Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  “What about the other flower?” he asks.

  “Orange? That’s complementary to violet.”

  He opens a premixed can of orange paint and rolls the color back and forth across the other flower. The whole process takes a few minutes. We remove the silk screen and see those two colorful flowers pop out at us from the canvas.

  I feel my heart jump with the excitement of experiencing the creation of this large Pop Art painting. I ask him if he’ll give it to me. After all, he’s never paid me for the films we are doing together. No, he won’t give it to me, but he’ll sell it cheap, below his dealer’s price. We agree on $2,000. I write him a check on the spot for $1,000 and later give him another $1,000 that I scrounge together. I still have the two receipts, on each of which he scribbled, “Two flowers, sold to Isabel defraine, $1,000.”

  In 1970 Gordon Locksley, a Minneapolis art dealer, offers me $40,000 for the Two Flowers. In 1975 I am offered $125,000 by Ivan Karp of the O.K. Harris Gallery. In 1980 Andy tells me the painting is worth $200,000. I don’t know how much the scribbled receipts are worth. The painting hangs in my living room. It costs me a fortune just to keep it insured.

  Today when I look at it, I marvel at what I see. First of all, it is beautiful, very beautiful. But what is it? What does it show? Those are not two flowers that Andy picked in a garden or saw in a vase. He first spotted them in a photography magazine. He enlarged the photograph (later he was sued by the photographer), then ordered a silk screen made from the photograph. Of course, he learned all about screens and multiples and blow-ups and colorization in his days as a commercial artist. Unhesitatingly he absorbed and transformed these techniques.

  When I study the flower painting even more closely, I wonder what kind of flower I see. Is it buttercup, cosmos, anemone, poppy, apple, peach, or pear blossom? It can be any of these. Andy does not care to be specific. Is the flower small and blown up? Is it large and exotic? Is it edible or poisonous? Is it in a vase, at a florist’s shop, or in the field?

  The flat, solid color makes the painting unreal. Real flowers have different shading around the pistils and stamens. So I come to the conclusion that these flowers are not live. They are plastic, can be mass produced, and will last forever. Thus we come to Andy’s idea of “plastic inevitability,” a state of affairs beyond surrealism in which the fake is more real than the real.

  By this time it is common for artists to use photographs incidentally in their work. It is part of the art of Rauschenberg and Duchamp. But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. The photograph is processed onto the canvas and colored in. There is no original painting; from the start, there are multiples. His paintings are mass produced. Theoretically, they are produced by the artist. But not always. Before long there is a scandal. Eager “volunteers” turn out dozens of Warhols without his knowledge. They are identical to the other multiples. But the signatures are forged.

  Who is to say the unauthorized paintings are fakes, for they are exactly like the “originals.” But they are bootleg paintings. I tell Andy to number his paintings, in order to control production.

  On a day in 1965, Andy moves toward the west wall of his vast, silvery loft. A large silk-screen painting of an electric chair leaps at me. The chair stands by itself in the middle of a silent room. An aura of mystery surrounds it. The room takes on an extraordinary meaning. It is a stage set for death. The viewer cannot help but think about who sat on that chair last.

  The design of the chair is both functional and elegant. It is inspired by the mission style, a kind of Gustav Stickley design. The leather straps caress the floor. Somehow the chair looks noble. What about an electric bed? I wonder. Have they thought of it? Wouldn’t dying in your sleep be more unnoticed, even by the sleeper? But the government has decided against that. Maybe dying in your sleep is too casual, too unaware; it is not capital punishment.

  I ask Andy, “Is there more than one manufacturer of electric chairs?”

  “Gee, I don’t know.”

  “Are they signed the way a Thonet chair is signed?”

  He shrugs. “Just a serial number.”

  I look again at the painting and say, “I like it. You are up-front.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The death element is obvious.”

  “Gee.”

  “It’s honest subliminal advertising.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how Madison Avenue uses death symbols to lure the customers.”

  “No, tell me.”

