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On today’s contemporary scene it is probably easier to name the artists Warhol hasn’t influenced than those he has. In his own lifetime he was an inspiration and role model for a generation of artists that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel. Today the work of Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney in America, Damian Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin in England would be unthinkable if Warhol hadn’t existed.

In fact Warhol’s influence is so widespread, so all pervasive, that it has almost become invisible. It is part of the culture, part of what we take for granted. His art has changed the way we think and feel about banal objects, about the media, about fame and about art itself. If you would see his monument, look around you, or failing that just turn on the TV.

Summary

Although originally hailed as a Pop Artist, we now see Andy Warhol’s significance in other artistic traditions, especially portraiture.

His is a genuine subversive and the least ‘theoretical’ of artists.

2 A Brief Life of Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol sometimes used to say that he came from ‘nowhere’. In fact he was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928, but his parents came from the village of Mikova in an area called Carpathian Ruthenia, a place where Russia, Poland, Hungary and what is now Slovakia come together, a place found on only the most scrupulously detailed maps.

Warhol was the youngest of three sons (a daughter died at the age of six weeks). His parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, had emigrated to the United States in 1922, and were devout Byzantine Catholics. Ondrej was a manual labourer, and like many other Americans he lost his job in the Depression.

Andy Warhola, as he was then known (he did not change his name to Warhol until 1949), was a frail, mother’s boy. He suffered from rheumatic fever and was frequently kept home from school. While he convalesced he read movie magazines, comic books, and made drawings and collages. When he was well he was a great movie-goer, and he wrote to movie stars asking for their photographs and autographs. He was a particular fan of Shirley Temple, and the Warhol archive includes a signed photograph she sent him in response to one of his letters.

All this time he drew constantly, perhaps obsessively, and while still a schoolboy he attended art classes at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum. On leaving school in 1945 he was accepted by the art department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Once there, however, he had trouble with his studies, especially the parts that involved writing, and he was dropped at the end of his freshman year. After a spell selling fruit door to door with his brother he was reinstated and this time he did much better.

He won an art prize, he joined the student film club and attended lectures by the likes of the avant-garde composer John Cage and the experimental film-maker Maya Deren. In 1948, while still a student, he took a job at a Pittsburgh department store, painting backdrops for window displays. The store’s display department was populated by flamboyant homosexuals, Warhol’s first encounter with that world.

Warhol goes to New York

Although Andy Warhol was to become the quintessential New York artist, he did not make his first visit to that city until 1948. He took his portfolio with him, went knocking on doors, and eventually found a sympathetic audience in Tina Fredericks at Glamour magazine, who gave him some freelance work.

After graduation in 1949 he moved to New York permanently, living initially in a slum apartment on the Lower East Side. He went back to Tina Fredericks who this time commissioned him to draw shoes for her magazine. Shoes were a perfect subject for Warhol. These drawings got him widely noticed and as a result he began to do a lot of work for other magazines and ad agencies.

He was very successful indeed as a commercial artist. His work included book jackets and newspaper advertisements, including one drawing of a sailor injecting himself with heroin, which first appeared as an ad for a radio programme called The Nation’s Nightmare and then went on to be used as an album cover. It eventually won him a gold medal from the Art Director’s Club.

Warhol worked hard and was soon earning enough money to justify hiring an assistant, a practice that would be important throughout his working life. Soon his mother sold her house in Pittsburgh and moved to New York to live with her son, initially sharing a bedroom with him in his apartment. They would live together, not always harmoniously, until her death in 1972.

Socially Warhol now moved in New York’s gay elite, a very discrete, not to say clandestine, scene. He went to expensive restaurants in the hope of spotting celebrities, with some success. It was also at this time that he started to go bald and began wearing a wig.

In his later career, Warhol consciously made little distinction between art and commerce, but when he was given his first one-man gallery shows in the early 1950s he left out his commercial work and exhibited drawings based on the work of Truman Capote, then a series of paper sculptures decorated with drawn figures, then drawings of a dancer called John Butler.

In 1955 he had an exhibition of overtly homosexual drawings at the Bodley Gallery, and although reviews and sales were poor, some of the less explicit drawings were selected for a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art the following year.

Warhol’s work in this period was delicate and fey, and it made little impression on the serious world of fine art, which was then much taken with the aggressive energies of Abstract Expressionism*.

≡ Post-war, mostly New York-based artistic movement, that produced large, non-figurative, gestural, spiritualty complex paintings. Artists include Jackson Pollock, Mark Kothko, Willem de Kooning.

It was not a style that appealed to Warhol at all, but with the start of the 1960s many things in the art world and the world at large were about to change.

Warhol enters the 1960s

At the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Jasper Johns had a ground-breaking exhibition called Flags, Targets and Numbers. The show sold out and the Museum of Modern Art bought four major paintings. Johns had previously been a commercial artist, as had Robert Rauschenberg, who also had a successful exhibition at the Castelli. Both also happened to be homosexual. Warhol was jealous of their success but he could see possibilities for himself.

He began a series of black and white paintings of nose jobs, wigs, television sets, charts of dance steps, all based on cheap ads found in magazines. Then he painted cartoon characters — Dick Tracy, Batman and Popeye — then a Coke bottle. Although he was working in the area that would eventually bring him success, these early works failed to provide him with a breakthrough.

By the end of 1960 most of those who would come to be considered major Pop Artists — Claes Oldenberg, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselman, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist — had all had successful exhibitions in New York. Andy Warhol at this time didn’t even have a gallery.

Then, according to legend, a fledgling gallery owner called Muriel Latow met Warhol, and he asked her to give him some ideas for the things he should paint. Her first suggestion was that he should paint money. The second was that he should paint a can of soup.

Warhol’s mother went out and bought one can of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup and he began work, making individual ‘portraits’ of each can, seen against a plain white background. Warhol had found his subject. The paintings were first shown in Los Angeles in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery, were a huge success, and their fame spread internationally.