Andy Warhol (4 page)

The “cock drawings,” like cats and angels playing eternally with themselves in pussy heaven, never call a halt to desire, and so the frolicsome instances multiply: the amorous viewer, who respects the pornographic impulse to build an archive of hunger's objects, will understand that each body needs to be documented, for every man possesses an individuating detail—a pattern of hairs on the arm, a slope of the nose, a sufficiency of the lips. Andy drew “cocks” so he could pick up tricks without bedding them. In the 1950s he frequently asked handsome men whether they'd let him draw their privates. Many consented. Sometimes he'd draw one man's penis with a second man present, and the session would lead to a “three-way,” Andy's role merely to watch and draw. Robert Fleischer, a stationery buyer for Bergdorf Goodman in the 1950s, modeled for Warhol, and he described the encounters in an interview with Patrick S. Smith:

Andy
loved
to sketch models and very intimate sexual acts. Really! And Andy sketched us screwing a couple of times. Andy would get very, very excited. He wouldn't quite join in, but he
loved
watching. He would very often like to draw me nude and see me with an erection, but he never actually touched me. And I think that I never really put myself in a position of letting him [touch me] or leading him on, or [letting him think] that I was interested physically, because I wasn't. And at one time he said that he got so hot when he saw men with erections that he couldn't have an orgasm himself. But he started to strip that day. “And wasn't it all right if he sketched in his Jockey shorts?” And he did. And I was really upset. And it kind of
confirmed
what I had thought about Andy's personal habits in those days.

(Fleischer mentions that Andy “didn't bathe terribly regularly,” perhaps because the bathtub was “filled with dyes and water” used for making paper.) Biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles claims that Andy and his friend Ted Carey—with whom Andy commissioned a double self-portrait by Fairfield Porter in 1960—arranged for three-ways in which Andy sketched Ted and a partner having sex. The first few times Andy made “cock drawings,” he'd run away, flustered, when the action got too hot (one participant reports that Andy screamed, “I can't take any more!”), just as, in the 1970s, he would disappear from a session of shooting nude Polaroids, associates recall, by retreating into the bathroom to have a private “organza.”

The erotic drawings did not stop at penises. Warhol's line captured feet or other body parts, sometimes juxtaposed with mundane or outré objects, such as the score of Samuel Barber's opera
Vanessa:
in one undated drawing he paired two feet with a can of Campbell's Vegetable Beef Soup. The image originated in Julia's larder: she served him Campbell soups for years. The Campbell soup cans that Andy painted and silkscreened in the 1960s, which helped make him famous, are usually interpreted as commentaries on mechanical reproduction. However, displacement and other metaphoric processes contributed to his choice of Campbell soup as subject, and connected the image to his erotic hungers. Indeed, cans, in Warhol's work, continue the task of the “cock drawings,” for cans allude to the sexual body, and to limbs iconically isolated from the whole: as a foot (in his drawings) is divorced from the body, or a penis (in his “cock drawings”) is featured in relative isolation from the face and torso, so the can is alienated from the act of eating that it nonetheless announces as a purchasable possibility. The can's most arresting word—the eye ignores it for the first hundred times—is
condensed:
“Campbell's Condensed.” Condensation is a property of dreams and the unconscious; the soup-can fetish condenses Andy's unspeakable interior procedures, and gives them a shopwindow's attractiveness. “Can” means “ass” (“He's got a nice can!”); Andy's career in advertising, in the 1950s, gave him a working knowledge of the subliminal substitutions that Vance Packard claimed, in his book
The Hidden Persuaders
(1957), sparked the marketing of commodities. Andy Paperbag liked receptacles—cans, bags, boxes—and aimed to disguise whether they were full or empty. His Heinz Ketchup never pours. No hand ever reaches the bottom of his bag.

