Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

  It is worth asking oneself how many other American artists would have made headlines had they been shot. The New York Post informed its readers that “Andy Warhol Fights for Life,” on the assumption that its readers would know who was being talked about, and would have bought a copy of the paper to find out more. Of no other artist in America would this have been true. The Post’s readers would have known that he was the guy who painted Campbell’s Soup Cans. Even if he had given up painting, he remained an artist in the public mind. The fact that he now made movies instead of paintings meant that he was an artist who made movies. He had expanded the concept of the artist as someone who no longer limited his product to one particular medium. There would have been no other American artist of whom something like that was true. He really reinvented the concept of the artist as free to use whatever medium presented itself. Even the most creative artists lived conventional artists’ lives in comparison with his. He persisted in his view that painting, in his own case at least, was a finished phase, without this meaning that he was not continuing to be an artist. He had simply found ways of continuing to be an artist who no longer painted. That did not mean that he felt comfortable about where he was, as Leo Castelli said about him. It just meant that feeling comfortable was no part of being an artist as he understood it.

  In 1970, he discussed the idea of a traveling retrospective exhibition with the curator John Coplans of the Pasadena Museum of Art. It was to conclude its itinerary at the Whitney Museum of Art in spring 1971. He pointedly excluded from the retrospective what Donna di Salvo designated “Hand Painted Pop,” which included the work that he showed a decade earlier in the window at Bonwit’s. He wanted it to contain series only, like the soup can and the grocery boxes, the portraits of icons and the images of disasters, and, finally, the Flower paintings. It was as though, after all, he was what he said he wanted to be—a machine: a machine that produced not single works, but only series. So what was he to do now? In a way, Warhol seems to have sensed that the 1960s were over, and that the decade newly entered upon was a kind of blank. In fairness, it must be said that no one quite seemed to know what was next. Painting, as people liked to say, was in trouble. Eric Fischl, a student in 1970 at Cal Arts, recalls that the faculty looked to the students to say where art was headed and what it should be. Drawing, for example, was frowned upon, though there was no clear sense of what was to take its place. Fischl described the atmosphere in what was one of the most advanced art schools of the time:

  It was about 1970, the peak of crazed liberal ideas about education and self-development. Do your own thing. No rules. No history. We had this drawing class that Allan Hacklin had put together. I arrived late. It started around nine or ten in the morning, but I couldn’t get there until eleven. I walked into the studio and everybody was naked. Right! Everybody was naked. Half the people were covered with paint. They rolled around on the ground, on pieces of paper that they had torn off a roll. The two models were sitting in the corner absolutely still, bored to tears. Everybody else was throwing stuff around and had climbed up onto the roof and jumped into buckets of paint. It was an absolute zoo. [Kuspit, 33]

  The art schools of America stopped, in effect, teaching skills. The assumption was that it was up to the students to somehow determine what kind of artists they would become. They would learn what they needed to in order to realize their ideas as art. The art school “crit” replaced the course of instruction: the student defended his or her current work in a kind of consciousnessraising session. Everything was accepted so long as the student could justify it in a crit—everything, at least, except painting, which the decade impugned just as Warhol had done in 1965, and which seemed not to meet the needs of a new generation of artists, much of it now consisting of women, for whom painting was associated with the heavy machismo that Abstract Expressionist culture generated. Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner—herself of course a major figure in that movement, said, at the end of her career, according to sympathetic critic Anne Wagner, “I’m a product of this civilization, and, you might say that the whole civilization and culture is macho.” The confession has the logical form of an enthymeme: a major and a minor premise, with an unstated conclusion, viz., “I, though a woman, am macho.” As if she needed to be macho herself in order to survive as a painter. Women in the 1970s did not feel that way at all. In a major show of women artists in the mid-1980s, the subtitle of which was “Women Artists Enter the Mainstream,” it was clear that the mainstream was something that was being reconstructed in such a way as to be more accommodating to what was believed to be a feminine sensibility. In the exhibition that Barbara Rose mounted of Krasner’s work in the mid-1980s at the Museum of Modern Art, there were photographs of her paintings in her living space, with plants and patterned slipcovers. But in the MoMA show itself, the paintings themselves were in the flagrant white cubes of its harsh galleries, as if an exhibition was an arena, and art a situation of ordeal, a rite of passage, that paintings had to be able to stand up against. The curator of painting, William Rubin, even stripped paintings of their frames! They had to brazen it out, like naked wrestlers in the gymnasium. Art had no place in life.

