Andy Warhol (6 page)

Warhol painted Campbell's soup cans throughout his life. After the Ferus Gallery soup cans, there were paintings of a hundred, and even two hundred,
Campbell's Soup Cans.
Then there were paintings of Campbell's soup cans in which the cans were undergoing some kind of martyrdom—being pierced with a can opener, or crushed, or flayed by having the label torn off. These belong in spirit with the various paintings of human disasters that he was shortly to turn to—car crashes, airplane crashes, and the like. The formats he discovered for showing the cans feel almost like formats for religious painting—choruses, assemblies, iconostases, where the cans were understood as vessels for our daily soup. There was a steaming bowl of Campbell's soup leaning against the far wall of his studio when he left it for the last time, when he went to the hospital for the operation that was to kill him in 1987. It is next to a double Jesus, from the
Last Supper
variations he did in his last years. It really did meet his demand that, whatever “idea” Latow was to give him, it had to be personal. What he admired about commercial culture was the uniformity and predictability of everyday manufactured food. One can of Campbell's tomato soup is like every other can. No matter who you are, you cannot get a better can of soup than the next person. Wittgenstein said that he did not care what he ate as along as it was always the same. The repetition of instantly recognized
food containers—Campbell's cans, Coca-Cola bottles—was an emblem of political equality. It was not simply a formal device of advanced painting.

In November 1962 Warhol's show opened at the Stable Gallery, which had since relocated to an elegant town house on East Seventy-fourth Street. A week earlier, three of his works appeared in a show called “The New Realists” at the Sidney Janis Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, curated by the French critic Pierre Restany, who was associated with the
Nouveau Realiste
movement in France. The Janis show may have appeared to be an effort to absorb Pop into the European movement, and at the same time declare that the Abstract Expressionist movement had come to an end, since Janis's gallery had represented several of its leading figures. To turn its space over to the Pop and the New Realists seemed a betrayal of the values of the New York School in favor of the values of the “gum-chewing, pinheaded delinquents.” Several of the older artists resigned in protest.

Certainly a line was being drawn between two periods of artistic production in New York, but even more, though this was less evident at the time, between two periods of art history. The 1960s effectively saw the end of Modernism and the beginning of an entirely new era, which Pop exemplified. But Pop was also too American in spirit to be easily absorbed into a single movement with the
Nouveaux Realistes
, which was essentially an expression of European values. The robust Americanism of Pop was perhaps accentuated by the end of the Cuban missile crisis on October 26
of that year. The sudden lifting of the threat to the entire form of life the Pop artists celebrated must have added a certain luminosity to such innocent artifacts of the American soul as Campbell's soup and Coca-Cola. I remember, as a Fulbright student, sitting in an audience addressed by Janet Flanner, the expatriate
New Yorker
writer, who told us that the stomach is the most patriotic of organs, that there were times when the craving for certain foods that could not be satisfied in Paris was overwhelming.

There were eighteen rather heterogeneous works in Warhol's first Stable show: three so-called serial works of one hundred soup cans, one hundred Coca-Cola bottles, and one hundred dollar bills, as well as
Red Elvis—a
serial array of thirty-six Elvis heads. There were two paintings with Marilyn Monroe as subject, one of which, consisting as it did of fifty Marilyn heads, could have been counted as a serial painting, as could a silk-screen painting of the baseball player Roger Maris swinging a bat, over and over and over, in front of a catcher, like a recurrent memory. Then there was
Dance Diagram
, a large black-and-white painting of where to put one's left and right foot, together with the connecting lines to be following in executing a step; and
Do It Yourself (Flowers)
, a brilliant “painting by the numbers” painting. There were no comic images of the sort included in the Bonwit Teller show, Warhol having left that genre of Pop to Roy Lichtenstein. Finally, there was the first of Warhol's Death and Disaster paintings,
127 Die.
A reviewer would have had a hard time putting this
all together as a consistent oeuvre. But it made clear that Warhol was more than the painter of soup cans.

Dance Diagram
and
Do It Yourself (Flowers)
belong with the grainy advertisements of the Bonwit Teller window display, if we think of the latter as a kind of portrait of everyman and everywoman, with their inventories of minor aches and pains, and the cosmetic blemishes that make them, in at least their own minds, unattractive, and hence unlovable and lonely. Learning to dance presents itself as a way of overcoming the loneliness: one can hold a partner while the music plays, and feel the other's warmth. Learning to paint by buying a kit and filling in the numbered areas on a canvas board with pigment is a pathetic effort at selfimprovement by acquiring an “accomplishment” that involves no talent whatsoever. It only underscores the distance between one's life and that of the celebrities that makes one feel inferior. But even the celebrities are not that happy. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide the day that Warhol's show at the Ferus Gallery closed. Warhol painted her beautiful head as if it were the head of a saint on a field of gold leaf in a religious icon. She was Saint Marilyn of the Sorrows. Her beauty was a mask. Warhol's skills as a commercial artist stood him in good stead when he began to execute Marilyn Monroe paintings. He drew a frame around her head in a publicity photograph for the film
Niagara
and had it made into a silk screen. This, in effect, made her face into a mask, which he could reproduce over and over again. In fact, Warhol did twenty-four
Marilyn
paintings, the most spectacular of which
was
Marilyn Diptych
, which was included in his first Stable Gallery show.