  Andy loves to play dumb—the village idiot, the global idiot. When he first uses this technique on me, I naively explain, on and on. Then I realize it’s part of his flattery. He wants you to think he’s learning from you. Later, I see he takes it a step further—he actually learns many things that way.

  So I explain: “I’ve read somewhere that sex and death are the greatest motivating forces for people. Advertisers constantly use symbols of sex and death, usually hidden or subtly disguised.” I pick up a magazine from a cluttered tabletop and flip through it. “Here, take this ad for Scotch. There are a bottle, two glasses with ice cubes in them, two hands, one reaching for the bottle, the other for a glass.”

  Andy nods. He loves someone to tell him a story. He is eight years old again, and his mother is reading to him from a comic book. I’m enjoying myself too at this point, as I launch into a description of how the two hands seem to touch or even caress. In fact, the woman’s hand suggests that she is holding a phallus—the circular glass. I point out that if she were really holding a glass the way her hand is shown, she’d get a cramp.

  Then I go into the ice cubes, how ice crystallizes in crisscross strokes, and these have been exaggerated by the commercial artist into skulls and crossbones in a way that is not discernible to the eye but can be read by the subconscious. Then there is the way the male hand is holding the bottle—it suggests a subliminal ejaculation. The model was probably carefully chosen from among hundreds because his wrist hairs curl in the manner of pubic hair. The consumer, unaware of any of this symbolism, is irresistibly drawn to the photograph and the product.

  “Where’d you hear all that?” Andy asks.

  He knows perfectly well what I’m talking about from his own days in the advertising world. I bet he was a master of the subliminal touch.

  “And death,” I go on. “For some people the pull of death is as irresistible as sex, especially people who buy cigarettes and alcohol. Of course, the death symbols are hidden. But you’re up-front with your death symbols, your electric chair. Does the public know what you’re up to, or will you tell them?”

  “You’re getting too smart.”

  “What fascinates you about capital punishment?”

  Andy doesn’t answer. I point to the leather straps that float on the left side of the chair. “Do you see any symbol in that strap?”

  “I’m not big for that stuff.”

  “It’s an S-and-M attachment.”

  “Gee, you’re right.”

  “Do you suppose other countries use the electric chair?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I figure that only an advanced country can afford it because it requires so much electricity, massive amounts that dim the lights throughout the prison at the moment of execution so that inmates roar and growl and shake their metal gates. It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment. “How do you feel about it?” I ask Andy.

  I get the usual shrug. “And you?” he asks.

  “I guess I’m for it as an abstract sanction, but I’m against it on a one-by-one basis.”

  While we are talking we are moving through the studio.

  “Here’s some more of your fascination with death.” I point to the big silk screen of an atomic mushroom. “This one is obviously about sex too.”

  The global idiot: “Sex?”<
br />
  “Come on; your mushroom looks just like a penis in eruption.”

  Andy: “Gee.”

  “Is that why you selected the subject?”

  “Ultra, you x-ray everything.”

  “You know, you’re the first to take subliminal advertising and Pop it up into fine art. You know you’re doing that, don’t you?”

  We come to one of his Marilyn Monroe portraits. I say, “She was so beautiful and sexy, yet as vulnerable as a child. Gossip says she was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Do you think it’s true?”

  “Sure.”

  “When did you first paint her?”

  “The day after she died. I ordered a silk screen made from her photograph when I heard about her death on the radio.”

  “You didn’t waste any time.”

  “Timing is all.”

  “You mean timing is art.”

  He’s right. Her death was in the news. It was on people’s minds. It was commercial. The moment she was dead was the time to immortalize her.

  Ingrid joins us as Andy picks up a small silk screen of Marilyn, about forty by forty inches. Then he looks among the paint cans and chooses a fairly dark green. “Do you like that for the background?” he asks.

  “It’s too dark,” I say.

  Ingrid disagrees. She says, “It should be dark.”