In the 1950s, Warhol had a professional stake in feet. His most successful advertising images were for the I. Miller shoe stores, an award-winning campaign that appeared weekly in the
New York Times.
The feet and shoes he drew were sleek as spinal cords. He also painted and decorated freestanding lasts—wooden shoe forms—and made a series of golden shoe drawings (“the golden slipper show or Shoes shoe in america” reads Julia's handwritten script on the invitation) exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956 and featured in
Life
magazine in early 1957 under the title
Crazy Golden Slippers.
He haphazardly assigned the shoes to celebrities—Elvis Presley, Kate Smith, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Truman Capote, Mae West, Judy Garland, Diana Vreeland, Helena Rubinstein, Christine Jorgensen, Julie Andrews: a lavender pantheon. Warhol also made a presentation book, entitled
A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu;
shoe drawings accompanied “shoe poems” composed by friend Ralph Pomeroy, such as “The autobiography of alice B. shoe.” Whether or not he had read Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, Andy announced himself their fellow traveler.

In 1956 he crafted a book entitled
In the Bottom of My Garden
, a second rendering of pussy heaven—angels, cherubs, sailors, pussies, dowagers, and other disporting animals. “Do you see my little Pussy,” reads one caption, below a drawing of a girl with a kitty tucked crotch-level into her dress pocket; we only see the cat's pink head. The words
the End
decorate the bottom of a cherub, back turned to the viewer; across a blank chasm, this final cherub observes a girl and boy angel embracing. (The spied-on boy's tiny penis and testicles are a mere squiggle.) We cannot judge whether the outcast—whose line-drawn buttock curves form the Warholian
W
—interrupts the boy and girl's love play or whether they fornicate specially for him.

Andy may have done the “cock drawings” by himself—with the aid of live models—but he employed assistants to help with commercial illustrations. His first was Vito Giallo, who looks, in pictures, like friendly “rough trade.” That Vito's father was a well-known gangster interested Andy, whose fascination with glamorous criminality would bear fruit in many later projects, including the film
More Milk Yvette
(1965), which touches on Lana Turner's scandalous affair with mobster Johnny Stompanato, who was killed by her daughter, Cheryl. (Andy saw a lot of himself in Lana, a fake blonde who gave up caring.) In John O'Connor and Benjamin Liu's book
Unseen Warhol
, Giallo recalls the limits of Warhol's cordiality:

Once, [Andy] was taking sex lessons. There was a woman named Valerie and she had a sailor boyfriend. Every Wednesday night, Andy said he would go over for “sex lessons.” They would give him lessons in how to have sex. I guess they would just show him what they did and how they did it. He loved to watch. He wanted me to go with him one time. I refused, and he got very upset. So I didn't hear from him for a long time.

Giallo told me that Andy never saw him socially again after he'd refused to attend the sex lessons, though they continued to work together. (Vito felt sorry for Julia; she seemed to have no friends. He remembers: the TV was on while Andy worked—and Andy wasn't unattractive, merely pale.)

Warhol's productivity escalated after he discovered that he could make more money by having assistants do his work while he drummed up new business; beneath this convenience lay the insight that transformed him into a mixture of Picasso and Henry Ford—the realization that the artist's atelier could be turned into a factory by mechanizing reproduction and minimizing manual touch. Warhol's work, though full of desire, is not full of feeling; the work is not touching because, with the exception of the line drawings, he rarely touched it. For his advertising work and his presentation books, he used a blotting technique, a forerunner of silkscreening: he drew on one piece of paper, and his assistant traced this drawing onto another page and then inked the drawing and pressed it onto yet another sheet. Andy would discard the originals and keep the third-generation imprint. (So, too, would Andy wish to speed as quickly—and artificially—as possible past the stigma of being a first-generation immigrant: blotting, a process that hides the image's “touching” or sentimental roots, was Andy's model for successful Americanization.)

Vito was Andy's first assistant; the next, Nathan Gluck, would prove the most important to Warhol's early career. Andy hired him in fall 1955, and they continued to work together until 1965. Soft-spoken, erudite, Gluck was perhaps the gentlest of Warhol's many collaborators. Interviewing him, I experienced his old-fashioned niceness, a sweetness at odds with the Warhol manner; perhaps Andy needed to put “feelings” behind him if he wanted to turn, like Lana Turner or Henri Matisse, into a myth. If he'd taken his assistant's advice, Warhol would never have become famous, for Gluck disapproved of the misregistration in Pop paintings—the silkscreened photo-based image not lining up with the separately applied colors. His tastes ran toward Jean Cocteau, Paul Klee, André Gide. Before Andy went to the opera, Nathan explained the plots, though Andy archly botched the titles—“Ariadne Obnoxious” for
Ariadne auf Naxos.