  The increasing presence of women in the art force through the 1970s and after was not the only complicating factor in the art of that decade. There was also pressure from various racial and ethnic groups for recognition of their art by the defining institutions of the art world, most importantly by the museum. Multiculturalism inevitably diversified the curriculum of art history and the exhibitional programs of museums and galleries. The art world was growing into something that would barely have been recognized in the 1960s, let alone the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme. It did not lack a logic, but the logic of art and of art appreciation became contested at every point, as more and more became allowed. In 1960 the great critic Clement Greenberg published an influential paper titled “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg’s thesis was that each art was beginning to inquire into what was essential to its defining medium. Greenberg thought that painting was becoming more and more pure, in the sense that it was more and more true to its essence. But the very reverse was to take place in the 1970s. A kind of “impurity” began to overtake artistic production. Warhol turned out to have been exceedingly advanced in this. He was the first contemporary artist to consider wallpaper a legitimate artist’s product. His “Silver Clouds” pioneered inflatable sculpture. Nothing could have been more heterogeneous then the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” with music, dance, and film all mixed together and raised to the highest decibel. Painting would have seemed an entirely retrograde move for someone who emblematized advanced art. If, that is to say, Warhol was going to paint again, it was going to have to mean something different than painting had meant even in his own incredibly heterogeneous oeuvre.

  Inasmuch as most speakers of the language think of easel paintings when they think of art, it is curious that this genre of painting has been deemed obsolescent by members of the avantgarde for much of the Modernist era. “Painting is washed up,” Marcel Duchamp said to his companions Fernand Léger and Constantin Brancusi at an aeronautical exhibition in Paris in 1911, where they were admiring an airplane propeller: “Can you paint anything as beautiful as that?” Soviet artists after the Russian Revolution asked what role they were to play in the new society, for which painting was deemed unsuitable. The Mexican muralists denounced easel painting in favor of huge painted walls with heroic messages addressed to The People. In the early 1980s, heavy thinkers in the New York art world proclaimed the death of painting, as well as of the institution in which painting was mainly enshrined, namely the museum of fine art. But when it became evident in that era that, through a number of breakthroughs by Duchamp, Warhol, and Beuys, art could look like or be anything at all, it gradually became evident that there was no rea
son to exclude paintings from consideration, and in today’s pluralistic art world, excluding paintings from major exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial seems merely curatorial caprice. The painting wars are over, leaving it a question of art-historical explanation why they ever raged at all. Though Warhol continued to make movies through the 1970s, he returned abruptly to painting in 1972, when he began a series of portraits of Chairman Mao in large numbers and in various sizes.

  In February 1972, Mao Tse-tung encouraged President Nixon to visit China, and this was widely seen as a step toward easing the Cold War. Only someone with a solid anti-Communist reputation would have dared undertake this journey, and Nixon is credited with having made an exceedingly bold gesture. Warhol painted portraits of both these world historical figures. As described in chapter 4, Nixon is depicted with a green complexion and fangs, and the injunction “Vote for McGovern” is lettered along the bottom. The Mao paintings, by contrast, have a benign blandness, based on an exceedingly familiar image—the picture of Mao’s features that was used as frontispiece of “The Little Red Book” of quotations from the leader of China in the role of sage. Warhol modified the image by making it look as if Mao is wearing lipstick and eye shadow, like (what I assume to be an allusion to) a raging queen. Warhol was often portrayed as a transvestite in Chris Makos’s photographs of him, and in a jocular interjection reported in Victor Bockris’s biography, he says that lipstick for both men and women is one of the rights demanded in his film Women in Revolt, starring the three chief transvestites of the Silver Factory—Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis.

