by Gary Indiana
FIVE
During the glory years of Abstract Expressionism, Warhol had something of a love-hate relationship with the work promoted in the art world. It was not the kind of art he wanted to do; he was impressed and intimidated by it, and probably repulsed by the personalities of its premier practitioners, whose homophobia was as legendary as their boozing.
While it was obscured during Warhol’s lifetime by his Pop Art career, his commercial artwork during the 1950s has by now been extensively documented, both in the biographies written about him and in the many lavishly illustrated books devoted to his work.
Trained at Carnegie Tech to be a good commercial-art professional, Warhol quickly achieved success as a graphic illustrator and within a few years of his arrival in New York had become one of the best-known and most highly paid commercial artists, sought after by magazines like Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, McCall’s, and Vanity Fair and by ad agencies such as Young & Rubican. While other commercial artists of the era made their work as “photographic-looking” as possible, Warhol developed a distinctive, hand-drawn look in his ad work that was instantly recognizable. He produced advertising drawings for products like Martini & Rossi wines and Fleming Joffe leathers. His distinctive line drawings as well as his blotted-line style of easily reproducible imagery adorned book jackets for New Directions and covers for jazz albums by Kenny Burrell and Count Basie; undoubtedly his best-known advertising work was done for I. Miller Shoes, the premier shoe emporium of its day whose ads appeared weekly between 1955 and 1957 in the Sunday New York Times in the section devoted to wedding announcements.
He won four awards from the Art Directors Club in the 1950s, three of them for his shoe drawings for I. Miller advertisements. Indeed, Warhol’s headiest success as an illustrator was in his endlessly inventive, often boldly exaggerated designs of ladies’ shoes. But much of his other graphic work gleaned wide exposure—for example, a drawing of a sailor injecting his arm with heroin in an ad for a radio crime program on “The Nation’s Nightmare” that occupied a full page of the New York Times in September 1951, then became the cover of an album of the radio program. This won Warhol his first Art Directors Club gold medal in 1953.
Warhol’s “fine art” efforts throughout the 1950s reflect two alternating, sometimes jarringly combined, distinct tendencies. Many of these pieces used virtually the same stippled, blotted, or continuous-line techniques of his commercial works, while others incorporated an emphatic painterly drizzle and motes of scumbled brushwork imitative of Abstract Expressionism. He produced thousands of “private drawings” and collages and a smaller number of paintings, many now lost or destroyed; between 1952 and 1959, he collaborated with various “boyfriends” and others on privately printed books—A Is an Alphabet, 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy, A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu, In the Bottom of My Garden, Wild Raspberries—whose contents were usually exhibited at the Bodley Gallery on East Sixtieth Street. The books themselves were typically presented as gifts to art directors and other of Warhol’s commercial clients and featured Julia Warhola’s distinctive, uneven handwriting, knotted with spelling errors, which Andy also employed for some of his advertising work.
A vast quantity of noncommercial Warhol art from the 1950s has come to light in recent years. Much of it has been no more precisely dated yet than “1950s,” and it is difficult, if not impossible, to chart any salient “development,” beyond its obvious skill and cleverness, before Warhol “began Pop Art.” It includes fanciful and rococo colored drawings of cupids, butterflies, flowers, pastries, and animals; portraiture and depictions of male bodies executed in ballpoint pen in a manner reminiscent of Cocteau, as if rendered without lifting the pen from the page; feet and shoes, male nudes, and everyday objects like paintbrushes, putty knives, gloves, hats, tubes of lipstick, and the like; in 1956 and 1957 particularly, Warhol employed imitation gold and silver leaf for the surfaces of myriad ink drawings—of monkeys, peacocks, horses, angels, floral bouquets, male profiles, body parts, and, most notably, shoes.
