“I can make ordinary people look good but I have trouble making beautiful people look good.”
It would be pointless to make any great claims for Warhol as a scathing social critic, but a remark like that suggests that he wasn’t quite the uncritical poodle that a lot of people try to make him out to have been.
Warhol’s own role as both insider and outsider is a curious one. Growing up poor in Pittsburgh, his contact with the world of fame and glamour was as distant as anyone else’s. He went to the movies, read movie magazines, then he wrote to some of the stars asking for signed photographs. Not everybody would have taken that final step of trying to make contact with the stars, and you might argue that this indicated he was more than just the average movie-goer. Equally, you could think it was an action that in someone else would have confirmed forever their status as nothing more than a fan, as someone who would always be on the outside looking in, pressing his face against the glass.
Warhol’s success meant that he moved to the other side of that glass. By the 1970s Warhol might have appeared to be the ultimate insider. He was a friend of Liz Taylor and Liza Minelli, he was inviting Bianca Jagger to stay at his estate in Montauk. He was meeting (and admittedly occasionally sparring with) Hollywood’s old royalty — with Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall. He was as big a star as any of them and probably richer than most. The wheel might seem to have come full circle for the movie fan from Pittsburgh, but it was never quite as simple as that. Warhol the star remained starstruck.
Whenever he encountered these stars he had his camera and his tape recorder with him; the tools of the undying fan. Also, of course, the tools of the paparazzo and the investigative journalist. One wonders if he sometimes carried an autograph album.
Warhol may have felt the need for props. The photographer at the party is always popular and never has to account for himself. And perhaps the camera and tape recorder were also used as a shield that saved him the trouble of having to engage directly with the world. But they must surely also have created an impermeable barrier between Warhol and the stars he was so keen to meet. At the very least they must have forced the stars to keep their guard up, to remain in their star persona. And this, I suppose, is what a true fan might very well want. He would be far more interested in the star’s public image than in any private reality behind it.
There is a very telling, also quite funny, photograph in Exposures of Bianca Jagger apparently shaving her armpit, and one’s first impression might be that this is a candid picture, that Warhol has caught Bianca off guard, and is offering us a candid glimpse of her as we have never seen her before. But when you look more closely at the photograph, you see that there is no shaving foam in the armpit, indeed there is no hair to be shaved off. Bianca is posing for the camera. She is a star pretending to have a candid moment, caught by Warhol.
Of course this is just fine with Warhol. The kind of exposure he is concerned with (here at least) is more that of publicity than of revelation. It remains, however, a very appealing picture of Bianca Jagger.
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Warhol the self-portraitist
As I said in the introduction, I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that ‘Warhol was his own greatest creation’. Yes, he most certainly created an image for himself, both visually and philosophically, and it was an appealing and attention-grabbing image, and a great help in getting publicity, but without the art it would have been meaningless. After all, his superstar Ultraviolet presented the most striking visual image to the world, but what good did it do her? Looking at it the other way, the artist Joseph Beuys has an instantly recognizable image, but it has hardly made him a household name like Warhol.
Self-portraits of Warhol exist from as early as 1942, and in his senior year at the Carnegie Institute, 1948-49, he caused a stir by entering a self-portrait in a college show. The work was rejected. It was called The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose, and although the painting does indeed show a Warhol-like character picking his nose, it is surely the punning, frivolous title with its casual insult to motherhood, that caused offence rather than the image itself.
There is obviously a reference to plastic surgery in that title, and we know that Warhol was very unhappy about his own appearance, going so far as to have facial plastic surgery in 1957. He regarded the operation as a failure.
Warhol is hardly the first art student to have spent a lot of time experimenting with his own look, drawing himself, taking a lot of pictures of himself in photobooths. And obviously there is a long and noble tradition of artists who have created self-portraits.
It seems to me that rather too much is made of Warhol’s alleged blankness. The face that gazes out from the self-portraits is certainly immobile and not obviously expressive, but it is possible to see a variety of things in it: a severity, a wariness, perhaps a sort of inert hostility. At other times he looks alarmed, deathly, deliberately grotesque.
Warhol’s look is always iconic, but it is not fixed, especially in the beginning. Early photographs show him as a bespectacled, bow-tie wearing dandy or nerd. The look is unusual but not fashionable or cool or Pop. By the time of the Factory years Warhol looks far more current, as though he might be a member of a pop group, in Beatle boots, hooped tee-shirt and dark glasses. Dark glasses are always a reinforcement of cool, and suggest a distance, a detachment, a refusal to look the world in the eye, or to let the world see into yours. But the photographs from these years, and there are a great many of them, are generally created by others. When it came to making his own self-portraits he generally took the shades off.
Over the years, in his self-portraits, he subjected his own image to most of the same transformations that he used in his portraits of other people; multiple repetitions, the use of garishly inappropriate colours. He also treats himself more harshly than he does most of his subjects. Sometimes he looks just terrible: sinister, sickly, sometimes with camouflage colours blotched across his face, sometimes done out in terrible drag, in bad make-up and wigs.
It is hard to say quite what the wig meant to Warhol. Certainly, it hid his bald head, but it also drew attention to the fact that he was bald. Perhaps he was embracing falseness as a Pop joke, refusing to make a pretence, or at least revealing the pretence, but that doesn’t altogether explain why the wigs had to be quite so cheap and nasty looking. Did he know how ridiculous he sometimes looked? And did he care? And was that the whole point?
Photographs of Warhol’s house, unseen until after his death, show Warhol wigs framed behind glass, looking like alarming, giant spiders, which suggest he was well aware of how strange and absurd they looked. Perhaps there was a sort of masochism going on here. If a man perceives himself as ugly and sexually unattractive, he may well decide to embrace that ugliness rather than disguise it, and make himself look even uglier.
Warhol’s self-portraits, as works of art, are not in themselves ugly, of course. Once again art transforms the banal or the ordinary into something beautiful and startling. This is art’s power, and in creating his self-portraits Warhol took control of that power and exercised it to transform his own image.
Summary
Warhol met and made portraits of thousands of the most famous personalities of his era.
His portraits often deal with the media image as much as with the ‘real’ person.
Warhol became a ‘society portraitist’ but his work is not always flattering or uncritical.