  “No,” I say, “it should be more tender, the way Marilyn was, a kind of Veronese green.”

  Andy peers into other cans of color and comes up with a green just a little lighter than the one he originally chose. I add, “Yes, that’s a good color, especially with the blondness of her hair and the pink of her skin. It’s like the color of one of those sweet Italian cassatas. It’s delicious, like she was.”

  He applies it with a roller to the entire background and then with a small brush to her eyelids. He backs up and says, “Yes, that’s right.” Then he turns to me and intones, in a singsong voice, “You know what, Ultra is a violet, is a violet, is a violet.”

  We keep moving through the studio, and soon he pulls out a huge, menacing painting, Red Race Riot. It consists of repetitious images, some the same, some different, all violent. Policemen with attack dogs are battling blacks. The repetition produces an action painting. My eyes move quickly to grab each frame. I feel myself becoming the action, getting involved. But what is he saying? Is he making a statement about blacks? About the police? About violence?

  “Do you care about blacks and their problems?” I ask.

  Bored with this conversation, Ingrid drifts off.

  “It’s from a photograph that was on the front page.” He is so noncommittal, so amoral, he does not take sides. To me, he has delivered an apocalyptic message of the times. To him, it is only a masturbatory gesture.

  We come to Ambulance Disaster, a picture painful to look at. It shows a white ambulance that has just crashed into a car. A body has been ejected through a window. Even though the body is half covered, it hurts one’s sense of being to look at it. There are two versions of the picture in juxtaposition, one above, one below. The crash is doubled, magnified. An ambulance crashing twice as it transports a victim is Popped up into dramatic fury.

  Why does Andy pick these subjects? Because he understands the shock value of death and its subliminal message. But being Warhol, he takes it all one step further. Aware that his art is advertising, he goes on to create subliminal art. He deliberately takes the objects that people are fascinated by and turns them into art.

  That evening we stop at a coffee shop on the way to the Cinematheque, the loft in SoHo where his films are shown. We sit at the counter on high chrome stools covered with green vinyl. I study the menu for something that will fit my fanatical standards about organic and unprocessed foods. Andy doesn’t bother to wait for me to make a choice. While I am still reading, he orders Coke, cream of chicken soup, peaches in syrup, and coffee. By the time I give my order, his food is already in front of him and he has started to eat.

  “That waitress has no sense of etiquette,” I say, not wanting to direct the rebuke to him.

  “What do you mean?”

  I glance from the empty space in front of me to the food before him.

  “I know all about etiquette,” he says huffily. “I illustrated Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette.”

  Then he notices that I am staring hypnotically at his food. “Something wrong?”

  “Look at what you have in front of you—four of your paintings.”

  There, neatly arranged on the plastic counter, are Andy Warhol’s Coke Bottle, 1962; Campbell’s Soup, 1962; Del Monte Peach Halves, 1962; and Martinson’s Coffee, 1962.

  “Hmmm,” he says. “Is that why they taste so good?”

  Earlier that day, in our tour of his studio, we’d stopped in front of a photograph of his 32 Soup Cans, made of thirty-two panels, each twenty by sixteen inches, each depicting a different soup: Vegetable Bean, Chicken Vegetable, Turkey Noodle, Cream of Chicken, Clam Chowder, Beef Broth, Bouillon, Cream of Mushroom, Split Pea with Onion, Minestrone, Chili Beef, Black Bean, Green Pea … I’d felt compelled to read the names of all thirty-two varieties. “You just paint what’s in front of you at mealtime,” I’d said.

  Now, at the lunch counter, Andy says, “I like this food. I eat it. I paint it.”

  “Chagall does the opposite,” I say. “He makes cows and roosters dance in the sky to the sound of his green violin. He kisses his beloved and waltzes with her above the rooftops. Do you know that when Chagall was head of the art school in Vitebsk, he enrolled all the town’s housepainters, their children, and their wives?”

  “That’s a good idea. People who paint houses should be paid more than artists because it’s more work.”

  “People say you were once a housepainter because you use a roller.”

  “Barnett Newman paints walls with a stripe on them and gets away with it.”

  “Gets away with what?”

  “He paints a wall in one color with a black line and sells it for forty thousand dollars.”

  So much for trying to discuss higher values with Andy.

  I review in my mind’s eye the actual paintings of the meal placed before Andy, and I come up with a surprising discovery. All four paintings contain words, the brand names of the products, so they have quadruple impact on viewers—visible, audible, edible, and readable. “You really pound it in,” I say.

  Andy is silent for a while. Then he says, “John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances.”

  “Duchamp used a lot of words in his paintings. His Mona Lisa has the letters ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “Something about fucking.”

  I go on: “The letters sound like ‘Elle a chaud au cul.’ In English that means ‘She has a hot ass.’ All the viewer has to do is read your paintings.”

  “Yep; if you want to know all about my paintings, just look at the surface. There’s nothing behind.”

  I have just read an article by the critic Clement Greenberg about the flat painting technique used in Pop as opposed to the highly visible, active brush strokes of the Abstract Expressionists. “What’s so important about flat painting?” I ask.

  Andy just stares.

  “And why do you put words in paintings? Is it to create visual noise?”

  He stares some more.

  “I bet you think visual noise will make real noise and get you the attention of the press.”

  “Oh, Ultra.”

  I am reminded of a story about Dali. I tell Andy that when Dali got to this country, one of the first objects he made was a chocolate cup and saucer, a piece of edible art. It was displayed in the window of a Fifth Avenue store. Dali didn’t like the way it was shown. It was supposed to be suspended in the air. But there on Fifth Avenue, for all to see, it just sat on a table. Dali complained to the window display people. They refused to make a change, and on a Saturday at noon, with crowds of people on the ave
nue, Dali hurled a large rock through the window. Of course, he stopped traffic. He was arrested. The next day there was a huge headline: MAD SPANISH ARTIST, WITH POINTED MUSTACHES, SMASHES FIFTH AVENUE WINDOW. From that day on, his fame in the U.S. was assured.

  As usual, Andy is mesmerized by my story. “Oh, how great,” he says.

  “You put words on a Dick Tracy cartoon, on Popeye—”

  “Rauschenberg has that one.”

  “… the match case, Close Cover Before Striking, Pepsi-Cola. That’s a gorgeous painting. I think it’s a masterpiece of commercial art.”

  “Well, thanks, Ultra.”

  “Were those paintings painted by hand?” I mean with paint and brush rather than with a roller.

  “Half and half.”

  “Did you use ready-made letters?”

  “Sure we did.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Helpers.”

  A few days later, in my neighborhood supermarket on Eighty-eighth Street, I see a woman stacking her cart with Campbell soup cans. I watch her pile up several dozen cans. I wonder if she runs a boardinghouse. I ask her why she’s buying so many. Without an instant’s hesitation, she says, “They are works of art.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Andy Warhol copied them. I display them on my shelves, next to my books.”

  I am stunned. The next day I take Andy a whole shopping bag of soup cans and ask him to autograph them. He is delighted when I tell him about the woman in the market. Unfortunately, over the next few weeks some visiting friends eat the soup. I should have saved the empty signed cans. I could retire on them.

  ROCK BEAT

  A wave of energetic idealism sweeps the nation at the outset of the turbulent 1960s, as the torch is passed to the new, young president, who exhorts us at his inaugural: “So let us begin anew.” The words are new; they seize us, thrill us.

  In not much more than a blink of an eye, we go from racism to civil riot, from gin and whiskey to marijuana, speed, and heroin; from Eisenhower, the father president, to not trusting anyone over thirty; from no more war to slaughter in Vietnam; from saluting the flag to burning it; from culture to subculture; from acoustic to electric; from marriage to open sex; from straight to gay; from the underground to the moon, where we walk with pride. Even the Catholic Church abolishes centuries of tradition and translates the mass into English.