In a show at the Bodley Gallery in 1956, Warhol exhibited numerous collage-drawings of shoes incorporating gold and silver foil, each of which was given the name of a famous personality (Mae West, Julie Andrews, Kate Smith, Truman Capote, James Dean). These “golden slippers” were reproduced in Life magazine’s “Speaking of Pictures” section in a two-page spread in its January 1957 issue. Although the “celebrity shoes” were briefly reviewed by Parker Tyler in Art News, Life featured them in its section devoted to visual oddities rather than fine art. Throughout the 1950s, Warhol’s shows in such marginal venues as the Serendipity Café and the Bodley Gallery were given perfunctory attention, when noted at all, in the art press.
Broadly speaking, Warhol’s noncommercial art of the 1950s was redolent of both the strictly representational nature of his commercial design work and his preoccupation with the frivolous motifs and blatantly homoerotic content that “marked” him as an outsider to the art establishment. And when Warhol sensed, in the final years of the 1950s, that the burgeoning phenomenon of Pop Art could provide his entrée into a nascent “movement” that was nudging aside Abstract Expressionism as the fine art du jour, he intuitively abandoned the overtly homosexual features of his earlier work, as well as the upper-middle-class subject matter of his commissioned graphic design art, from which he had extrapolated so much of his noncommercial art.
Even an infinite number of elegant shoe illustrations and fey exhibitions of figurative drawings would never kick down the door to the realm of “fine art”; it would take something else entirely to do that. Warhol perceived, in the transitional art of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers, an opening into that realm. When early Pop Art began creeping into the inventories of high-end galleries like Castelli, Warhol understood how his years of doing commercial art could serve his larger ambitions.
SIX
In the summer of 1952, Julia Warhola moved into Andy’s basement apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street. She arrived with her bags to look after “her Andy.” They slept in the same bedroom. They acquired two Siamese cats. These became many Siamese cats. Despite impossible clutter and Andy’s lack of work space, mother and son seemed to enjoy each other’s company.
In 1953 they moved to a larger apartment on Lexington Avenue in the twenties, shared for a time with an art director friend, Leonard Kessler. Julia and Andy again shared a bedroom. The ever-growing cat population exuded a dizzying stench, while the noise from Shirley’s Pin-Up Bar on the ground floor blasted through the windows.
In the townhouses he later acquired, Julia’s living space was confined to the basements, where she carried on, it was said, a completely hermetic life in the middle of Manhattan, inhabited by memories of her Ruthenian girlhood, alienated from the outer world, and venturing outside only to go to church. She began drinking Scotch throughout the day.
Julia returned to Pittsburgh once, angered that Andy’s financial help to the rest of the family was less generous than he could afford. Warhol couldn’t manage without her. He soon invited her back. Art director Joseph Giordano, whom Julia demanded be present when she returned, later recalled the scene: “She slammed her suitcases on the floor, looked at [Andy], and said ‘I’m Andy Warhol.’ And there was a big discussion about why she was Andy Warhol . . . the crux of Andy Warhol is that he felt so unloved, so unloved. I know it came from his mother. . . . She made him feel insignificant. She made him feel that he was the ugliest creature God ever put on this earth.”5
Over the twenty years that Andy and Julia lived together in Manhattan, their relationship was a mixture of mutual support and antagonism. They seem to have kept one another amused and infuriated. Julia could never entirely control Andy, but Andy easily controlled her. True, her presence kept him leashed to a suffocation he wanted to escape; yet it provided a stability and nourishment he apparently needed.
Whatever antagonisms rankled between Warhol and Julia, she took care of his basic needs, sere
nely infantilized him, kept him safe from adult development. Her presence turned his homes into closets. Whenever she met one of Andy’s female “Superstars,” Julia urged her to marry him.