Gluck did the work that enabled Warhol to circulate among design-world professionals and land more assignments; content to be merely an employee, he never socialized with the boss—except for Christmas parties at the apartment Gluck shared with his companion, Clinton Hawkins, who worked as window dresser at Bonwit Teller. (Today, looking at a photo of the three of them, Nathan points to the expressive looseness of Andy's wrist—an angle that men in the 1950s would call limp, nelly, pussy— and says, “The wrist is very Andy.”) Nathan buttressed Andy's faltering sense of family, and was the last assistant to work in the Warhol residence rather than the studio: Nathan, ten years older than Andy, sat at home with Julia during the day, re-inking drawings, making art-gum stamps, composing ads, painting shoe lasts, listening to her sing Czech folk songs into the tape recorder—Andy's gift—and then play back the tape and sing along with herself in duet. Nathan heard Andy shout, “Where's my tie? Where's my shoes?” to his mother in the morning, and saw Andy scissor off the bottoms of his long cravats (rather than simply retie them for a proper fit) and store the cut-off ends in a box. (Andy had mixed feelings about size; he glorified it, but he was also troubled by it.) Every morning Julia put Andy together: she found his clothes and brought him orange juice. Nathan helped inspire Andy to collect, for Nathan's apartment was (and still is) an archive of multiples—masks, canned foods, European drawings, Asian and African artifacts, toilet bowl fresheners—a compendium that I would call “Warholian” if the Warholian did not already depend on the Gluckian.

Andy learned something from everyone he worked with, and he may have learned the most from Nathan; he learned how gay taste tended, in 1950s New York, toward multiplication and archiving. In the bleak McCarthy era, gay culture paradoxically flourished in the home—safer than police-threatened bars and tearooms. The private apartment—or townhouse—became a Joseph Cornell shadow box, a vitrine, an inside-out Brillo carton; in domiciles, queers amassed artworks, cleansers, masks, records, and receipts, with a curatorial intensity that Warhol would translate into an art of serial and repeated imagery, and into the collections (cookie jars, jewelry, superstars, drawings, cardboard-boxed time capsules) that were his signature, his incarceration, and his bid for immortality. Warhol's mature practice takes its cue from the urban gay fetish of “interiors”—such as Nathan Gluck's apartment of serial objects, or Stephen Bruce's restaurant decor (Andy paid the “Serendipity boys” to recreate that look—proto-Pop Americana, a Mobil Gas sign's winged horse—in the Warhol apartment). Many of these men never became famous artists, but they reconsecrated their apartments as galleries, temples, artisanal havens, and warehouses. Andy's 1960s studios continued this 1950s domestic vanguardism; the Factory—an ambient artwork, a living museum that replaced the Museum of Modern Art and those other institutions that would remain unsympathetic to Warhol's experiments during his lifetime—extended the apartment philosophy he first learned from decor-conscious gays. (Indeed, Warhol's concern for physiological interiors corresponds to his passion for architectural interiors.) In the company of men I would call “design queens” if they were not also, and more important, rigorous conceptual artists, pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space, Warhol learned how to collect, how to decorate, where to put the couch, how silver foil—a Heloise hint, nearly—can double as wallpaper. (Martha Stewart owes a lot to Andy Warhol. Coincidentally, she recently purchased Vito Giallo's entire antique collection.)

Andy's beloved mother cat, Hester, went to pussy heaven after she died under the knife. Afterward, he stopped caring—but he didn't stop caring about pussy heaven. He wanted to copy it. He wanted it to be a real locale, with a telephone number, an address, and a guest list. Though he proposed it as a comic, Utopian vision of kitties playing together eternally in a land of flowers and bottoms and clouds, he hoped to prove the fiction genuine, as a transsexual yearns for surgery. Pussy heaven, at first a fantasy, became, in the 1960s, a factory.

