Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PART ONE - Abjection and Epiphany

  chapter one - THE BOY ON THE HILL

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  chapter two - LEAP OF FATE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  chapter three - POP ART: SURF’S UP!

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO - Figment

  chapter four - INSIDE ANARCHY’S RISING TIDE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  chapter five - MASS PRODUCTION

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  chapter six - THAT ONE PAINTING

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  chapter seven - PORTRAIT OF THE IMAGE AS “IMPORTANT” ARTIST

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  FOR

  MARY WORONOV

  AND

  CHARLES RYDELL

  IT’S TOO HARD TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR. THERE’S NOTHING THERE.

  ANDY WARHOL

  interview with Jordan Crandall,

  Splash, No. 6 (1986)

  PREFACE

  CLOSE TO A QUARTER-CENTURY AFTER HIS DEATH, Andy Warhol continues to evoke ambivalence and polarized appraisal, despite his work’s almost surreal financial appreciation.

  Cultural conservatives disparage him and blame him for nearly everything appalling in American culture; at a different extreme, virtually everything he produced is lauded as prescient, masterful, and, especially, prophetic—and there are also those who think both judgments are true.

  There is a museum devoted to his work in his home-town of Pittsburgh. A foundation that bears his name distributes millions for worthwhile artistic endeavors. A catalogue raisonné, years in the making and still incomplete, may dispel many confusions and myths concerning the circumstances in which Warhol’s vast oeuvre was generated. Yet the mythmaking porosity of Warhol’s enterprise will certainly retain its usefulness in the perpetual revision of the kind of history generated by rumor, gossip, and word of mouth—the history that occurs before it becomes history in the sedimented, old-fashioned sense.

  In the twentieth century, perhaps only Picasso left a comparably prodigious and variegated body of work, and therefore there will always be more to say about it. No one will ever get the final word on Andy Warhol. Like many people who came of age during the peak of the Warhol phenomenon, I considered him a brilliant provocateur, an artist of genius whose personality, as much as his art, exposed the vapid conformity, sexual repressiveness, and crass commercial values of American culture that prevailed during my childhood; like many, I read into Warhol’s ongoing enterprise a satirical contempt for the banality of that culture and its norms. That enterprise had, at first, a decidedly marginal character, appealed to a special kind of minority sensibility, and was valued precisely because of its “countercultural” insouciance. Later, however, as Warhol’s work achieved mainstream acceptance and the artist became synonymous with the culture of celebrity-for-its-own-sake and financial success as the measure of any artistic activity’s value, I became far less admiring of Warhol’s achievement and much more critical of Warhol’s career as it played itself out—without, I must add, ceasing to marvel at the audacity of his early work and his preternatural productivity or to appreciate the vast range of cultural practices and social changes, both baleful and appealing, that have been, to one degree or another, inspired by Warhol’s example.

  If he had simply been a famous artist with a flashy personality, like Picasso, there would no doubt be firmer anchorage for assertions of intention, the parsing of works into clearly defined “periods,” and less skepticism about the value of the artist’s work overall.

  In the case of Andy Warhol, the personality is one of implacable ambiguity, deliberate mystification, and a pose of complete detachment from his own work, a tyrant of passivity. Picasso began from a traditional “fine art” practice of painting that he revolutionized with Cubism and subsequent innovations. Warhol, who was trained in commercial art and first achieved eminence in that field, demolished the critical and perceptual boundaries separating “fine” and “applied” art, most memorably by exhibiting a series of Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in an art gallery.

  Although hand-painted, the Soup Cans had the look of their industrially reproduced models. Warhol soon went further, applying the methods of mechanical reproduction to painting, including later versions of the Soup Cans; he extended this industrial model of production to sculpture and the whole gamut of customarily “handmade” works of art, glorifying the banal artifacts of American consumer culture and its icons of celebrity. The Soup Cans, at first widely dismissed as the ultimate cynical gimmick, were soon recognized as the first shots of a total revolution in American culture.

  These pictures emitted no “aura,” no irreplaceable uniqueness, none of the qualities traditionally thought to emanate from works of art. What they conveyed was the enshrinement of a trademark commodity that the artist himself had had to swallow every day for lunch as a child—a kind of condensed regurgitation of what “America” meant to Andy Warhol.

  Yet whether the Soup Cans, and the staggering quantity of works that followed, signified contempt or reverence, love or loathing, a mixture of feelings or an absence of any feelings at all, could not be gleaned from the paintings themselves. And the artist had, by the time they were shown, perfected a laconic and distancing persona that confounded any definition and presented itself to the public as a glacial enigma.

  This enigmatic quality, which made Warhol a celebrity, infused all his work with a kind of empty secret. It was there for others to interpret; the brilliantly terse aphorisms he coined about himself and his work, the interviews in which he claimed that other people did all his paintings for him, the exhibitionists he collected as a sort of protective gang around him, created a vast field of legend that steadily multiplied the value of everything he made.

