Again, it is hard to know from our current standpoint how far Warhol was extraordinarily prescient in choosing to depict Elvis and Marilyn, or whether Elvis and Marilyn have achieved their colossal iconic status partly as a result of Warhol using them in his art. No doubt a little of both. Certainly being portrayed by Warhol wasn’t enough to turn Troy Donohue into an icon, but his portraits of Liz Taylor and Natalie Wood have certainly conferred a sort of symbolic status on them that they might otherwise lack.
Even in these portraits, of course, a selection process was going on. We know that Warhol owned many movie and publicity stills and part of his skill as an artist lay in choosing just the right one to use in his work. The single image he selected of Marilyn Monroe was one that contained her essence and could bear the weight of the many reworkings he made of it. By contrast, the still he used for his Elvis portraits (Elvis in western gear with a gun) derives much of its power from being slightly atypical. The more truly iconic Elvis would be curling his lip and shaking his pelvis. By the time Warhol has added a couple of slightly out of register red lips, this is no longer the Elvis we are used to at all.
Warhol’s later symbolic subject matter — guns, skulls, daggers, shadows, endangered species, the hammer and sickle — certainly provide images with plenty of weight and significance, yet they seem to come less directly from the world of Pop.
The bottom line is that a work of art doesn’t achieve its power simply because it uses powerful subject matter. A work of art is not about an object, it is an object, an object that we want and need to look at. Warhol always makes us want to look.
It can hardly be emphasized enough how skillfully and brilliantly Warhol uses colour and composition. His paintings seem almost scientific in their ability to engage us and draw our attention. This is why Warhol’s work is not simply Duchampian, not simply a matter of signing soup cans, of simply asserting that art is what the artist says it is. Warhol’s work is great art because it enthralls the viewer and connects at the very deepest level.
Summary
Pop Art takes as its subject consumption, popular culture and the mass media.
Its subject matter is always ‘quoted’.
It was a reaction against the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism.
Pop Art blurred, probably forever, the distinction between high and low art.
4 Warhol the Portraitist
Andy Warhol’s quip that, ‘In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes’, which first appeared in the catalogue for a show he had in Stockholm in 1968, is the most quoted and most misunderstood of all Warhol’s many public utterances.
These days the line is generally used to criticize or dismiss someone who has briefly and apparently for no good reason found themselves in the limelight. They are denounced with the put-down, ‘Your 15 minutes is up’. These briefly famous people have supposedly got something they don’t deserve or aren’t entitled to, and now they can return to an ignominious and deserved obscurity. Once their 15 minutes is up, fame will presumably be left to the people who more truly deserve it.
Apart from the fact that there is something very snobbish and condescending about this attitude, I also think it is pretty much the exact opposite of what Warhol actually had in mind.
Warhol loved fame. He loved it in himself and in others. He aspired to it. He achieved it. He worked hard to keep it and increase it. You would not have found him complaining about the ‘problems’ of being famous. From this standpoint he would inevitably think that fame was something everybody might enjoy given half a chance.
And so, adopting one of his (admittedly not always wholly convincing) poses, that of the Coke-drinking, Campbell’s-soup-eating democrat, he made the not very startling observation that fame is rather unfairly and unequally distributed. Far more original was the idea that, at least in theory, at least on a temporary basis, and certainly somewhat ironically, the world might be a better place if fame were shared out more fairly, or at least passed around.
It is hard to tell if Warhol was ever much of a reader, and even if he were he would surely have gone to some lengths to disguise the fact, but this concept of the regular redistribution of fame and fortune is very similar to the plot of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Lottery In Babylon in which society is constantly reformulated on the basis of chance, so that at some time or another everybody has been a leader and everybody has been a slave. One is also reminded of Warhol’s own remark in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol;
“If everybody’s a beauty, then nobody is.” (p.62).
In a certain limited way, at the Factory, Warhol practised what he preached. He created his own superstars, people who were certainly not stars outside the Warhol circle, and some of them weren’t even very ‘super’ within it. Ingrid Superstar, for example, was a potato-faced girl from New Jersey whose aspirations to stardom seemed at best misplaced. Within the circle, however, she was a somebody. Warhol, of course, reserved the right to say who was this week’s superstar and who was not.
Members of the Factory crowd seem to have put a great deal of effort into pleasing Andy, into being his favourites. Whether they wanted to be famous for 15 minutes or longer, whether they wanted to be stars or not, they certainly wanted Warhol’s approval. They wanted to be insiders.
Was Andy Warhol really interested in people? Ultimately the answer has to be yes, if a qualified yes. You don’t spend as much time surrounded by as many people as Warhol did, and you certainly don’t spend as much time photographing, tape recording and filming them, if you are simply indifferent to them. Warhol could, after all, have stayed with the soup cans and the electric chairs. But perhaps he was interested in people the way an old-style lepidopterist is interested in butterflies. He observes them, studies them, is fascinated by them, but ultimately he wants to capture them, skewer them on a pin, and add them to his collection.
Warhol seems to have met every celebrity of his era, everyone worth knowing, plus many, many who weren’t. The number of people he made portraits of, either as paintings, prints or silk-screens, or simply by taking their photograph, is astonishing. Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview, puts the number in the tens of thousands. Imelda Marcos was one of the few he wanted but couldn’t get.
The list of his subjects reads like a who’s who of his times, and includes Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, Muhammad Ali, Grace Jones, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Rudolph Nureyev, Paul Anka, Philip Johnson, Merce Cunningham, Man Ray, Mickey Mouse, Joseph Beuys, Chairman Mao, Lenin, Jerry Hall, Albert Einstein, and of course, above all, Marilyn Monroe. If some of these names seem more significant and familiar than others, that is a sign of our own times as well as of Warhol’s.
Latterly Warhol was really only interested in making portraits of the rich and famous, although there were times when he would make an exception and accept a portrait commission from those who were merely rich.
At the start of his career he didn’t know anybody who was famous at all. In the 1950s he was making drawings of what look like male models, but these are referred to in the catalogues as ‘Untitled’ so hardly qualify as portraits. He also made a lot of drawings of a store owner called Stephen Bruce who sold Warhol’s art through his store, but when it came to real stars he knew them only from media images, the way any other member of the public did. And so he made his first portraits using images taken from magazines and newspapers. There are a number of pencil drawings he made in 1962 of Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr and Ginger Rogers that explicitly reveal their sources to be publicity stills and movie magazines.