Comrade Warhol

Edinburgh Research Explorer Comrade Warhol Citation for published version: Davis, G 2016, 'Comrade Warhol', Journal of European Popular Culture, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 107-122. https://doi.org/10.1386/jepc.7.2.107_1 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1386/jepc.7.2.107_1 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Journal of European Popular Culture General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 Comrade Warhol Essay for ‘Warhol in Europe’ issue of JEPC Glyn Davis, University of Edinburgh In a 1977 interview with Glenn O’Brien for High Times magazine, Andy Warhol was asked about his current painting projects. His response outlined a political theme connecting together works made across the decade: We’ve been in Italy so much, and everybody’s always asking me if I’m a Communist because I’ve done Mao. So now I’m doing hammers and sickles for Communism, and skulls for Fascism. (Goldsmith 2004: 239) This brief comment serves to link two of Warhol’s major groups of works of the 1970s, the Skull and Hammer and Sickle series; it also partially reprises Warhol’s common tactic of attributing creative ideas to others, the notion of making ‘Communist paintings’ here seeming to originate with unidentified interrogators. Notably, Warhol does not express any personal political sympathies in his response: Communism and Fascism are topics, themes for art to engage with, rather than allegiances. This essay focuses on the Hammer and Sickle series, and the place of politics, especially Communism, within Warhol’s drawings, paintings, and photographs. Warhol’s mention of Italy in his retort to O’Brien is of crucial significance. In an essay on the Skulls, Trevor Fairbrother notes that in the mid-1970s ‘Warhol and his Factory circle were working with the European art market more closely than ever before’ (Fairbrother 1989: 108). He suggests that ‘it is tempting to read into [the Skulls] a new strategy to engage in pictorial traditions that have always been a part of the Old World art market.’ (108) Such tactics could enhance the appeal of the works to European dealers and buyers, and thus potentially boost Warhol’s finances, as well as his cultural currency in Europe. Fairbrother connects Warhol’s Skull works to a historical genealogy of other paintings featuring skulls, including a vanitas still life by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder and a number of paintings by Cézanne. Beyond this particular lineage, it may also be profitable to situate both the Skull and 1 Hammer and Sickle series in relation to the lengthy European history of still life painting. I will return to this topic, but in this essay I primarily want to interrogate an implication lodged within Fairbrother’s comment about the European art market. Specifically, I want to explore what value there is in reading the Hammer and Sickle series as ‘European’. With these works, did Warhol attempt to tailor his output to what he perceived as European themes and concerns? Most commentary on the Hammer and Sickle series has stressed the power of the symbol in the United States, reading Warhol’s images in relation to the history of Communism in North America. However, as Warhol was attempting at this time to position his work within a European context – to exhibit and sell it there, as a potential source of financial and cultural capital – then it is imperative the Hammer and Sickle series is framed from a European perspective. What European resonances and implications have been omitted from the few critical accounts of this significant series of works? Parts and Labour The mid-seventies was an especially productive period for Warhol: he received a large number of commissions for portraits; he worked on the Ladies and Gentlemen series of portraits of drag queens; he produced the American Indian and Cats and Dogs series. Warhol began working on the Hammer and Sickle series in 1975, in the midst of this prolific run. The series included drawings, photographs, and paintings. According to Bob Colacello, the germ of the idea for the Hammer and Sickle works was fomented at the Italian opening of the Ladies and Gentlemen series in Ferrara: The left-wing Italian art critics went wild, writing that Andy Warhol had exposed the cruel racism inherent in the American capitalist system, which left poor black and Hispanic boys no choice but to prostitute themselves as transvestites. At the press conference in Ferrara, a reporter wanted to know if Andy was a Communist. In Italy in the mid- seventies, the expected answer was yes. “Am I a Communist, Bob?” said Andy. “Well”, I said, “you just painted Willy Brandt’s portrait, but you’re trying to get Imelda Marcos.” “That’s my answer,” said Andy, as 2 the translators scratched their bearded chins. But back at the hotel that night, he said, “Maybe I should do real Communist paintings next. They would sell a lot in Italy.” Thus was conceived the 1977 Hammers and Sickles series. (Colacello 1990: 228) Ronnie Cutrone, Warhol’s studio assistant at the time, identifies the origin of the Hammer and Sickle series in Italian graffiti uses of the emblem. Warhol, comments Cutrone, ‘had just come back from Italy, and he said, “Gee, when you walk around Italy, all over the walls no matter where you go, there’s in chalk or paint, there’s all these images scribbled on everything with hammers and sickles.” So, in a way, that sort of makes it Pop, in a funny way.’ (Smith 1986: 278) The wide deployment of the reified symbol of the hammer and sickle by street artists in Italy as part of their lexicon – swiftly and cheaply mass-reproduced, and of denigrated cultural status – unsettled the power of the emblem in a manner analogous to the high/low reversals of Pop art. This may have boosted its appeal to Warhol as a potential theme. Appropriately enough for a series of images of tools of work, a considerable amount of labour went into the production of the Hammer and Sickles. Cutrone’s role in Warhol’s studio was, as he put it in a 1978 interview, to ‘photograph anything that's not people’ (Smith 1986: 277). Warhol’s appropriation of images made by others – such as his use of a photograph by Patricia Caulfield as the basis for his Flower paintings of the 1960s – had previously landed him in trouble (Morris 1981). As Cutrone noted, the photographs he took prevented Warhol ‘get[ting] sued from magazines if he cuts pictures out and things like that.’ (Smith 1986: 277). Despite this, Warhol initially sent Cutrone out around New York to look for pictures of hammers and sickles. This involved visiting Communist bookstores, which caused Cutrone concern: I would find myself sneaking along the skyscrapers of the Big Apple and darting into a Red bookstore, looking over my shoulder. I’d find a couple of books and brown-bag them and nonchalantly walk out into the broad daylight. I’d return with the books, heart racing, and Andy would say, half-joking, half-serious, “Were you followed by anybody?” I would answer, “I don’t think so, but if I was, I think I’m a little too old to 3 say I’m a college student studying the Russian Revolution.” (Cutrone 2004) After three weeks of fruitless searching, Warhol and Cutrone decided to use the actual items. Cutrone went to a number of hardware stores, selected a hammer and sickle, and then photographed them in the studio with ‘three or four rolls of film, all different ways, using different lighting’ (Smith 1986: 279). Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle works began to appear in late 1975. As Neil Printz notes, in a videotaped interview with Warhol from late October of that year, ‘the Italian art critic Janus remarked upon a Hammer and Sickle drawing that he had seen the day before.’ (Printz 2014: 329) David Bourdon reviewed a Minnesota exhibition of flower illustrations by Warhol in November of 1975; he commented in the review that Warhol was currently making drawings of ‘the Soviet hammer and sickle, rendered as three-dimensional objects’ (Bourdon quoted in Printz 2014: 329). Printz also notes that correspondence from early 1976 reveals that Hammer and Sickle works ‘were already far enough advanced for Warhol to offer them for sale to other dealers in Europe’ (Printz 2014: 329). From mid-November to mid-December 1976, Warhol exhibited some of the Hammer and Sickle drawings at the Visual Arts Museum in New York City, under the title ‘Andy Warhol: Drawings’. In January 1977, Hammer and Sickle works were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in an exhibition called ‘Still Lifes’. According to Arthur Danto, the works shown in an exhibition entitled Hammer and Sickle Series at Daniel Templon Gallery in Paris, 31 May to 9 July 1977, sold out (Danto 1992: 132). In comparison to the abstracted iconographic form of the hammer and sickle Communist emblem, the tools in Warhol’s images are resolutely solid and everyday.

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