Andy Warhol (5 page)

So it is not uncommon for commentators to explain this art simply as a predictable reaction against Abstract Expressionism. But there were many forms a reaction could take. Abstractionists could go back to nongestural abstract painting, as the so-called
Hard-Edged Abstractionists did. Or painters could go back to landscapes and still lifes. But there was something in-your-face about Pop art. Yes—everyone knew who Superman and Mickey Mouse were. But it took some special courage to accept a painting of either of them as high art. In my preface, I describe the shock with which I first saw, in 1962, a black-and-white reproduction of Roy Lichtenstein's painting
The Kiss
in
ARTnews
, the leading and most authoritative art publication of the time. It looked like a panel from
Terry and the Pirates
or
Steve Canyon
, but it was instead used to illustrate a review of Lichtenstein's first one-person show at Castelli's. I found it deeply disturbing, though I ultimately came to feel that, if that was art, anything could be art—
anything!
Years later, I heard Lichtenstein say that his aim was to overcome the distinction between high and low art by getting a painting of a comic strip panel into an art gallery. There was something revolutionary, something of what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values,” in Lichtenstein's attitude. It condemned to irrelevance everything that belonged to art appreciation. Artists who made this turn were not simply reacting to Abstract Expressionism, they were revolutionizing the concept of art. They were pressing against a boundary. Imagine someone hanging a painting of a tin of shoeshine polish in his or her home, rendered literally, so one could not admire the brio of the brushwork—a painting that could have appeared in a magazine as an advertisement for shoe polish. What could that mean? It would mean at least that the owner of the painting had himself
crossed a boundary, and was making a statement about art, and about himself.

Revolutionary periods begin with testing artistic boundaries, and this testing then gets extended to social boundaries more central to life, until, by the end of that period, the whole of society has been transformed: think of Romanticism and the French Revolution, or of the Russian avant-garde in the years 1905 to 1915 and of Aleksandr Rodchenko's slogan “Art into life!” Strictly speaking, I think that the era of Modernism began to break up with the advent of Dada in 1915 as a revulsive reaction to World War I. It took place initially in Switzerland, which had remained neutral. The reigning idea was that artists were no longer prepared to make art for the pleasure of the ruling classes in Europe, whom they held responsible for the deaths, in the name of patriotism, of millions of young men and the devastation of civilian populations. The Dada artists felt powerless to do anything other than begin to make art that was disrespectful of the classes that had patronized the arts, and to mock the very idea of the Great Artist, whose work brought glory and edification to those in power. The emblematic Dada work was Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.—a mild French obscenity when the letters are pronounced—printed across the bottom of a postcard of the
Mona Lisa
, on which the artist drew a moustache. Duchamp was the central figure of provocative disrespect that bridged the Dada revolt and detonated the attack against boundaries that defined Modernism. The culminating Modernist aesthetic was political.
It consisted of the great monolithic states, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in particular, the regimentation of life, and the glorification of war. Abstract Expressionist paintings were very far from the political vision of these states and their concept of power. They are, indeed, celebratory of personal privacy. But in their scale and power they are also celebratory of the spirit of heroism, which Dada began its adventure by mocking. Abstract Expressionism was the last great artistic expression of the Modernist spirit.

There were certain centers in America in which artistic innovation of a certain kind was encouraged in the 1950s: Black Mountain College, where Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were students and John Cage was a teacher; the seminar in Zen Buddhism taught by D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University, attended especially by avant-garde composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman, and by artists like Philip Guston and Agnes Martin; and then Cage's own course in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research, out of which Fluxus, a radical art and music movement, was formed, committing itself to “overcoming the gap between art and life.” The Fluxus slogan echoed Rodchenko's “Art into life” agenda, and found expression in Robert Rauschenberg's statement in the catalog for the 1959 Museum of Modern Art exhibition
Sixteen Americans
, in which he wrote: “Painting relates both to art and life. I try to act in the gap between the two. There is no poor subject. A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting than wood, nails, turpentine,
oil, and fabric.” Rauschenberg should have used the word “art” rather than “painting.” He was giving himself license to use anything he wanted to use for making a work of art. By the early 1960s this inclusionary impulse extended itself to dance. A dance movement could consist of sitting in a chair, eating a sandwich, or ironing a skirt. The question “What is dance?” joined the questions “What is music?” and “What is painting?” Where and how was the line between art and life to be drawn? As the 1960s progressed, the testing of cultural boundaries became the defining project of the decade.