In his characteristically insightful essay “Queer Andy,” critic and activist Simon Watney perfectly captures the Freudian dynamics of Andy Warhol’s childhood and its persistence in the contradictory, controlling behavior of the adult artist. “He seems to have lived with his mother in Manhattan to guarantee the undermining of any sexual self-confidence he might have achieved, just as throughout his adult life he played his immediate friends and colleagues against one another as he had learned to play members of his family against one another when he was a child.”6
The neurotic re-creation in adult life of familial dysfunction and its participants is an insidious imperative of the unconscious. The family is both the cauldron of insanity and the site of physical safety and nourishment. The reprise of an original family configuration in adulthood, however, produces a corrosive, womblike pathology and a chimerical kind of security. Seeking friends who correspond to the figures of our childhood, we gravitate to the flaws, addictions, destructive patterns, and emotional disorders we learned to consider intrinsic to our comfort zones rather than the strengths and virtues that offset their negative impact.
Warhol’s eventual arena of family reenactment, the Factory, became one of the most significant cultural phenomena of its time. The adult Warhol was an anomaly in this re-creation: a figure, commanding massive cultural space, whose most evident feature was a massive lack.
His mother purportedly advised him not to be pushy but to let everybody know he was around. Andy, it seems, found a way to be pushy without being overtly aggressive: by simply withholding attention from people who displeased him. He manufactured a space too large for himself that could not be satisfyingly filled by others; it could only be controlled by the punitive exercise of his will.
SEVEN
Warhol is said to have had many sexual affairs, de spite Julia’s presence in his apartments. He went home with other people. One anonymous informant told Bockris that Warhol was skilled and uninhibited in bed.
Unrequited infatuations, obsessions with unavailable men, and friendships Andy vainly hoped would flower into “relationships” are amply documented. Romanticism permeated his delicate, often fey and fetishistic drawings of the 1950s: whimsical fairy tale creatures people his privately produced books of drawings.
Warhol had an early obsession with Truman Capote. He was in love, if not with Capote, then with what Capote represented: androgynous prettiness, social connections, money, and fame. Warhol’s Capote fixation became onerous to the writer. Andy had managed a brief, bar-crawling relationship with Capote’s mother, Nina, but Capote decided that Warhol was pathetic and quickly cut him off.
An earlier crush on television set designer Charles Lisanby resulted in a shared trip across several Asian countries. After a queasy start, attributed to Warhol’s unwelcome overtures and jealous rages, the adventure unfolded amiably. Warhol’s drawings of their travels are fascinating little masterpieces of ruins, temples, street life, masques, and costumes. Yet upon their return to New York, Warhol stalked off by himself at the airport. He bitterly told friends that he had “gone around the world with a boy and never got a kiss.”
Warhol had a talent for holding grudges. It’s doubtful that Lisanby wouldn’t have known the nature of Warhol’s interest in him. Perhaps he wasn’t attracted to Warhol but obtained something from Warhol’s company that he deliberately misrepresented as the possibility of an affair. Perhaps Lisanby believed he could acquire something of Warhol’s abilities while holding out the promise of an eventual sexual liaison.
EIGHT
A yearning side of Warhol’s personality seems in compatible with his famously detached persona. But he expressed it often enough, in scornfully unemotive terms. He wished, throughout college at Carnegie Tech and later with a succession of flatmates in New York, to “share problems.” His often quoted remarks that having feelings is too hard and too painful, the cold aphorisms he coined as armor against emotional hurt—these comments simultaneously reveal and repress Warhol’s obvious vulnerability.
“I want to be a machine,” he once said. Trying to be a machine is hard work, however easier it makes perceiving others as utilitarian objects. To be unloved and to wish for love truly is “too hard”—unless one reverts to an almost impossible stoicism.
Warhol’s stifling of emotional display can be seen in his self-makeover in the early ’60s, when the eager-to-please, dandyish “Raggedy Andy” of the commercial art world began to invade posh parties with entourages of marauding underground types, having adopted a tougher, invulnerable carapace: leather jackets, jeans, ungovernably messy wigs (he was going prematurely bald), sunglasses, Teddy Boy ankle boots. The pathological shyness of his childhood was transformed into a menacing aversion to being touched, a glazed and distant unapproachability.
Warhol’s reinvention of himself as a brittle, silent, withholding specter emphasized his reversed position vis-à-vis the imperious, demanding fashion editors and graphic designers he’d catered to throughout the 1950s. He would no longer play the desiring half of any unreturned attention.