  Andy had a profound view on transvestism:

  Among other things, drag queens are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood. I’m fascinated by boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls, because they have to work so hard—double time—getting rid of all the telltale male signs and drawing in all the female signs. I’m not saying it’s not self-defeating and self-destructive, and I’m not saying it’s not possibly the single most absurd thing a man can do with his life. What I’m saying is, it’s very hard work to look like the complete opposite of what nature made you and then to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place. [Warhol and Hackett, 317–18]

  Meanwhile, it is impossible to decide whether the Mao portraits are supposed to show him actually wearing lipstick, or if that is just a mannerism of his style of portraiture. My sense is that Warhol really did not see why men did not have the right to make themselves up to look better than nature made them, just as women do—and that he himself claimed that right by using makeup when he went out.

  As with his popular Flower paintings, Warhol produced his Mao portraits in all sizes and prices, so that anyone could purchase a Mao painting to suit his means, including four giant Maos, seventeen by thirteen feet, impressive enough to make a powerful statement at a rally in Tiananmen Square. As this is being written, the one remaining giant Mao in private hands has been sent to an auction in Hong Kong, where speculation is that it may bring $120 million, outselling Andy’s Green Car Crash, which sold for over $80 million in 2007. But he also produced Mao s in small and medium sizes, and even printed rolls of wallpaper consisting of iterated Mao s. The Chairman’s face was not simply silk-screened onto panels: Warhol enlivened the surface with spontaneous brushstrokes so that they had the look—they were hand-painted Pop.

  The final transformation was astonishing. What Warhol had managed to do was to detoxify one of the most frightening political images of the time. Until Warhol appropriated Chairman Mao’s face, to hang a picture of Chairman Mao was not merely to make a political statement. It was to make a declaration of faith. No institution in America would have faced the suspicion of subversion that hanging a portrait of China’s most powerful radical leader entailed. It would be like hanging a portrait of Karl Marx or Joseph Stalin. Warhol managed to transform this awesome image into something innocuous and decorative. Anyone could hang one—or ten—Maos without fear of offending anyone, or suggesting that he held dangerous and revolutionary ideas. Imagine a young student, excited by the ideas that were taken up by the Red Guards in China, bringing home a poster of Chairman Mao to hang in his bedroom, being shown his parents’ new Warhol—a benign portrait of Mao over the fireplace, next to one of Andy’s soup cans, in a living room whose walls were covered in green and purple cow’s-head wallpaper! Andy had a smallish Mao on his bed table in his town house on Sixty-sixth Street, off Madison Avenue.

  Andy made approximately two thousand Mao portraits, restoring the Factory to something like the mass-production entity it had been for a time when he and Malanga were turning out hundreds of grocery boxes. But the imaginativeness of their variety of color and the mock impulsiveness of the brushstrokes was a preparation for the style of portraiture that was to become Andy’s signature way of representing celebrities, and those who want to look like celebrities. There is room for serious scholarship addressed to the evolution of the Warhol portrait, which for a number of years became the economical basis of the Factory in its third and final phase, when potential subjects were invited to lunch in the paneled dining room of Andy Warhol Enterprises, after the end of the movie-studio phase of Warhol’s career. It came to an end because Warhol and his associates were unable to get the money due them from a surprisingly successful run of an obscene remake of Frankenstein in 1973. Recently, I compared Warhol’s portrait style with that of Francesco Clemente, also a portraitist of celebrities. As greatly as I admire Warhol as an artist, however, I cannot imagine him having an interest in the kind of interiority that is Clemente’s reason for portraying someone. He was a master and, to some degree, the servant of mechanical reproduction, lost, one might say, without some mediating recording instrument. By contrast, “I never paint a portrait from a photograph,” Clemente says, “because a photograph doesn’t give enough information about what the person feels.” One might say that Warhol interposed his camera between himself and the subject precisely because only the surface engaged him. “When you sit for an hour and a half in front of somebody,” Clemente observed, “he or she shows about twenty faces. And so it’s this crazy chase of Which face? Which one is the one?” I think, in fairness, that Warhol would have said “all of them,” refusing to choose. His screen tests, his arrays of photomat shots, were mechanical strategies for not making choices. But Clemente, a worldly man, finds ways of making visual what he knows about a person, in addition to what he sees. He translates this knowledge into visual inflections, presenting the subject in ways that could not be photographed. I know of few portraits in modern art that compare with his amazing Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. The woman with the great name looks defiantly out over her stunning jeweled choker, aggressively wound around her neck, her fierce eyes enhanced by the green and pinkish tones Clemente has given her by way of a complexion. The portrait is inflected by stylistic discoveries independently made by Schiele, Beckmann, and Matisse, without in any sense being reducible to them. By this painting alone he would be recognized as an artist of stature and authority. The features through which he creates the reality of Princess Gloria have no correspondences in the language of photography. Warhol’s half-arbitrary colored shapes, placed where the defining features of a subject’s face are shown, certainly don’t correspond to anything photographic, mainly because they do not correspond to anything real in a person’s face. That may account for the greatness of the Mao portraits. Do they tell us something Warhol intuited about the tyrant, e.g., that he dyed his hair black? Or wore lipstick to make himself more photogenic?

