action comics, in which pilots zap enemy planes, and the comic word “Zap!” appears in the same frame. Or the inner thoughts of pretty girls appear written in thought balloons above their heads, connected to the thinkers by bubbles. Warhol's differ in various ways, but chiefly through the way in which words are blurred out by scumbled paint, so words or, better, fragments of words are visible only in part. And the viewer is very aware of the materiality of the paint, which has been allowed to drip. Lichtenstein applies paint the way the comic artist would, within carefully drawn boundaries. Warhol applies paint the way an Abstract
Expressionist artist would, allowing it to drip. “You can't do a painting without a drip,” he told Ivan Karp, who was director of the Castelli Gallery. This is what I meant by saying that he used Abstract Expressionist gestural painting as protective coloration. The drips did not come from some inner conviction. They did not refer to that moment of trance when the Abstract Expressionist painter moved the paint around without tidying up. “The drip” in fact was felt in those years to be a discovery. It was a sign of authenticity. Not for Warhol. It was, for him, an affectation, a form of branding his work as
now.
What was special about these works was the effort to fuse mass art with high art—to paint the ultrafamiliar, like Popeye or Nancy, using paint like—or somewhat like—the Abstract Expressionists did. It was as if he were painting Abstract Expressionist cartoons. It was a stab at stylistic synthesis that did not go over with art world experts who felt strongly that Warhol was gifted.

One of these was certainly Ivan Karp. Warhol regularly visited Castelli's gallery, which was where the artists he most admired showed their work. It was the gallery that he would most wish to have been part of. What he discovered on one of his visits was that he was not alone—others were on a path very close to the one he was trying to follow. Karp showed him the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who had just joined the gallery.

Warhol was stunned that someone else was painting cartoons and advertising icons. Lichtenstein had painted an enlarged version of an icon showing, in color, a shouting girl in a bathing
suit, holding a beach ball. It was originally a boilerplate icon in advertisements for a resort, Mount Airy Lodge. Without modifying the image—he even used the Benday dots—Lichtenstein simply enlarged it to the size an Abstract Expressionist painting. To be significant in those years, a painting had to be big. Any reader of the
New York Post
would have recognized the image but would have been astonished to see it hanging in large format on someone's wall, without text. It would have been considered an aesthetic hybrid. Lichtenstein was painting to an exceedingly sophisticated audience. The fact is that, while hand-painted, the image had none of the Abstract Expressionist touches in paint handling that would have been noticed by anyone who bought the painting. Warhol told Ivan Karp that he had been doing the very same kind of painting, and invited him to visit his studio. Karp liked what Warhol was doing, but rightly objected to the messy paint.

Warhol's response to this criticism is deeply instructive in understanding how he made his moves forward. On this occasion, he enlisted the help of someone whose judgment he trusted. This was Emile de Antonio, a documentary filmmaker who, among other achievements, had made
Point of Order—a
film using footage from the McCarthy hearings in 1954. In the summer of 1960, de Antonio went to Warhol's town house to have drinks:

It was almost a
Before and After
juxtaposition. What Warhol had been doing was adding marks that he thought were expected for a painting to be “who we are.” De Antonio made him see that the direction was the reverse of what he had believed it should be. He had to remove all the mock expressionist markings. He ought, in truth, to have done in this respect what Lichtenstein intuited was right. I have written about this episode in an essay called “The Abstract Expressionist Coca Cola Bottle.” The Coke bottle was, of course, an icon in its own right. If you want to paint it as an icon, you paint it as it is. It does not need any frills.

The way forward was clear. It was a mandate and a breakthrough. The mandate was:
paint what we are.
The breakthrough was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply.
Before and After
is like an X-ray of the American soul. Warhol began to paint the advertisements in which our deficiencies and hopes are portrayed. His
images after the change were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of blue-collar newspapers, the cover pages of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies, boilerplate for throwaway advertisements. It was as though he had received some commandment to lead the lowest of the pictorial low into the precincts of high art. There were no disclosures or confessions of what remains perhaps the most mysterious transformation in the history of artistic creativity. But that is not the whole of it. Warhol went from what one of Henry James's characters describes as “a little artist man,” on the fringe of a fringe of the art world, to the defining artist of his era. That could not have happened had the world itself not undergone a parallel change, through which the transformed Warhol emerged as the artist it was waiting for.