Pop art was part of the cracking of the spirit of Modernism, and the beginning of the Postmodern era in which we live. In December of 1961, Claes Oldenburg turned a downtown store on the East Side of Manhattan into a place in which he would sell his sculptures, which were made of plaster, chicken wire, and cloth, painted over with household enamel to form crude representations of everyday things—dresses, tights, panties, cake, soda cans, pie, hamburgers, automobile tires. It was more like a general store than an art gallery, and Oldenburg indeed called it “The Store,” as if the sales place and the items for sale constituted an artwork. Oldenburg was the storekeeper who wrote out sales slips. The merchandise was displayed in the store window. People bought art from it the way they bought groceries from grocery stores, or dry goods from dry goods stores. It was obviously very different from the smart display windows of Bonwit Teller, in which Warhol had displayed his art in April. In a sense,
Oldenburg's was an act of institutional critique. It was a critique of the air of preciosity art galleries and museums created to reflect on the preciousness of the art they showed. It too was a way of overcoming the gap between art and life. But it was also a way of becoming known very quickly, if your work attracted media attention.

Since at least the Armory show of 1913 (in which Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
was the paradigm of avant-garde art) the doings of avant-garde artists made good copy. What caused Warhol to begin to paint the advertisements and cartoons he installed for a brief time in the Bonwit Teller window is one of the deep mysteries of his biography. But there is no such mystery regarding his decision to paint cans of Campbell's soup. He wanted to become very famous very quickly, and nothing could achieve that for him that did not attract media attention. He was a Pop artist before the meaning of the term was stabilized, but Pop in 1962 was what caused people to talk.

There are various stories about where Warhol got the idea for the
Campbell's Soup Cans
, but it is worth examining at least one of them—an encounter with an interior designer, Muriel Latow, whom he begged for an idea. There are enough such stories to suggest that this was a regular pattern with Warhol. He got his ideas from others much of the time. In a 1970 conversation with Gerard Malanga, his assistant and sidekick, Warhol said, “I always get my ideas from people. Sometimes I don't change the idea. Or sometimes I don't use an idea right away, but may remember
it and use for something later on. I love ideas.” Warhol told Latow he needed something “that would have a lot of impact, that would be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing.” Latow told him that he should paint something that “everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes . . . like a can of soup.” The form of Warhol's question ruled out a lot of possibilities. He was not interested in being told to do a nice, cheery abstraction, or Manhattan by moonlight, or a pretty girl reading a letter by the window. It had to be something from the common culture that hadn't already been done by someone else. It had to be something people would talk about without having seen it. How many people have actually seen the diamond encrusted skull that Damien Hirst is alleged to have sold for a hundred million dollars? But that doesn't keep them from wondering how much it is really worth, who would buy it, what it meant, why anyone would do it.

It is one thing to be told to paint soup cans, another to determine how the painting or paintings should look. Warhol's response was far more than simply a painting of a soup can. It was an eight-by-four grid, consisting of each of the thirty-two varieties of Campbell's soups produced at the time—like an installation of portraits of notable personages. Warhol put into effect what he had learned from Emile de Antonio: the paintings had nothing painterly about them, but looked as if they were mechanically reproduced, as indeed they were, since Warhol used a
silk-screen process to achieve a look of perfect uniformity. In any case, the array is severely frontal, like Byzantine portraits, and the four rows of eight paintings each were like an up-to-date iconostasis—a wall of icons such as the one in the Orthodox church in which Andy's mother, Julia Warhola, worshipped in Pittsburgh when he was growing up. Or a regularly stacked set of supermarket shelves, which embodied an aesthetic that greatly engaged Warhol. None of the other Pop artists used this sort of format, in which essentially the same image was repeated and repeated. Even when he came to do portraits, later in his career, Warhol favored using a block of the same picture of the same person in different colors. The
Campbell's Soup Cans
were portraits, in that each contained a different variety of soup, the name of which was printed on its label. Repetition came to be one of the master elements in what could be called the Warhol Aesthetic.

