Documents TOP of the POPS:A Critic at Large Louis Menand. The
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Documents TOP OF THE POPS:A Critic at Large Louis Menand. The New Yorker. New York:Jan 11, 2010. Vol. 85, Iss. 44, p. 57 All documents are reproduced with the permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. Abstract (Summary) Menand discusses the many paradoxes in the life and work of iconic Pop artist Andy Warhol. To this day, the ambiguity and pretense that Warhol and his Factory cultivated in their extended commentary on America culture continues to engender arguments as to what his true message was. Full Text (6784 words) (Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2010 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.) Andy Warhol's parents came from a village in the Carpathian Mountains, in what is now Slovakia. They immigrated to Pittsburgh, where, in 1928, Andy was born, the youngest of four children. Warhol's father was a construction worker, and he died, of peritonitis, when Andy was thirteen; but he had saved enough money for his son to go to college, since it was obvious that Andy was an unusual and talented child. Warhol entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) when he was seventeen, and majored in pictorial design. He struggled at first. He was younger than most of the other students, many of whom were veterans attending on the G.I. Bill; he was also possibly dyslexic. But he eventually became an admired, and sometimes controversial, figure at the school. He had an ethereality that was oddly charismatic‐‐"like an angel in the sky" is the way one of his classmates remembered him. After he graduated, in June, 1949, he moved to New York City, where he found work as an illustrator. By 1960, Warhol had become one of the most successful commercial artists in New York. He drew, with a distinctive and recognizable line, magazine illustrations, advertisements, book jackets, and album covers, and he owned a four‐story town house on the Upper East Side. But he had fine‐art aspirations. His fey, slightly spacy air of ingenuousness was not a liability at advertising agencies and fashion magazines, but it was a problem in literary and artistic circles, and especially among gays. Warhol was regarded as a slightly embarrassing groupie. Truman Capote, with whom he was briefly infatuated, called him "a hopeless born loser." "A terrible little man," the director of the Tibor de Nagy gallery, where the poet Frank O'Hara hung out, is said to have described him. "A very boring person, but you have to be nice to him because he might buy a painting." In 1958, after Jasper Johns's exhibition of the "Flag" paintings, at the Castelli Gallery, rocked the New York art world, Warhol became obsessed with Johns, and with Johns's collaborator and (many have assumed) lover Robert Rauschenberg. They, too, were cool; Warhol later decided that he was too "swish" for them. Warhol's big break finally came in 1962, with a one‐man exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, in Los Angeles. This was "32 Campbell's Soup Cans"‐‐thirty‐two paintings of soup cans, each a different flavor. A New York show soon followed, and by 1964, the year he exhibited the "Brillo Soap Pads Box" sculptures, he was being written up in Time. He was no longer on the outside of the windowpane. Warhol had already begun making movies. He also produced the Velvet Underground, and he "wrote" (using a tape recorder) a novel, entitled "a." In the mid‐nineteen‐sixties, his studio on East Forty‐seventh Street, known as the Factory, was a center of avant‐garde activity. Virtually everyone fashionable in art, ideas, and entertainment passed through it, from Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan to Susan Sontag and John Ashbery. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory; transvestism was the fashion. Warhol himself wore jeans and took only prescription diet pills, but he developed a carapace of inscrutability. He could be generous and he could be withholding, and you never knew which he would choose‐‐the classic technique of the passive‐ aggressive. Within the Factory, he was known as Drella, after the two sides of his personality, Dracula and Cinderella. As an artist, he was astonishingly productive and a great risk‐taker. At a time when it seemed that everyone was going too far, he went farther. Then, in 1968, a paranoid schizophrenic named Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and nearly killed him, and although he returned to painting and to a jet‐set social life, his work was never again on the leading edge of the contemporary arts. He died in New York Hospital, after a routine operation, in 1987. He was fifty‐eight. There are some terrific books about Warhol and the nineteen‐sixties, including Warhol's own wonderfully funny and clever memoir, written with Pat Hackett, "POPism" (1980). The recently published "Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol," by Tony Scherman and David Dalton, is, basically, the familiar story. It is not as richly informative as Steven Watson's monumental group biography of Warhol and his circle, "Factory Made" (2003), or as critically imaginative as Wayne Koestenbaum's "Andy Warhol" (2001), but it is knowledgeable and smart, it presents much fresh material (Dalton and his sister, Sarah, were close to Warhol in the nineteen‐sixties), and it's a lot of fun to read. Anyone who writes about Warhol faces two meta‐problems, one having to do with the man and the other with the work. It should be a rule when writing about Warhol never to take anything he said completely seriously, and it would be a rule, probably, if there were not always one or two irresistible bits that suit the writer's purpose. From the beginning, Warhol postured and prevaricated when he was interviewed, sometimes obviously but sometimes not so obviously. And the sources of several of his most apparently serious remarks‐‐a 1963 interview in ARTnews, by Gene Swenson, and a 1966 interview in the East Village Other, by Gretchen Berg‐‐ were almost certainly doctored by the interviewers. Berg referred to her piece as a "word collage," and in the ARTnews interview Warhol is made to refer to an article in The Hudson Review, a publication that was about as far outside his orbit as the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened. He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on a lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings. And he demonstrated, almost every time he did this, that it didn't make any difference. His Brillo boxes were received as art, and his eight‐hour movie of the Empire State Building was received as a movie. The people who saw someone pretending to be Andy Warhol believed that they had seen Andy Warhol. ("Andy helped me see into fame and through it," Midgette later said.) The works that his mother signed and that other people made were sold as Warhols. And what he made up in interviews was quoted by critics to explain his intentions. Warhol wasn't hiding anything, and he wasn't out to trick anyone. He was only changing one rule, the most basic rule, of the game. He found that people just kept on playing. Warhol loved gossip. He spent hours on the phone every day keeping up with the scene, and he naturally populated his world with men and women who shared his taste. Quite a few of these later produced memoirs: Gerard Malanga, who was Warhol's principal assistant from 1963 to 1970; John Giorno, the star of Warhol's first film, "Sleep" (1963); Mary Woronov, who performed with the Velvet Underground and acted in some of the films; and the so‐called superstars Janet Susan Mary Hoffman (a.k.a. Viva) and Isabelle Collin Dufresne (a.k.a. Ultra Violet). Other Factory figures‐‐notably Billy Linich (a.k.a. Billy Name), who was the de‐facto chief of operations at the Factory; Brigid Berlin, a Fifth Avenue heiress and connoisseur of amphetamines; and the underground movie actor Taylor Mead‐‐ were interviewed repeatedly over the years. So were various art‐world figures associated with Warhol in the early stages of his career, particularly Emile de Antonio, a documentary filmmaker, and Henry Geldzahler, a curator of American painting and sculpture at the Met, both of whom introduced Warhol to artists, dealers, and collectors. Ivan Karp, who worked at the Castelli Gallery, and who discovered many of the Pop artists, gave a number of interviews. So did Irving Blum, who ran the Ferus Gallery, and who bought "32 Campbell's Soup Cans," and Robert Scull, a taxi tycoon and art collector, whose wife at the time was the subject of one of Warhol's earliest and most famous portrait paintings, "Ethel Scull 36 Times," in 1963. (Some of these interviews are collected in "The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol," by John Wilcock, which is being republished early this year.) For the biographer, these sources have "Handle with Care" stamped all over them. On the art‐world side, of course, the subjects have a professional or financial stake in Warhol's reputation.