  Careers have been minted from inventories of innocently and not-so-innocently repeated, thousand-told anecdotes with dubious moorings in reality. The mind-numbing deluge of writings about Warhol includes factual slippages of every stripe, impossible-to-confirm stories, and, quite likely, facts that have been eclipsed by more interesting apocrypha.

  We can each be one person’s saint, another’s bastard, a third’s genius, and someone else’s imbecile. Warhol was that rare individual who could be all these things, at the same time, to the same person. From the distance of an interested spectator, he certainly appeared to be that rarity to me.

  PART ONE

  Abjection and Epiphany

  chapter one

  THE BOY ON THE HILL

  ONE

  ANDY WARHOL CONTINUALLY REVISED AND MUDDIED his background. His contradictory self-inven tions were often freely embellished by those who heard them, though now, in posthumous finality, his densely veiled life may look slightly l
ess veiled.

  Authentic copies of his birth certificate have appeared in publications. His birthplace was just plain Pittsburgh—not McKeesport, Pennsylvania, or Hawaii, or other places he sometimes claimed to have been born. Scholars can trace his movements from birth to his arrival in New York City, and, with considerably more difficulty, afterwards.

  Born in 1928, Andy Warhola was the youngest of three brothers. Andy’s parents, Julia Zavacky and Ondrej Warhola, married in 1909 in Ruthenia, a Carpathian sliver of impoverished villages, epidemics, illiteracy, and hapless geography in the path of incessant territorial skirmishes between neighboring countries.

  Ondrej, who had already spent three years working in the United States, returned to America three years after their wedding. A baby daughter was born after his departure and died before Ondrej earned enough money to bring his wife to the new country.

  Julia never entirely recovered from this child’s loss.

  Nine years passed before she could join Ondrej in Pittsburgh. There the couple produced three sons—Paul, John, and finally Andrew. The family lived in the Ruthenian ghetto known as the Hill, and its isolation resembled Ruthenia itself.

  Descriptions of Andy’s childhood evoke bravely maintained family cohesion in abject circumstances, with a father often absent, obliged to travel for his work for a company that transplanted whole houses from one place to another. Warhol later described his early home as the worst place on earth. On another occasion he remarked that being born was like being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

  Ondrej died in 1942, when Andy was fourteen. Andy’s father’s dying ukase was that his savings be spent to start Andy in college: Paul and John would have to work to support the family.

  Andy Warhol later said he barely remembered his father.

  TWO

  Superficially at least, the family appeared content to struggle with its lot. Its members may even have felt a contentment within a cycle of poverty mirrored in the families around them.

  Only Andy, the problem child, posed any threat to the family’s cohesive self-image. Yet this sort of subdural, intractable wound—inflicted by the excessive love and material favoritism that jangled the family’s equilibrium, depriving Andy’s siblings of their share of attention and care—may not have appeared as dramatic as it sounds.

  Early on, Andy staked out special-child status among his brothers. His father’s frequent absences left the elder Paul as the putative male head of the family, a role he fully assumed after Ondrej’s early death.

  Andy was the family’s moody, tyrannical center-piece. The child had panic attacks and was prone to hysteria. He shaped weaknesses into weapons for rejecting anyone he didn’t like and avoiding anything he didn’t want to do. He manifested the estrangement and neediness of the gifted child, cursed and blessed with qualities foreign, magical, and possibly frightening to those around him. The misery of such a child, “kidnapped” into a Depression-era, uneducated family, is immeasurable. Regardless of the family’s primal bonds of love, its inability to comprehend him and his inability to understand himself inevitably nurtured a degree of resentment and produced from the child sadistically impossible demands and intolerable behavior.

  Andy refused to go to grade school after a black female classmate slapped him. Lonely Julia, with a shrewd peasant gift for sculpting permanent dependence, kept him home for two years while Ondrej was away, until brother Paul put his foot down. After a mild bout of malingering that Andy prolonged into a full month in bed, a neighbor friend forcibly carried Andy to school. Andy immediately suffered a histrionic relapse that kept him home for many months.

  His real and imaginary illnesses, his pathological shyness, and his remarkable artistic talents intimidated the family menagerie into catering to his wishes. Cluelessness and anger must have accompanied the resource-draining sacrifices that were made to satisfy Andy’s wants (like the dollar-a-day housecleaning jobs Julia took to buy Andy a $20 cartoon projector). These wishes could never be fully satisfied: gifted children are quite often incapable of happiness and can only be temporarily placated. What gifted children often want is idolatry rather than happiness.

  We do have it on the artist’s word, and that of his brothers, that the Warhola sons’ childhood lunch un-varyingly included Campbell’s soup and a sandwich—and that Andy got to pick the day’s soup flavor.