The Sixties

3. Screens

HOW DID ANDY WARHOL
become a painter? One answer he concocted: “When I was nine years old I had St. Vitus Dance. I painted a picture of Hedy Lamarr from a Maybelline ad. It was no good, and I threw it away. I realized I couldn't paint.” That flip response diverts attention from his secret seriousness; his verbal deflections are always deep. Paradox: Warhol was not a painter, although he painted.

The story of how he became—sort of—a painter is mechanical and oft repeated (it is well told in David Bourdon's monograph) and so can be dispensed as automatically as a tuna sandwich from an Automat. More heartfelt is the tale of the human relations behind the Pop paintings—intimacies that spring to life in his films. Each painting, too, reveals a friendship, betrays an interaction, transmits a newsflash of interpersonal desire. Whether his subject is soup, a HANDLE WITH CARE—GLASS—THANK YOU label, S&H Green Stamps, dollar bills, or do-it-yourself paint-by-number art kits, each canvas asks:
Do you desire me? Will you destroy me? Will you participate in my ritual?
Each image, while hoping to repel death, engineers its erotic arrival.

At the beginning of the 1960s Andy Warhol decided again to be a painter. For subjects, he chose comic strips, advertisements: Popeye, Nancy, Coca-Cola, Dick Tracy, Batman, Superman—images of childhood heroism, thirsts quenched, fantastically draped he-men standing up to insult. He told superstar Ultra Violet one origin of this iconography: “I had sex idols—Dick Tracy and Popeye. … My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon. … I fantasized I was in bed with Dick and Popeye.” His dilemma—a pretend conflict?—was whether to render these figures expressionistically with drips and overt signs of the hand, or flatly, without personality. He showed his paintings to curators and dealers, and solicited opinions about the direction his work should move—toward “feeling” (wild marks), or toward “coldness” (mechanical reproduction).

One consultant was filmmaker Emile De Antonio, nicknamed “De.” Sometime in 1960 (the date is uncertain), according to Warhol and Pat Hackett's memoir of the period,
POPism
, he showed De two renderings of a Coca-Cola bottle, and asked which he preferred. One was “a Coke bottle with Abstract Expressionist hash marks halfway up the side.” The other was “just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white.” De pronounced the expressionist version crap and the mechanical version a masterpiece, and so Warhol, for years, avoided painterly stigmata and strove for machinelike execution.

The term
Pop
does not adequately explain Warhol; although he used popular and commercial images for his silkscreened paintings of the early 1960s, each has a clear link to his own body and history. He profited from the term
Pop
, but he didn't believe in it: he casually defined it as a way of “liking things.” As a commercial artist in the 1950s, his task was to make the public like the objects he drew, enough to buy the products. Andy liked a promiscuous gamut of objects: men, stars, supermarket products. He liked zing, oomph, vim, pizzazz—any hook, whether ad or accident, that could rivet the eye by exciting or traumatizing it. Such images included disasters, and so he painted car wrecks, electric chairs, race riots: scenes you couldn't bear to ignore because they aroused unholy fascination, what Freud described as
unheimlich.
Warhol appreciated any immediately recognizable image, regardless of its value. In 1963, when he began wearing a silver wig, his own appearance (documented in self-portraits) acquired the instantaneous legibility that he demanded of Pop objects.

Ashamed of his appearance, or wishing to spin it as performance, he covered his face with a theatrical mask when Ivan Karp, scouting for the Leo Castelli Gallery, came to call in 1961. Karp remembers that the artist in his studio was loudly playing the Dickie Lee song “I Saw Linda Yesterday” over and over: Andy claimed not to understand music until repetition drummed its meanings in. Henry Geldzahler, an associate curator at the Met, accompanied Ivan one day; Henry would become a staunch ally, although later he would alienate Andy by not including him in the 1966 Venice Biennale. Irving Blum and Walter Hopps from Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery also visited, and eventually gave Andy his first solo painting show.

At first, however, no one accepted or exhibited his paintings. Leo Castelli already represented Roy Lichtenstein, committed to comics, and Castelli deemed that one Pop artist was enough. Andy showed paintings for the first time not in a gallery but in a Bonwit Teller window, in April 1961: with this gesture, he paid dual allegiance to commerce and art—a split he hardly took seriously, though pundits did—and proved that his work could roost in clothing stores, those feminine bazaars of fetish and decor.

