In an auction last November 13 at
Sotheby’s here in New York, a grisly Andy Warhol painting, “Silver Car Crash
(Double Disaster),” showing a body amid the wreckage of a car crash, was sold
for $104.5 million, the highest price paid to date for one of the artist’s
works. The sale provoked much comment,
some of it harshly negative, and rekindled the perennial debate as to the
importance of Warhol as an artist, some seeing him as a genius and some as a
fraud.
Recently I queried several friends, all
knowledgeable New Yorkers, and got a consistently mixed reaction. “So-so,” said one, adding that he could do without
the repetitions, meaning the reduplications of celebrity portraits and other
subjects. My friend John felt that
certain works, but not all, merited serious attention, citing in particular a
silkscreen painting – just one, not fifty – of Marilyn Monroe, that the artist
painted in 1962, soon after her suicide, and then reproduced many times; John
found her expression and the vivid background coloring captivating.
A third friend, an artist who does
landscapes and city views, saw early Warhol as defining a moment in art history
but viewed the later work, always witty and entertaining, as lacking the depth
of the earlier work. When I questioned
him about the “moment in art history,” he said that early Warhol in a small way
recognized and visualized a decade in which American decadence had a defining
influence on the course of civilization; by “decadence” he meant a
materialistic view of the world, with instant gratification and idol worship
(Marilyn, Elvis, Liz Taylor) thrown in. My
partner Bob, who loves abstract expressionism, is frankly scornful of Warhol, whose
work he deems simplistic, commercial, and lacking in depth; “I’ve never seen a
work of his that I liked,” he explains.
As for me, less knowledgeable about modern American art than any of
them, I am inclined to share Bob’s reaction, opining that Warhol was indeed a
genius … of self-promotion. But maybe
I’ll be moved to – just a little – change my mind.
 |
| Andy with a friend. Jack Mitchell |
No one would deny that Warhol, the Prince
of Pop, probably alone of twentieth-century American artists, made his name a
household word for his generation and beyond; people who know little or nothing
about art have heard of him and sometimes have opinions. He surfaced in New York in the 1950s as a
successful and very well paid commercial artist and an innovator in silkscreen
painting. In the 1960s his Pop art was
widely displayed in exhibitions featuring such attention-getting creations as Campbell’s Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and
100 Dollar Bills, plus renderings of
vacuum cleaners and hamburgers, and garish portraits of celebrities like
Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and Mohammad Ali. He himself became a celebrity, his youthful
features, with long blond hair and glasses, becoming known to the public
through photos and self-portraits.  |
| Poster for Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a 1966 multimedia spectacle by Warhol that featured The Velvet Undergound. |
Warhol’s studio at 231 East 47th
Street, dubbed the Factory (it was in fact an abandoned hat factory), proved a
magnet for avant-garde artists, writers, musicians, and assorted drug addicts, weirdos,
and crazies, all of them Warhol devotees over whom, even with his gentle demeanor, he is said to have reigned
tyrannically. Out of the Factory came quantities
of Pop art, avant-garde films, multimedia happenings, and the music of The
Velvet Underground, a rock band managed by him, which enjoyed phenomenal
success. At Factory parties celebrities
and socialites rubbed shins with drag queens and hustlers in a unique setting
where everything, from the floor to toilet handles, was painted silver, and
there were drugs galore.
Then, in June of the pivotal year 1968, just
after Warhol moved to a new studio on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, the
radical feminist Valerie Solanas, author of a tract advocating the elimination
of men, shot him, inflicting a wound that was almost fatal. I remember how this was big news, until
Robert Kennedy’s assassination three days later relegated the Warhol story to
the back pages. Solanas later pleaded
guilty to reckless assault, was sentenced to three years in prison and released
in 1971, phoned Warhol and threatened him again, then was rearrested and
subsequently institutionalized several times before fading into obscurity. That Solanas, hating men, should pick Warhol
as her victim is curious, since he never claimed to be, or wanted to be, a
sterling specimen of manhood. My take
on the two of them is simple: she’s a bore; he’s interesting. In her photos she looks like she's been force-fed on hate. But she has been hailed – by a few – as a
“girl Nietzsche,” Medusa, an anti-patriarchal avant-garde militant, and a
feminist/lesbian revolutionary ahead of her time. For that fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol
says we all get, it seems that all you have to do is shoot someone.
Following the shooting Warhol was out of
commission for weeks. He was released
from the hospital in July, and on his first sortie out of his house he went to
42nd Street to see a porno movie and bought, according to a friend
who went with him, the dirtiest magazines he could find. But the Factory, now much more tightly
controlled, was never the same again. It
is said that Warhol was so afraid of further attacks by Solanas that he would
jump if even a good friend touched him. He
was less scandal-prone and likewise less successful in the 1970s, when critics
began criticizing his celebrity portraits as superficial and overtly commercial,
but reaped more critical and financial success in the 1980s. By then his long graying hair, over a gaunt
face, looked at times like a fright wig; aging was not kind. In 1987 he died following gallbladder surgery
at 58.