  THREE

  Julia was maniacally devout. She brought Andy with her on daily two-mile treks from the Hill to St. John Chrysostom Eastern Rite Greek Catholic Church. The church’s densely crowded-together gilded icons of saints and strict formal rituals probably had later echoes in Warhol’s sanctifying portraits of Marilyn Monroe and other film stars, as well as the dramaturgy of the Factory, with its hierarchies of “Superstars” and its atmosphere of a travesty religion, where devotees “confessed” to a godlike camera and were “absolved” by inclusion in a community of dysfunction.

  Described as a gentle, kind person, Julia undoubtedly was. But she was more complex than the blurred image of her captured in later years by Duane Michals’s camera and the painting Andy made of her.

  Pretty, funny, talented at drawing, and, until her last years, able to contain the melancholia that haunted her, Julia repined for the world of her childhood. She never truly left Ruthenia, it’s been said; she lived very much in the mental world of her own childhood. The harsh conditions of that childhood, its cultural and material poverty, remained imprinted on Julia’s mind in an alien country where she found everything familiar turned askew, and her fierce maternal instincts toward her favorite child were laced with panic. His difference from the norm made her overbearing and hypercritical, ferociously protective yet perpetually disappointed; while she sought to mold Andy in her own image, his nascent lack of “manliness,” his manipulative spells of sickness and “feminine” methods of getting his own way, must have often stricken her with guilt and anger.

  Julia’s disproportionate attention on her Little Prince was entangled with contempt. The “holy terror” described in Bob Colacello’s exemplary biography is the calculating crybaby and revered brat who evolves from coddled child into adult monster. Child Andy was mother Julia’s tantrum-prone, acne-riddled, albino lion cub, smothered with attention and chocolate rewards when he completed pages of his coloring books. Yet Julia also told him that he was ugly, that his nose was too big, that he was nothing. Her pride in him warred with her envy: sins joined at the hip. Julia’s psychic cannibalism—in every account her possessiveness amounts to this—was “well intended,” yet devastating.

  Julia shaped Andy into Nothing Special, and a Special Nothing. Warhol’s acute sense of the void, many years later, would be the basis of his best art. His awareness of Nothingness, and his terror of it, were tenuously balanced by his lifelong Catholicism—a religion that instills the idea that anything can be forgiven if penance is made, forgiveness asked for.

  FOUR

  Three childhood “nervous breakdowns” are attributed to Saint Vitus’ dance. These always occurred in summer months, when Warhol, rarely leaving his island bed, listened to radio serials, scissored paper dolls, crayoned coloring books, and played with a Charlie McCarthy dummy.

  Radio was the murmuring hearth of the American home in the 1920s and ’30s, acrackle with serials like The Shadow and, paradoxically, the wildly popular ventriloquism of Edgar Bergen. Warhol’s fantasy fed on radio, comics, and Photoplay. He prized radio’s Niagara of voices and sought it in chatty grade-school girl-friends; later he would replicate this torrent of talk by filming his loquacious Superstars—like Ondine, a flume of scathing wit fueled by massive amphetamine consumption, and Viva, who could engagingly drone for hours about her Catholic girlhood, her bizarre upper-class Irish family, and her sexual adventures, whether anyone was listening or not.

  We don’t know whether the chronically convalescent ten-year-old Andrew Warhola tuned in to Orson Welles’s Campbell Playhouse productions of A Christmas Carol, A Night to Remember, Theodora Goes Wi
ld, Dodsworth, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It’s unlikely that the supple, thunderous radio voice of Welles—an American theatrical legend at twenty-three—would have escaped the attention of a boy who collected 8 x 10” autographed glossies of film stars and had adopted the mannerisms of his idol, Shirley Temple.

  The Mercury Theater, launched by Welles and John Houseman in 1937, was an ambitious repertory venture in the spirit of Roosevelt’s populist New Deal. Within a year, the company was offering, as The Mercury Theater of the Air, one-hour weekly dramas under the auspices of CBS, adapting literary works like Treasure Island and Dracula.

  The Mercury’s radio venture went south soon after it unintentionally spread panic throughout depressingly large, credulous regions of the United States with its dramatization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. During the ensuing scandal, the Campbell Soup Company picked up sponsorship of the Mercury’s radio theater, allowing CBS to withdraw.

  The Mercury Theater of the Air was soon reconfigured into The Campbell Playhouse, and this commercialization of Welles’s arguably highbrow experiment in radio wreaked significant changes in the flavor of the fare being offered. Simon Callow, Welles’s biographer, writes that the original ensemble’s tone “was only occasionally reverential, more often blithe, high-spirited, dashingly dramatic. Not all of that was lost with the reinvention of the programme as The Campbell Playhouse, but it was a radically different animal, and it made of Welles a rather different animal, too.”

  The difference is notable when you compare the Mercury Theater broadcasts with the Campbell-sponsored ones. The latter, preceded by a ponderous Bernard Herrmann fanfare, lavishes several minutes on an announcer’s deifying résumé of Welles’s theatrical career, followed by Welles’s own purple lucubrations over his costar—in the debut broadcast, Margaret Sullavan. As Callow describes it: