Andy Warhol (15 page)

The painterly equivalent of this disappearance trick that the time capsules finessed—emptying space while filling it—was his monumental series of commissioned portraits, begun in 1970, a project that occupied him for the rest of his life. Their greatness has yet to be recognized: when the portraits were exhibited at the end of the 1970s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, critics lambasted him for having sold out. Not only did Warhol receive pots of money for doing them, he committed the political sin of portraying figures like the sister of the shah of Iran. The screen purpose of these portraits, in the Freudian sense of a “screen memory,” was to make money; Andy charged perhaps fifty thousand dollars for each. But, on an ulterior level, the portraits, like Andy's other ceaseless projects, attempted to capture everything in the world, to stylize the act of capture, and to make his rapacity seem acceptable and legal because it led to decorative, pretty surfaces. Warhol did fifty to one hundred of the commissioned portraits a year; many are privately owned, and unfortunately they may never be exhibited as a series. Imagined in their totality, however, they eviscerate the identity of each sitter, even as they pretend to perpetuate it. The lure of the portraits—what the artist presented as bait to the client—was the chance to appear Warholian: to be rendered in a garishly colored silkscreen, in the manner of his trademark images of Liz, Marilyn, or Jackie. But the joke was on the client: by being portrayed
as if
a
Liz, the subject admitted an identity as stand-in, nonstar, aura seeker, just another flavor of person, without a monopoly on presence. Although many of the 1970s and 1980s portraits are of famous individuals, many more depict
not
famous people (a rich nobody, or a nobody's daughter, son, wife, husband). Each sitter for Warhol, whether famous or not, longs for a stardom beyond attainment; the portrait mocks—and fulfills—that desire. The sitters are stars and nonstars at the same moment—as boxes, bodies, and rooms were, in Andy's eyes, both empty and filled.

The method Warhol used for making the portraits was labor-intensive, and hardly instant. He took fifty or so Polaroids of the subject, chose an ideal image, silkscreened it (sometimes onto a prepainted background), and, on occasion, added flourishes of hand-painting as parodic homage to the expressionistic artiness he'd long ago renounced. The Polaroid camera he favored was called a Big Shot: for proper focus, it required a three-foot distance from his subjects. This cordon sanitaire, rarely violated, separated him from his prey—and protected him from the subject's usurping touch. The portraits celebrate Warhol's happy marriage of photography and painting, the two media he could never choose between. As the 1960s screen tests maneuvered a place between still photography and moving picture, the commissioned portraits clearly originated as Polaroids, but the inapposite, clashing, eye-assaulting colors reinforce the canvas's identity as a painting. Color is the gloss—makeup, camouflage—that Andy places protectively or abusively over the vulnerable photographed face. He fulfills the pathetic sitter's desire to be rendered immortal, attractive, Warholian, but also lays waste to it by overpainting, by adding wrong color. The fame account of the sitter sinks; Andy gloats. The face vibrates, like a disco Rothko, between assertiveness and disappearance.

The most celebrated of his portraits, profoundly uncommissioned, were images of Mao, begun in 1972. In this series, he turned the revered Chairman into a fleshy, maternal Monroe, the face an epitome of sated appetite, plump and colorful as a carnival balloon. He hung the Maos, in 1974, on Mao wallpaper. The choice of Mao as a subject resumed Andy's early allegiance to “Commonism”; he liked powerful star-presences that erased everybody's personality, but he also liked to level fame's distinctions, giving each citizen a morsel of renown. Mao's face was a flash card of the world's greatest star, but his cult signaled individualism's collapse; like the “Female Movie Star Composite” collage that Andy made in 1962—four ink-drawn slivers of the faces of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren, and Marlene Dietrich, taped together, as if by Dr. Moreau, into one unrecognizable cyborg—Andy's Mao was a contemporary Jesus whose face, if you worshiped it, forgave (and decimated) individual idiosyncrasy.

Following the trail of the Maos, in 1976 Andy did silkscreens of hammers and sickles. His fondness for communist iconography may have been partly motivated by a desire to please European collectors and critics, who tended to read Marxist meanings into his work, but he had always favored images of private identity resisting (and succumbing to) mass culture's manic replications, and he had always sought the literal's face overruling the figurative. The hammers and sickles may be symbols, but Warhol made the images from photographs of real hammers and sickles that Ronnie Cutrone had bought at a hardware store.