The colors in
Marilyn Diptych
were garish—chrome yellow hair, chartreuse eye shadow, smeary red lipstick. There were two sets of twenty-five Marilyns, colored on the left, black and white on the right. The colored ones are fairly uniform, even if off register. The black-and-white ones show a certain variation. In the second row from the left, for example, the screen gets clogged with the black ink, as if a shadow had fallen over the star's face. Then the features get paler and paler until, in the upper right corner, the face feels as if it is fading away from the world as we read across the diptych. It is like a graphic representation of Marilyn dying, without the smile leaving her face. In this respect the fifty faces of Marilyn Monroe is very different from the array of thirty-two
Campbell's Soup Cans
, which are uniformly bright. There is no internal transformation. In
Marilyn Diptych
there is repetition, but it is a transformative repetition, in which the accidentalities of the silk-screen medium are allowed to remain, like the honks and squawks of a saxophone solo, in performances by John Coltrane.

The one anomalous work was
129 Die.
It was the front-page photograph of a jet crash in the
New York Mirror
for June 4, 1962. Henry Geldzahler, the curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, brought it to Warhol, saying, “It's enough life. It's time for a little death.” He wanted Warhol to change from the celebrator of consumption to something deeper and more serious. Warhol was to spend much of the following year making Death and Disaster silk-screen paintings: car crashes, plane crashes, race riots, suicides, poisonings—the disasters we see on the evening news, or that get written about in the tabloids and then forgotten, as if violent deaths happened to others, to people we know nothing about. They are like illustrations to Marcel Duchamp's mock epitaph—
D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent
—“Anyway, it's always the others who die.” Like the batter who dreams, over and over again, of a base hit or a strikeout, the disasters are repeated and repeated in a single frame, as if to dull the horror. You cannot die more than once—“After the first death there is no other,” as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote—though Warhol did in fact die twice. But what does it mean, showing people dying the same death over and over? Warhol used decorator colors for these paintings, lavender and rose and orange and mint-green—as if he were producing wallpaper. Sometimes he would pair a disaster painting with a blank monochrome canvas in the same color. It made for a more impressive work than the disaster taken alone. But it points to a contrast as well, between the world of disaster and devastation and the void—the world emptied of incident, lavender emptiness.

Dying in America. Andy Warhol,
Marilyn Diptych
, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint and silk-screen ink on canvas, 82 × 57 in. (205.4 × 144.8 cm). Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

The 1962 Stable show was a huge success, critically and financially, though Warhol's prices were unusually modest. But in a way Warhol himself was carried along with his work, as if he were inseparable from it, with his wig, his weak eyesight, his bad complexion, his loopy, ill-defined musculature. Who, unless they
knew Lichtenstein or Oldenburg or Wesselman or Rosenquist personally, had any idea of what they actually looked like as men? But Andy became as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Mickey Mouse. He became a public personality. With the first Stable show Warhol became Andy, the Pop artist—an icon, identified with his bafflingly obvious work, and with the world in which Americans lived. He was the one that took that world and turned it into art that everyone felt they understood. Much of the publicity was negative, but there was a lot of it, and it didn't matter what it said.

One the best critics of the time responded to what the negativity left untouched. Michael Fried, cultivated and sophisticated as few journalistic critics, captured the great truths of the Stable shows: “Of all the painters working today in the service—or thrall—of a popular iconograph, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular. At his strongest—and I take this to be the Marilyn Monroe paintings—Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity (as in his choice of colors) and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time. That I for one find moving.”

The tragedy of the commonplace—“beauty falls from air, queens have died young and fair”—is as true of New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s as it was of Paris and Lombardy at the time of the Renaissance. No one standing in front of
Marilyn
could say—how cheap, how empty. Warhol, in giving us our
world transfigured into art, transfigured us and himself in the process. Even if the Death and Disaster paintings did not sell, even if Pop's days were numbered, ours was becoming the Age of Warhol. An Age is defined in terms of its art. Art before Andy was radically different from the art that came after him, and through him.

Because of the success of his first show at the Stable Gallery, Andy attained a degree of celebrity unshared by the other artists in the Pop movement: it in fact outlasted the movement itself, which was as much a cultural craze as an art movement, based on brashness and novelty. His productive career took a direction very different from that of any of his peers. It was not the typical career of the Artist in his Studio, producing a body of work to be shown at regular intervals at a gallery, harvesting critical reviews and sales to important collectors. More than any artist of comparable importance, Andy intuited the great changes that made the 1960s the “Sixties,” and helped shape the era he lived through, so that his art both became part of his times and transcended them. He invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film,
and drugs, as well as art. But beyond even that, he changed the concept of art itself, so that his work induced a transformation in art's philosophy so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art in the same way that it had been thought of even a few years before him. He induced, one might say, a deep discontinuity into the history of art by removing from the way art was conceived most of what everyone thought belonged to its essence. Picasso, it must be said, was the most important artist of the first half of the twentieth century, inasmuch as he revolutionized painting and sculpture in deep and liberating ways. Warhol revolutionized art as such. His decisions were always surprising, and if they did not especially make his work popular, they seem, in retrospect, to have been precisely in harmony with the spirit of his era. Which makes it natural to think of ours as the Age of Warhol, to the degree that he set his stamp on what was allowable.