More mysterious than how Andy became a painter, or why he chose to paint comic-book and commodity images (perhaps he calculated that these American objects and icons were a safely majority taste, while the naked men and shoes he'd rendered in the 1950s were a minority taste), is why he became a painter at all. He'd always wished to express his body, to push it through a silken mesh of given images; he'd always wanted to be a “fine” (classy) artist, and had merely been biding his time. His sketches and presentation books had a limited audience; he knew that painters were more famous than commercial or coterie artists. He took inspiration from the careers preceding and surrounding him—Jackson Pollock made a splash in
Life
magazine in the late 1940s, and Andy's peers Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had recently arrived. Andy bought a Johns drawing of a lightbulb and was desperate to be noticed by Johns and Rauschenberg, lovers who kept their sexual identities under wraps. Andy was too fey in manner, as he admits in his memoirs, to hide his homosexuality, and De Antonio told him that the reason Johns and Rauschenberg avoided him at parties (and mocked him behind his back) was that Andy was too effeminate, and that his swish conduct threatened to rock the boat they were trying manfully to row toward success. In praise of what he could not embody, in 1962 and 1963 Andy did two silkscreen paintings of Rauschenberg, one titled
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, in which he pictured his peer as heroic artist, epitome of rugged pioneer self-made masculinity—a cowboy, or at least a dreaming farmhand. Eventually Rauschenberg and Warhol became grudging acquaintances (photos of the two embracing in the 1970s reveal the limits of their mutual affection), and Warhol's fame (though not his reputation among influential critics) trumped Pollock's. Warhol's decision to become a painter in the first place was an attempt to queer the Pollock myth—to prove that art stardom was a swish affair: all this business of men dripping paint on floors and posing in T-shirts and khakis in barns! The desire to be
like
a man—to be a painter
like
Pollock—was a project in resemblance, in imitation: not to be a master, but to be
like
a master, and thereby to master mastery.

Pollock's champion in the early 1960s was Frank O'Hara, the insouciant, nervy poet and curator at MoMA, which as early as 1958 had proclaimed its indifference to Warhol by refusing­ the donation of one of his shoe drawings. Warhol admired and envied members of the aesthetic gay intelligentsia—Rauschenberg­, Johns, and O'Hara key among them—and he attempted to court O'Hara, although O'Hara disliked Warhol's work and only came around to an appreciation of it a year or so before his own untimely accidental death in 1966. According to O'Hara's biographer Brad Gooch, Warhol sought the good graces of the smart gay set: “Warhol gave O'Hara an imaginary drawing of the poet's penis, which he crumpled up and threw away in annoyance.” (Recall that Garbo, too, had crumpled one of Andy's drawings.) Warhol wanted to draw O'Hara's feet: the poet declined the offer.

Andy's breakthrough as an artist came in 1962, and it had nothing to do with O'Hara, who I wish had shown more tolerance for the pasty-faced, unlettered Mr. Paperbag, whose art had affinity with such O'Hara gems as “Lana Turner has collapsed!” and “To the Film Industry in Crisis.” In August 1962 Andy began photosilkscreening, commencing with a baseball player and then actors Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty. (Although his portraits of Liz and Marilyn earned him the most fame, he preceded female deities with male; his goddesses, not intrinsically women, may indeed be
men at one remove.
)
On August 5, Marilyn Monroe fatally overdosed, and the very next day he silkscreened her needy face. Dead, she begged for respectful (handle-with-care) replication. Andy held that Marilyn desires or deserves no image but her own, a death row of doubles, or a single face enshrined in a godless, lonely field of gold. Andy also began silkscreening fatalities: he had already painted a disaster, apparently at Geldzahler's suggestion—depicting the front page of the
New York Mirror
, June 4, 1962, the headline reading “129 Die in Jet.”