In this period, Warhol's extraordinary range of subjects
is
his point: a performance of plurality, catholicity, sweep. In the 1970s, he did screenprints of Mao, but also of Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger, and black and Latino drag queens from the bars and piers of New York City (“Ladies and Gentlemen”); he did screenprints of hammers and sickles, but also of gems and grapes. He screened skulls; he screened self-portraits. Such promiscuity—such appetite for every category—should not prevent us from reading significance into his subjects: indeed, it matters that he chose Mao, and that he chose gems. But his larger interest was not in the meanings of a single object, but in the
proliferation
of different species, and each form's vulnerability to the blitzkrieg encroachments of neighboring appetites. Gems can't remain gems forever, if grapes are nearby; grapes grow gem-like, gems grow grape-like. Mao ceases to be wholly Mao after Andy renders him. For many viewers, Warhol's screen subsumes the real Chairman.

Andy had a fantasy: death didn't exist, and people at the ends of their lives simply vanished or floated away. This fairy-tale hypothesis came in handy when he needed to confront the deaths of family and friends. Edie Sedgwick died of a drug overdose in 1971. He didn't articulate the death's impact on him; leaving wounds unspoken was his custom. When his mother's health declined—drink and senility overtook her—and Andy found himself unable to care for her, he sent her back to Pittsburgh; she died the next year, 1972, at eighty. (That same year, he withdrew his 1960s films from circulation.) He didn't attend the funeral; he couldn't face it. A relative guilt-tripped him by sending him a picture of Julia in her coffin. He honored her with a portrait, in the style of his other commissioned works: on her sturdy face—some would call it old-world peasant, though she oddly resembles Georgia O'Keeffe—he overlaid high-stress finger-painting, as if connecting his painting proclivity with Mother's early tutelage. He didn't tell most people about Julia's death. When they asked about her health, he'd say she'd gone shopping at Bloomingdale's. But he never stopped feeling guilty about her death: near the end of his life, he told his diary, “at Christmas time I really think about my mother and if I did the right thing sending her back to Pittsburgh. I still feel so guilty.” Mrs. Warhola's last appearance on camera might be her cameo in a sequence of the
Factory Diaries
—brief, poignant footage of Andy and Julia watching TV together. Actually, Andy is invisible, behind the camera. We hear his voice, however. Mostly the camera trains its attention on the Warhola TV set—which shows men watching telemonitors of a moonwalk mission (early 1971). Everyone—Mom, Andy, moonwalkers, NASA—needs TV screens: televisions bring home the moon action, just as Andy's video camera brings home to him the domestic scene he is taking part in but also screening out. Julia lies on her side, in bed. Andy says, “Mom?” She looks up and says, “What?” Then the scene ends. This is their final recorded encounter: her last word to Andy, as far as his art knows, is “What?” My impression, from listening to his audiotapes, is that Andy frequently said “What?” in conversation, either because he didn't catch what the other person was saying, or because he sought confirmation, or because he liked repetition, and wanted to hear the same comment twice, with the hope that the second time around it might metamorphose into something strange. I suspect that Andy said “What?” primarily because he had difficulty making sense of heard speech, and because he needed time to come up with a coherent response.

Andy may not initially have told anyone about Julia's death because he found it literally unspeakable. That he was ashamed of the death, or of his inability to talk about it, is clear from a statement in his diary, ostensibly about a more sensational case. “And Brigid was telling me about the boy on the news whose mother died and he didn't tell anybody, he just kept her in the house for eight months.” Andy's reaction to the death of artist Man Ray, four years later, sheds further light on his bizarre nonresponse to Julia's. A segment of the
Factory Diaries
features Andy improvising a videotaped letter to Man Ray, after the latter's death. Andy, repetitiously, charmingly, describes his memory of meeting Man Ray and taking his picture, but he doesn't mention the fact that Man Ray is dead. Though transcription of this vocal epistle can't capture the sound of Andy's voice, it conveys a sense of the conversational style he used to evade death:

Nobody told me what to talk about. You mean write a letter to Man Ray? Oh. Man Ray was this wonderful person. … And he was really cute: he took a picture of me, and I took a picture of him, and then he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and then I took one of him. … Dear Man Ray, I guess this is saying goodbye to you. I probably won't see you again. I have a picture of you, a Polaroid stuck in a little red book. … I spent a couple of hours sticking one in each page. … I guess we'll be taking our [Christmas] tree down, because it's going to be falling down soon. My dogs say hello to you. Archie and Amos. I don't know what else to say to you. I never really had much to say to you before. All I did was take pictures.

