POPism (3 page)

I asked Larry about Jackson Pollock. “Pollock? Socially, he was a real jerk,” Larry said. “Very unpleasant to be around. Very stupid. He was always at the Cedar on Tuesdays—that was the day he came into town to see his analyst—and he always got completely drunk, and he made a point of behaving badly to everyone.
I knew him a little from the Hamptons. I used to play saxophone in the taverns out there and he'd drop in occasionally. He was the kind of drunk who'd insist you play ‘I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby' or some other songs the musicians thought were way beneath them, so you'd have to see if you could play it in some way that you wouldn't be putting yourself down
too
much.… He was a star painter all right, but that's no reason to pretend he was a pleasant person. Some people at the Cedar took him very seriously; they would announce what he was doing every single second—‘There's Jackson!' or ‘Jackson just went to the John!'

“I'll tell you what kind of guy he was. He would go over to a black person and say, ‘How do you like your skin color?' or he'd ask a homosexual, ‘Sucked any cocks lately?' He'd walk over to me and make shooting-up gestures on his arm because he knew I was playing around with heroin then. And he could be really babyish, too. I remember he once went over to Milton Resnick and said, ‘You de Kooning imitator!' and Resnick said, ‘Step outside.' Really.” Larry laughed. “You have to have known these people to believe the things they'd fight over.” I could tell from Larry's smile that he still had a lot of affection for that whole scene.

“What about the other painters?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “Franz Kline would certainly be at the Cedar every night. He was one of those people who always got there before you did and was still there after you left. While he was talking to you, he had this way of turning to someone else as you were leaving, and you got the feeling of automatic continuity—sort of, ‘So long… So this guy comes over to me and…' and while you may have flinched at his indiscriminate friendliness, he did have the virtue of smiling and wanting to talk all the time. There were always
great discussions going on, and there was always some guy pulling out his poem and reading it to you. It was a very heavy scene.” Larry sighed. “You wouldn't have liked it at all, Andy.”

He was right. It was exactly the kind of atmosphere I'd pay to get out of. But it was fascinating to hear about, especially from Larry.

The crowd at the opening had thinned to the point where we could move out of our corner. “You didn't go to the Cedar ‘to see the stars,' though,” Larry added. “Oh, sure, you may have liked being in their aura, but what you came back for night after night was to see your friends… Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery…”

The art world sure was different in those days. I tried to imagine myself in a bar striding over to, say, Roy Lichtenstein and asking him to “step outside” because I'd heard he'd insulted my soup cans. I mean, how corny. I was glad those slug-it-out routines had been retired—they weren't my style, let alone my capability.

Larry had mentioned that Pollock came in from the country every Tuesday. That was part of the big out-of-the-city-and-into-the-country trend that the Abstract Expressionist painters had started in the late fifties when they were beginning to make money and could afford country places. Right in the middle of the twentieth century, artists were still following the tradition of wanting to get out there alone in the woods and do their stuff. Even Larry had moved to Southampton in '53—and stayed out there for five years. The tradition was really ingrained. But the sixties changed all that back again—from country to city.

One of the first people Ivan brought by to see me that July was a new young “curatorial-assistant-with-no-specific-duties” at the Met. Henry Geldzahler had grown up in Manhattan, gone to
Yale and then to grad school at Harvard. Before coming back to New York from Cambridge, he'd gone to see Ivan, who had a gallery that summer in Provincetown. “I'm about to go back to New York,” he announced, “and I want you to tell me who I should meet, what I should do, what I should say, how I should act, speak, dress, think, carry on…” Ivan gave him a thirty-minute rundown and once they were both back in New York, they started going around together to all the artists' studios. They were both avid to pick up new art before it got to the galleries—they'd drop by artists' studios and lofts to catch a look at works before they were even finished. Just days after Ivan came up to my place for the first time, he discovered Jim Rosenquist, and Henry had taken him down to see Tom Wesselmann.