There is a question of genre that applies to almost everything Warhol did at the time—whether there were thirty-two paintings, or one installation consisting of thirty-two parts. My sense is that he had in mind the entire array as a single work. They were projected and then touched in by hand. He could have turned out as many of each variety as he wished. But he did only one of each, suggesting that he was bent on making a wall of soup cans, consisting of thirty-two unique units. When the work was exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962, however, they were displayed in a single line, placed on a narrow shelf around the gallery. And they were evidently sold one at a time, for $100
each. But the dealer, Irving Blum, increasingly felt that the paintings belonged together, “as a set,” as he put it. Warhol was pleased by Blum's decision, since they were “conceived as a series.” Blum was able to buy back the ones he had sold, and Warhol set a price of $1,000 for what was now recognized as a single work. Blum sent him $100 a month until it was paid up. And they began to be exhibited as a single unit, a matrix.

The
Campbell's Soup Cans
were already famous before anyone other than those who dropped by Warhol's studio had really seen them. They were described in
Time
magazine in May 1962. This was publicity of a kind that registered these works as a cultural rather than merely an art world event—that whatever the art world might have thought, Warhol was on his way to being an American icon. It hardly mattered whether the publicity was good or bad: the art world thrived on controversy. Warhol came to the attention of Eleanor Ward, who owned the stable Gallery, which in fact was originally housed in a former stable on West Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh Avenue. She asked Warhol's mentor, Emile de Antonio, to take her to Warhol's studio. She made him a deal; if Andy would paint a portrait of her lucky two-dollar bill, she would give him a show in November of that year. (In addition to soup cans, Muriel Latow had suggested that Warhol paint pictures of money.) Ward had an eye for serious art. Rauschenberg and Twombly were two of her artists. She had shown Robert Motherwell, and had just taken on Marisol and Robert Indiana. But more than any of them, Warhol's
Soup Cans
raised the question of what was art in a way that could not be resisted.

Everyone's conception of art was of something spiritually rich that belonged in gold frames and that hung on museum walls, or in the mansions of the wealthy. In his biography of Warhol, Victor Bockris interviewed one of Warhol's earlier friends, Charles Lisanby, who flatly turned down the offer of one of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe. “Just tell me in your heart of hearts you know it isn't art,” he said to Warhol. “He would never have admitted it, but I knew he knew that it wasn't” (p. 157). It is hard to know what Warhol thought of such questions, but I feel that he knew that he had taken art to a new place. As a teenager, I haunted the galleries of the Detroit Institute of Art, in which there were shiny oil paintings of saints, of princes on horseback, of ladies in long satin skirts reading love letters. To imagine that a flat and faithful image of a can of Campbell's soup would have been a work of art, fit to hang in their company, would have been unthinkable. Other than the fact that it was a painted picture, it would seem to have nothing in common with what anyone thought art was. It was part of life, but hardly a piece of what anyone would have recognized as art. At the very least a philosophical definition of art would have to apply to it as well as to El Greco's saints, or Terborch's Dutch beauties, or Velázquez's royal personages. If a definition was to do that, it would have to be emptied of everything that applied to these masterpieces but did not apply to the painting of the soup can. All at once, the
Campbell's soup can invalidated as insufficiently general the entire canon of philosophical aesthetics, and at the same moment defined its time. It was, as de Antonio said, who we are.