I probably first heard of Andy Warhol when
his Campbell’s soup cans caused a splash in 1962, but I never met him. We were exact contemporaries but moved in
different worlds; toiling then in the glades of Academe, I would have found his
entourage too bizarre, and the drug scene of the Factory repellent. Besides, the idea of 32 Campbell’s soup cans
as art, especially when exhibited in a single line like products on a shelf,
turned me off, old fogey that I am, so that right from the start I was
suspicious of his antics and his art. The
same goes for 100 Coke bottles, or 100 dollar bills, or however many images of
captivating Marilyn Monroe he produced.
But my friend John has a different take on
both the artist and his art. John knew
him in his early years in the 1950s and has shared his impressions with
me. An editor at Interiors magazine (see post #47), he got to know Andy Warhol when
Warhol did cover art for the publication.
John remembers commissioning him for cover art and some drawings to be
used inside the magazine for the princely sum of $25.00. John’s personal impression: the artist was a
gentle soul, otherworldly and precious; he describes him as “featherly.” Easygoing and friendly, Warhol was accessible; one could readily address him as “Andy.” Though he was
beginning to show his serious art, he was not impressed with himself, not at
all the ego-driven artist; above all, he was accommodating. For a feature article by John on music,
Warhol did a semiabstract cover showing a speaker with sound waves. When the publisher saw it, he asked John to
have Warhol add a small picture of an interior.
John was fearful that the artist would resent this interference with his
creation, but Andy replied, in his soft fey voice, “Oh that’s okay, John. That’s okay.”
Yes, accommodating in the extreme.
His sexuality was enigmatic. Certainly he was gay and on the femme side;
blond and “featherly,” he may have had a rough time in high school, though to
my knowledge this has not been commented on.
When he first hit the New York art scene, he says that the other gay
artists kept him at a distance, deeming him too “swish.” Homoeroticism permeates much of his work, yet
when interviewed in 1980 he claimed he was still a virgin, which confirms the
impression that I always had of him. His
doctor has stated that on his scrotum Warhol had prominent blood vessels like a
cluster of little rubies, a condition that made him self-conscious and ashamed. That may well explain why he seems to have
preferred voyeurism to full participation.
His interest in porn, and the male nudity exhibited in some of his
films, would seem to confirm this. “Fantasy
love,” he once said, “is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.” Furthermore, John has told me how a friend of
his attended a gay party where Andy Warhol was present. During some sort of sadomasochistic
exhibition Warhol, standing next to him, kept uttering an emphatic “Wow!”
Whitman’s sexuality, like Warhol’s, was
enigmatic; some gay lib advocates of today have assumed that every young man he
befriended was a lover, but there is no hard evidence of this. Certainly his Calamus poems are suffused with
eroticism. But a biographer once said of
him, “Perhaps for his work to be complete, his life had to be incomplete.” The same could well have been true of Warhol.
Well reported on as Andy Warhol is, there
are facts about him that many people probably don’t know. Here are some, culled from the Internet:
· He was born Andrej Varhola, Jr., in Pittsburgh in
1928, the son of working-class immigrants from Slovakia. His father worked in a coal mine or did
construction work, depending on the source.
· In third grade he had St. Vitus’ Dance (Sydenham’s
chorea), a nervous system disease causing involuntary movements of the limbs,
and became a hypochondriac, fearing doctors and hospitals. As a result, he probably delayed having his
gallbladder problems treated, leading to his death in 1987.
· A self-proclaimed mama’s boy, he lived with his mother
in New York from 1952 to 1971; she died in 1972.
· He praised Coca-Cola as a distinctly American and democratic
phenomenon: all Cokes are the same, and everyone drinks them -- the President,
Liz Taylor, and the bum on the street.
· He is said to have phoned his press agent every
morning.
· He said that, contrary to popular opinion, movies make
things look real, whereas real life is like watching television. When he was shot, he knew that he was
watching television; it was unreal.
· He once said: “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re so beautiful. Everything’s plastic, but I love
plastic. I want to be plastic.”
· Another quote: “I am a deeply superficial person.”
· Boys who came to lunch and drank too much wine were
amused or even flattered, when he asked them to help him “paint” by emptying
their bladder on canvases primed with copper-based paint.
· He was a practicing Ruthenian Catholic and regularly
attended Mass at the Roman Catholic church of St. Vincent Ferrer, at Lexington
and East 66th Street in Manhattan.
· The IRS audited him every year from 1972 until his
death in 1987.
· One critic called him "the Nothingness Himself." Warhol’s comment: “I’m still obsessed with
the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing.”
· He and his friends are said to have bought 2,000
bottles of Dom Pérignon to be consumed at the millennium. After his death, and long before the
millennium, the bottles disappeared.
· When he was buried in a suburb of Pittsburg in 1987, a
copy of Interview, a gossip magazine
founded by him, was dropped into the grave, along with an Interview T-shirt and a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume.
· When Sotheby’s auctioned his estate, it took nine days
and grossed more than twenty million dollars.