  These questions do not especially arise with the other image that Warhol detoxified, namely the Communist crossed hammer and sickle emblem that a storekeeper would have thought about twice befor
e displaying in his or her shop window. Andy exhibited his Hammer and Sickle paintings at the Leo Castelli gallery in January 1977, and later at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, which sold out. But the crossed hammer and sickle emblem was commonplace graffiti in Paris, where the Communist Party was strong, unlike in New York, where it was an incendiary mark, threatening and scary to a population that had been taught about the Cold War, and was persuaded that Communism was committed to the death of American values and all they stood for. True, the show was held in Soho rather than Omaha, but there were no demonstrations, no bricks through the window. Displaying the Communist logo a decade earlier would have been as provocative a gesture as showing a plastic Jesus in artist’s pee in Richmond, Virginia. But it was like any Soho show in that era. Andy had seen the Communist logo in Italy, where he was something of a hero to the left. In 1975 he had shown a series of black and Hispanic transvestites in Ferrara, which leftwing critics praised as exposing the “cruel racism in the American Capitalist spirit, which left poor black and Hispanic boys no choice but to prostitute themselves as transvestites.” Ladies and Gentlemen, as the suite was titled, really glamorized its subject, as suited the culture of transvestism: Warhol used patches of color like collage, which scarcely goes with the political intentions ascribed to the works. When Warhol was asked by the press if he was a Communist, Warhol played dumb, asking Bob Colacello if he was a Communist. Colacello said, well, he had just done a portrait of Willy Brandt and was desperately seeking the commission to portray Imelda Marcos, and Andy said, “That’s my answer.” As a business artist, Andy did not let politics get in the way. It was held against him that he pursued the shah of Iran for a commission—but really so was everyone else after the shah’s money, since he was engaged in modernizing Iran, and inviting professors to his country to help in that effort. I was invited to lecture on contemporary art in Tehran, but the return of the ayatollah caused that to be indefinitely postponed. Italian capitalists were Communists—Gianni Agnelli even bought a Hammer and Sickle at Galerie Daniel Templon. Meanwhile, in Soho, everyone was charmed: Paulette Goddard even thought she would have a pin made—though it would be one thing to have it based on Andy’s painting, another if it were a straightforward hammer and sickle. The striking fact is that the logo had gone dead in America—unlike the swastika, which even today arouses chills and anger. That of course does not mean that it has lost its energy elsewhere in the world. It maintains its toxin in North Korea, for example. But at least in Soho, in 1977, it could be shown with impunity. Sol Steinberg said that it was the one painting he wished he had thought of—a “political still life.” In any case, since it is the rare case in which nobody gave Andy the idea of painting what had been a feared and hated mark, universally recognized, one has to give Andy credit for intuiting that Communism need no longer be something to think about with apprehension. Only twelve years later, the breaking of the Berlin Wall put an end to the Cold War.