Silkscreening allowed him to appropriate an image—publicity­ still, press clipping. A shop printed a negative of the Warhol-chosen photo on a screen, through which Andy and an assistant pushed paint to form a positive image on canvas. Sometimes he first hand-painted color zones or primed the entire canvas, and then screened the image on top. Silkscreening, faster and easier than painting, removed the obligation of using the hand; silkscreening undercut (and poached on) photography's claims to depict the real. And silk­screening required a historically new variety of visual intelligence—a designer's or director's, perhaps, rather than a conventional painter's. Andy had a clairvoyant sense of what subjects were worth copying; he had an iconoclastic notion of what surprising colors should garnish or offend the bare black-and-white image, and what blues or reds or silvers had the power to verify and ratify the self who gazed at them; and he knew precisely what cockeyed rhythms of repeated images could defamiliarize received truths. He had a crush on hazard and flaw—places where the screen slipped or got clogged with paint, moments where the image was smudged or not fully applied, or where one image accidentally overlapped and screwed up the clarity of another. He had hand-painted his earliest Pop works from projections or with stencils, but in silkscreening he was jubilant to discover an efficient way of making paintings that were virtually photographs, illicitly transposed—smuggled across the hygienic border separating the media.

Silkscreens—baffles—introduced distance between himself and the viewer. Literally, silkscreens were nets, webs, mazes—crisscrossing meshes, composed of silk (the stuff of fine clothing, especially women's wear); and thus his beloved silkscreens were structures of enchainment and enchantment, poised between spider's web and widow's veil. In the 1950s, Andy had painted folding screens, one in collaboration with his mother: it was festooned with the numerals 1 through 9, as if intended to teach schoolchildren how to count. An undressing body could hide behind a folding screen's ersatz wall; one imagines modest Andy changing outfits behind its zigzag barrier. Screens, like fences between fractious homesteaders, made good neighbors. Andy, who chose not to screen out information (words and pictures rushed pell-mell into his consciousness), doted on screens because they were antidotes to his unscreened, hyperaesthetic constitution. As objects, they were heavy to draw across a canvas; he needed an assistant. Silkscreening resembled weight lifting: a dapper physical act. Art's ulterior motive, for Warhol, became the pleasure of watching the strong-muscled assistant work. He was Andy's screen: the two of them together, forcing paint through the silk mesh, came closer than artist and helper otherwise might. Art screened their intimacy.

Andy had his first solo painting show in 1962, in Los Angeles, at the Ferus Gallery (he didn't attend): it consisted of thirty-two individual Campbell soup cans, each a different flavor. Each painting was the same; only the label's words varied. Difference, not a visual affair, lay in semantics, gustation: Cream of Asparagus was not Cream of Celery, and Green Pea was not Bean with Bacon. The sequence's deadpan effrontery made Andy famous, and news magazines anointed Pop art a trend. He had his first New York show, at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, that same year: he showed Marilyns, Elvises, and disasters. He was pursuing two parallel iconographic missions, stars and disasters. The two overlapped: stars interested him when they died (Marilyn), when they hung on the verge of death (Liz), when they inflicted death (Elvis with pistol), or when they threatened Andy-the-viewer with orgasmic death. Deaths of anonymous people intrigued him because he believed people should pay attention to the nonstellar and thereby give them a soupçon of fame. To be famous, for Warhol, was merely to be noticed, turned on, illuminated; to bestow fame was charity, like feeding a neglected child. His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism,” Andy's revision of communism. He believed himself “com-monist,” not Pop—he wanted to place glamour communion on the tongues of the world's fame-starved communicants.

In 1963, Warhol had forged himself into a painter, but his story would be less melodramatic if he had remained merely a painter, a vocation that never captured his undivided attention; it has been a lasting public misperception that he primarily painted. In 1963 he ventured into two alternative spheres. The first realm was spatial, interactive: he created his first Factory—studio, party room, laboratory for cultural experiment. The second realm was cinematic: he bought a 16mm Bolex camera and made his first film. And though he essentially stopped moviemaking at the end of the 1960s but continued painting for the rest of his life, his movies are as important as his canvases to American art history, and deserve equal consideration. He removed the films from circulation in 1972; for a generation they have been absent from public view. Now they are being systematically restored. In coming years, as more people watch them, his complex achievement as filmmaker will challenge the limited notion of Warhol as painter of soup cans and celebrities.