· The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, with seven
floors and 17 galleries harboring his art, films, and archives, is the biggest
museum in the country devoted to a single artist.
There remains my original question: Andy
Warhol, genius or fraud? So where do I
come out? Certainly, as I said earlier,
he was a genius at self-promotion. I
find him, perhaps not a great artist, but a fascinating phenomenon. Indeed, I’m much less drawn to Andy Warhol the
artist than to Andy Warhol the person, whose contradictions intrigue me: a
virginal voyeur who needed people around him yet seems never to have revealed
himself fully to others. And the very
things so many of us deplore in American culture – crass commercialism, the
cult of celebrities, the commodification of art, Hollywood, money, Coca-Cola,
plastic – he embraced and glorified. But
to label him either genius or fraud is too simplistic; he may have had a bit of
both in him but can’t be described so easily.
Somehow he evolved from the gentle, accommodating person my friend John
knew in the 1950s into the reigning monarch of the Factory in the 1960s, ruling
his court like an autocrat and reveling in the fawning admiration of his
courtiers. Obviously, they needed him,
but he needed them as well. And from the
beginning to the end of his career, I think he can be fairly described in his
own words: “I am a deeply superficial person.”
Curiously, the Sizzling Sixties, that era
of liberation – gay lib, women’s lib, and campus rebellions nationwide – was
also characterized by autocrats: Rudolph Bing at the Met (post #84), Lee Strasberg
at the Actors Studio (post #41), Robert Moses at the Triborough Bridge and
Tunnel Authority (post #78, though by then he was on his way out), and Andy
Warhol at the Factory. But all these
figures, autocrats or not, were immensely creative and produced results.
When all is said and done, I still am
amazed that some anonymous buyer forked over $104.5 million for a Warhol
painting. After all, he was buying the
work not of an Old Master but a Young Phenomenon. But who knows how Andy Warhol’s reputation as
an artist will fare in the future? These
things are unpredictable. As an example
I cite the French painter Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898). What, you never heard of him? Or his name only rings a faint tinkle in the
cave of memory? Well, his murals and oil
paintings were hot stuff back in the Third Republic, when the Impressionists
were first getting known. And today, he
rates close to zero or, as my friend John has remarked, as “nineteenth-century
kitsch.” So it goes in the art world,
as one taste yields to another, and that one to still another. Will this be Andy Warhol’s fate? I wouldn’t presume to say. But there will be more reminiscences and
biographies of him – scores, hundreds – for he is an enigmatic and fascinating
subject.
 |
| Puvis de Chavannes, L'Espérance (Hope). |
If Andy Warhol still exists in some higher
mode of being and is aware that a work of his sold for $104.5 million, I’m sure
he’s smiling. Unless, of course, he’s
too busy silkscreening God.
 |
| Allie Caulfield |
A sobering thought: Bourgeois that I am, I can’t help but ask
who, at the Factory in its heyday, did the floors and the bathroom. A maid?
Volunteers? His mother? Andy himself?? And who cleaned up after those legendary
parties? Maybe his archives have the answer.
A note on Judith Malina: In post #94 I discussed the Living Theater,
its propensity for nudity, and why I kept my clothes on. From a recent article in the New York Times I have now learned that
its cofounder and artistic director, Judith Malina, afflicted with emphysema
and confined to a wheelchair, is still going strong at age 87. A year ago she lost the Lower East Side home
of the Living, and the commercial space above it where she had lived for six
years, because she couldn’t pay the rent.
She has had vast experience in losing leases, but this was
different. “I was crying, screaming,”
she says. “They had to carry me to the
car.” She now lives in an
assisted-living residence for theater people in Englewood, New Jersey, where
she is writing and making plans to direct new works. She likes her neighbors and the serenity of
the grounds there, but yearns for the creativity of the Lower East Side, her
home of many years. “If there’s going to
be a beautiful, nonviolent revolution,” she insists, “it’s going to start
there.” Living Theater actors visit her
almost daily, and she gets into Manhattan once a week. “I feel very exiled, abandoned,” she admits,
but she continues to write in her diary, some of which has been published, and
next spring hopes to direct a new play of hers in Manhattan. Though she seems to keep her clothes on now,
this woman is unchanged, unreconstructed.
Bravo, Judith! Keep at it as long
as you can.
Congressional millionaires: According to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, at least 268 of the 534 members of Congress had a net worth of over $1 million in 2012. At the top of the list is Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, with $330 million or more. At the bottom, poor David Valadao, another Republican of California, with debts of about $12.1 million from loans on a family dairy farm. I confess that I'm surprised, since I thought that all our Congress folk, without exception, were millionaires. How else to explain their letting unemployment benefits expire for over a million Americans? Well, if they aren't all millionaires yet, they will be, if they play their cards right.
Coming soon: Four Forgotten New York Murders (the Girl in
Green, a society dentist, Old Shakespeare, and Ah Hoon); Maritime New York: the
Slave Trade and the China Trade (horrors, then hong merchants, white devils,
and the Son of Heaven).
©
2014 Clifford Browder