Here Andy admits—as openly as he ever will—that the practice of repeatedly making and taking pictures glues him to the dead and the living, people he loves but can't speak with or about, even after their passing. He can only do their portraits. Repetition was Julia's style, too; perhaps she imparted it to her son. In an interview, she discussed, with admiring delight, his addiction to likeness, and she floated a fey hypothesis about the homoerotics of repetition, of cloning: “I wouldn't mind if he would really get engaged and marry one of the boys … maybe he would get a little baby, I mean a little Andy. I would have all these little Andys, you know, Andys, Andys, Andys, Andys … wouldn't that be beautiful?”

While Julia was advancing into senility, Andy married one of the boys of whom she spoke so approvingly. His name was Jed Johnson; with his equally cute twin brother, Jay, he entered the Factory in 1968. With Jed, Andy had the most prolonged romance of his life, and, ultimately, the most painful; insiders speak of Jed as the second of Andy's three major loves (the first was Charles Lisanby). Jed moved in with Andy, perhaps partly to help take care of Mrs. Warhola; eventually he redecorated the new home, at 57 East Sixty-sixth Street, where the “boys” moved two years after her death. Evidently Andy belittled Jed—withheld compliments, to lower the younger man's self-esteem. Pat Hackett told me that Andy didn't praise the masterful decorating job Jed did on the house until others had vociferously admired it. Jed directed a movie that Andy produced in 1976,
Bad
, written by Hackett (the film flopped, but it merits serious scrutiny, for it features startling—unintended?—echoes of Andy's home life); he was testy to Pat and Jed on the set of
Bad
, and these tensions may have led to Jed's decision, at the end of the decade, to leave him. More than any previous boyfriend, Jed performed the role of Victorian angel-in-the-house; as homemaker, he replaced Julia. His voice resembled Andy's, and Marilyn Monroe's. Soft-spoken, shy, recessive, Jed was the opposite of the dynamic, aggressive exhibitionists who usually screened Andy.

Warhol's home life remains a secret. He spent most of his time at the Factory, or at parties, dinners, and discos, and yet he slept at home, ate breakfast at home, kept beloved dogs at home (dogs had replaced his “pussies” of the 1950s), dyed his eyebrows at home, put on his wig at home, and brought his purchases back home. Home was where he glued himself back together: he used the word
glued
to describe his process of self-repair, which involved literally gluing the wig to his pate. Christmas Day 1976, for example, the diary says: “It started to snow a little. Said thanks and left to go home to get ready for the Jaggers'. Got to East 66th and glued.” Gluing aside, the days that seemed most solidly
home days
were Sundays—church time. On Sundays, Andy glued himself to God, Jed, and home. On Sundays, too, Andy glued himself back to art, which, he feared, his social whirl had overshadowed. So he seemed to spend many Sundays drawing at home. November 26, 1978: “I went to church, it was so beautiful and cold out. Then I worked. I drew earths and moons and watched TV.” He was conscious that the critical establishment had largely given up on him in the 1970s, condescending to him as a mere society painter. In fact, he remained in this decade a complex, profligately productive artist, but Andy doubted his own commitment to his vocation, and home (a country, a symbolic refuge, a townhouse) became the imaginary place where he might do real work, real art, apart from the distractions of the limelight. On May 25, 1977, in Paris, visiting the Beaubourg, he told the diary: “Then we saw the Kienholz show and then the Paris/New York show opening next week and then the permanent collection. This took two hours and Bob [Colacello] was passing out but I had energy and wanted to just rush home and paint and stop doing society portraits.”