Within this persona, there was also an aggressively passive response to the “AbEx” crew. Warhol made no effort to emulate the male artists of that movement or to fit in with either their aesthetic or their macho exploits. He began “playing up” the effeminacy, the challenging silence behind the shyness, the air of autistic indifference to what other people thought about him. This was a bravura refusal to appear in any way vulnerable, either to the withering ridicule of established heterosexual artists or to his own inability to connect with other people emotionally, to his longing for “real” relationships, or to the intense pain caused by his sense of inferiority, instilled by his mother and exacerbated by his later rejection by men he desired.
As Warhol puts it in POPism: The Warhol Sixties:
So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because those were all things I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I should want to change. There was nothing wrong with being a commercial artist and there was nothing wrong with collecting art that you admired. . . . And as for the “swish” thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that. . . . You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionists carried themselves . . . to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish. I certainly wasn’t a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme.7
This brittle, distancing attitude dominated the studio atmosphere as well; all that mattered was the steady production of work, regardless of whatever cacophony (loud music, blaring television sets, the amphetamine-fueled antics of people hanging around and rushing in and out) ruled the day. At his studios—his second homes—Warhol was the presiding spirit, the unquestioned boss. He seldom said anything. Others knew, almost telepathically, how he wanted things. No one was ever invited into Andy’s houses after he became famous. Relatives from Pittsburgh were welcome to visit on weekends. He got on best with children.
The exclusion of friends from his living spaces was an incremental process and another chapter in his evolving legend. People might imagine all sorts of secret things going on inside his homes. Andy never divulged what he did or, more likely, didn’t do in private. In this way he could at least pretend to have a “private life.” Ultimately, even the pretense of having one became unnecessary.
It may be a cliché that the longer a person wears a mask, the more it becomes his true face. But the cliché is often true.
NINE
Warhol conceived Pop Art as the negation of sub jectivity: the refusal of sentiment, sadness, disappointment. Just as Warhol excised, to all appearances, these qualities from his own personality, the Warhol work ethic became as hard as the steel that rolled from Pittsburgh’s factories. Similarly, the “factory” ethic informed
his work and life. Perhaps this ethic was born on the streets of Pittsburgh, or even at Carnegie Tech. It is well known that Andrew Carnegie built the institution to resemble a factory, often remarking that if it failed in its educational mission it would be easy enough to repurpose the buildings for manufacturing.
The transition from Warhol’s fey, delicate, expressively hand-drawn art of the ’50s to Pop Art entailed a brusque repudiation of the “personal” in the content, although Warhol vacillated, in many paintings from 1960, between a glacially hard-edged approach to his new subject matter and the inclusion of the drips, spatters, scumbled areas of paint, and tentative lines associated with the “high art” recognized in the 1950s. His fledgling Pop works frequently exist in two versions. His metamorphosis began with primarily black-and-white paintings of the kinds of product advertisements found in tabloid newspapers and with the iconography of comic strip panels; Warhol’s ambivalence about technique is baldly evident in double versions of works like Storm Door (1960). In one picture the stark lines and strict geometric picturing of a $12.99 storm door have been “softened” or blunted by arbitrary dribbles of black polymer paint, a nebulous area of smudgy gray brush strokes in the upper area of the picture, and the nervously tapered, inexact lines of the storm door itself; the other version reproduces the precise graphics of the advertisement, excluding all “evidence of the hand.”
The same hesitance to forgo some “artistic” touches in favor of a more audacious, straightforward reproduction of his source material turns up in most of Warhol’s black-and-white paintings derived from ads, in the form of rough drawing marks, splotches of paint, and drips; likewise, in Warhol’s comic strip paintings, such as Superman (1960), Dick Tracy (1960), and Nancy (1960), blotches of underpainting, faint colored lines extraneous to the image, and dialogue balloons partially obscured by washes of white paint appear.