When Henry and Ivan came in, I could see Henry doing an instant appraisal of every single thing in the room. He scanned all the things I collected—from the American folk pieces to the Carmen Miranda platform shoe (four inches long with a five-inch heel) that I'd bought at an auction of her effects. Almost as quickly as a computer could put the information together, he said, “We have paintings by Florine Stettheimer in storage at the Met. If you want to come over there tomorrow, I'll show them to you.” I was thrilled. Anyone who'd know just from glancing around that one room of mine that I loved Florine Stettheimer had to be brilliant. I could see that Henry was going to be a lot of fun. (Florine Stettheimer was a wealthy primitive painter, a friend of Marcel Duchamp's, who'd had a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, and her sister Carrie had made some fabulous dollhouses that I loved at the Museum of the City of New York.)

Henry was a scholar who understood the past, but he also understood how to use the past to look at the future. Right away
we became five-hours-a-day-on-the-phone-see-you-for-lunch-quick-turn-on-the-“Tonight-Show” friends.

Of course, it's easy for a young person to support new ideas. He comes onto the scene fresh. He doesn't have any positions to defend or modify, no big time or money invested. He can be a brat, say whatever he pleases, support whatever and whoever he wants to without having to think, “Will they ever invite me to dinner again?” or “Will this conflict with that letter I wrote to
Art Forum
three years ago?” In the last half of '60 Henry and I were both, in our very different ways, coming fresh into and up against the intrigues and strategies of the New York art scene, so that was good for at least four hours a day on the phone right there.

Henry liked all the rock and roll I kept playing while I painted. He told me once, “I picked up a new attitude toward the media from you—not being selective, just letting everything in at once.” And over the years I picked up a lot from Henry; I often asked him for advice. He liked to compare our relationship to ones between the Renaissance painters and the scholars of mythology or antiquity or Christian history who doled out the ideas for their subjects.

I was never embarrassed about asking someone, literally, “What should I paint?” because Pop comes from the outside, and how is asking someone for ideas any different from looking for them in a magazine? Henry understood that, but some people had contempt for you when you asked their advice—they didn't want to know anything about how you worked, they wanted you to keep your mystique so they could adore you without being embarrassed by specifics.

Take my commercial drawings. By the time Ivan introduced me to Henry, I was keeping them absolutely buried in another part of the house because one of the people Ivan had brought by before had remembered me from my commercial art days and asked to see some drawings. As soon as I showed them to him, his whole attitude toward me changed. I could actually see him changing his mind about my paintings, so from then on I decided to have a firm no-show policy about the drawings. Even with Henry, it was a couple of months before I was secure enough about his mentality to show them to him. Henry knew that the only thing that counted was what showed up on canvas—not where the idea came from or what you were doing before you painted it. He understood my style, he had a Pop attitude himself. So I was especially never embarrassed about asking him for ideas. (That kind of thing would go on for weeks whenever I started a new project—asking everyone I was with what they thought I should do. I still do it. That's one thing that has never changed; I hear one word, or maybe misunderstand somebody, and that puts me on to a good idea of my own. The object is just to keep people talking, because sooner or later a word gets dropped that throws me on a different train of thought.)

It was Henry who gave me the idea to start the Death and Disaster series. We were having lunch one day in the summer at Serendipity on East 60th Street and he laid the
Daily News
out on the table. The headline was “129
DIE IN JET
.” And that's what started me on the death series—the Car Crashes, the Disasters, the Electric Chairs….

(Whenever I look back at that front page, I'm struck by the date—June 4, 1962. Six years—to the date—later, my own disaster was the front-page headline: “
ARTIST SHOT
.”)

• • •

I asked Ivan for ideas, too, and at a certain point he said, “You know, people want to see
you
. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination.” That's how I came to do the first Self-Portraits. Another time he said, “Why don't you paint some cows, they're so wonderfully pastoral and such a durable image in the history of the arts.” (Ivan talked like this.) I don't know how “pastoral” he expected me to make them, but when he saw the huge cow heads—bright pink on a bright yellow background—that I was going to have made into rolls of wallpaper, he was shocked. But after a moment he exploded with: “They're
super
-pastoral! They're ridiculous! They're blazingly bright and vulgar!” I mean, he loved those cows, and for my next show we papered all the walls in the gallery with them.

It was on one of those evenings when I'd asked around ten or fifteen people for suggestions that finally one lady friend of mine asked me the right question: “Well, what do you love most?” That's how I started painting money.

There were times, though, when I didn't follow advice—like when I told Henry I was going to quit painting comic strips and he didn't think I should. Ivan had just shown me Lichtenstein's Ben Day dots and I thought, “Oh, why couldn't
I
have thought of that?” Right then I decided that since Roy was doing comics so well, that I would just stop comics altogether and go in other directions where I could come out first—like quantity and repetition. Henry said to me, “Oh, but your comics are fabulous—they're not ‘better' or ‘worse' than Roy's—the world can use them both, they're both very different.” Later on, though, Henry realized, “From the point of view of strategy and military
installation, you were of course correct. That territory had been preempted.”

Ivan got a bunch of us hooked on going out to the Fox Theater in Brooklyn to see Murray the K's rock-and-roll shows—Martha and the Vandellas, Dion, Little Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, the Ronettes, Marvin Gaye, the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and everybody else you could imagine. Each group did their hit song of the week, only the headliner did more than one or two numbers. But even he was only on for about fifteen minutes. I can't remember if there was a band or if they all lip-synced to their own records, which was actually the way the kids liked it best, with every sound exactly the way it was on the records—like if they were seeing, say, the Crystals, they'd expect to hear every little rattle in the Phil Spector production.

The audience was mixed, black and white, but the black acts got most of the applause. Murray the K would be up on stage screaming his “Ahhh-vey!'s” and talking about the “submarine races” and doing all his radio routines with the “Dancing Girls” and the Murray the K dancers. The kids would be going crazy all around us and Ivan would be screaming along with them one minute and the next minute saying things like “It's so naive! It's full of spirit and high rhythm! All the messages are basic love and alienation! There's no complex worldly wisdom! It's just good straightforward stuff with tremendous force and conviction!” (As I said, that was the way he really talked.)

We'd see the acts over and over. The Fox was a real movie palace, all velvet ropes and brass and marble fountains and purple and amber lights—sort of Moorish, with its high, dark lobby, always so cool in the summer—thousands of kids walking around, drinking sodas and smoking cigarettes. Ivan said to
me years later, “Those days were very meaningful for me because I loved the music so much.”

(Of course, like everybody else in the fall of '61, we were also running down to the Peppermint Lounge on 45th Street. As
Variety
headlined,
“NEW ‘TWIST' IN CAFE SOCIETY
—
ADULTS
NOW DIG JUVES
'
NEW BEAT
.”)

“I've lost a fortune over the years, thanks to my lack of objectivity about you,” David Bourdon complained to me once. What he meant was that we were such good friends that he didn't ever know what to think of my art, so he passed up the chance to buy a lot of my paintings in the early days when they were selling very cheap. David wasn't one of the people who'd laughed at my work in the beginning. But on the other hand, he wasn't one of the people who'd told me it was great, either.

We'd met in the fifties through a mutual friend who did the Bonwit Teller windows. David wrote art criticism (this was before he worked for the
Village Voice
and long before he worked for
Life
), and we both collected art. Soon we were going around to galleries together.

At the end of the fifties there was a year or so when I didn't see him at all, and then one day he called up and said, “I just picked up a magazine and read that a new artist named Andy Warhol is painting soup cans. Is that
you
?” I asked him if he wanted to come over and see for himself if that was me. He got right on the subway in Brooklyn Heights, where he lived, and was at my house in less than an hour. I showed him my work and waited for him to say something, but he just stood there looking puzzled. Finally he said, “Well, put yourself in my position: I've only known you as a commercial artist, and now
you've become a painter, and yet you're still painting commercial art subjects. Frankly, I don't know what to think.”