<Archive Obituaries> Andy Warhol (February 22nd 1987)
Bill Schenley
FROM: The New York Times (February 23rd 1987) ~
By Douglas C. McGill
Andy Warhol, a founder of Pop Art whose paintings and prints of
Presidents, movie stars, soup cans and other icons of America made him
one of the most famous artists in the world, died yesterday. He was
believed to be 58 years old.
The artist died at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in
Manhattan, where he underwent gall bladder surgery Saturday. His
condition was stable after the operation, according to a hospital
spokeswoman, Ricki Glantz, but he had a heart attack in his sleep
around 5:30 A.M.
Though best known for his earliest works - including his silk-screen
image of a Campbell's soup can and a wood sculpture painted like a box
of Brillo pads - Mr. Warhol's career included successful forays into
photography, movie making, writing and magazine publishing.
He founded Interview magazine in 1969, and in recent years both he and
his work were increasingly in the public eye - on national magazine
covers, in society columns and in television advertisements for
computers, cars, cameras and liquors.
In all these endeavors, Mr. Warhol's keenest talents were for
attracting publicity, for uttering the unforgettable quote and for
finding the single visual image that would most shock and endure. That
his art could attract and maintain the public interest made him among
the most influential and widely emulated artists of his time.
Although himself shy and quiet, Mr. Warhol attracted dozens of
followers who were anything but quiet, and the combination of his
genius and their energy produced dozens of notorious events throughout
his career. In the mid-1960's, he sometimes sent a Warhol look alike
to
speak for him at lecture engagements, and his Manhattan studio, ''the
Factory,'' was a legendary hangout for other artists and hangers-on.
In 1968, however, a would-be follower shot and critically wounded Mr.
Warhol at the Factory. After more than a year of recuperation, Mr.
Warhol returned to his career, which he increasingly devoted to
documenting, with Polaroid pictures and large silk-screen prints,
political and entertainment figures. He started his magazine, and soon
became a fixture on the fashion and jet-set social scene.
In the 1980's, after a relatively quiet period in his career, Mr.
Warhol burst back onto the contemporary art scene as a mentor and
friend to young artists, including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and
Jean-Michel Basquiat. With Mr. Basquiat, Mr. Warhol collaborated on a
series of paintings in which he shunned mechanical reproduction
techniques and painted individual canvases for the first time since
the
early 1960's.
He never denied his obsession with art as a business and with getting
publicity; instead, he proclaimed them as philosophical tenets.
''Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,'' he
said
on one occasion. On another, he said: ''Art? That's a man's name.'' As
widely known as his art and his own image were, however, Mr. Warhol
himself was something of a cipher. He was uneasy while speaking about
himself. ''The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me
to
say and I'll repeat them after him,'' he once said.
Date of Birth Uncertain
The earliest facts of his life remain unclear. He was born somewhere
in
Pennsylvania in either 1928, 1929 or 1930, according to three known
versions of his life. (The most commonly accepted date is Aug. 6,
1928.) The son of immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia, his father a
coal miner - the family's name was Warhola -he attended the Carnegie
Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), from which
he
graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949.
He immediately set out for New York, where he changed his name to
Warhol and began a career as an illustrator and a commerical artist,
working for Tiffany's, Bonwit Teller's, Vogue, Glamour, The New York
Times and other magazines and department stores.
By the late 1950's, he was highly successful, having earned enough
money to move to a town house in Midtown, and having received numerous
professional prizes and awards. Despite his success, however, he
increasingly considered trying his hand at making paintings, and in
1960 he did so with a series of pictures based on comic strips,
including Superman and Dick Tracy, and on Coca-Cola bottles.
Success, however, was not immediate. Leo Castelli, the art dealer best
known for discovering the artists Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg,
saw Mr. Warhol's paintings but declined to show his work, since Roy
Lichtenstein, who also painted pictures taken from comic strips, was
already represented by the gallery. Ivan Karp, a talent scout for
Castelli who discovered Mr. Warhol, tried to help him find a New York
gallery that would show his work, with no success.
The Birth of a Movement
In 1962, the dam broke, with Mr. Warhol's first exhibition of the
Campbell's soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and his show
of other works at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Other Pop
artists, including Mr. Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Tom
Wesselman
also began to achieve prominence around the country at the time, and
the movement was born.
Though some of Mr. Warhol's first Pop Art paintings had drips on
them -
evidence that the painter's hand had left its mark on the work - by
1963 Mr. Warhol had dispensed with the brush altogether. Instead, he
turned to exclusively hard-edged images made in the medium of
silk-screen print, which made a depersonalized image that became Mr.
Warhol's trademark.
''Painting a soup can is not in itself a radical act,'' the critic
Robert Hughes wrote in 1971. ''But what was radical in Warhol was that
he adapted the means of production of soup cans to the way he produced
paintings, turning them out en masse - consumer art mimicking the the
process as well as the look of consumer culture.''
In 1964 Mr. Warhol was taken on by the Castelli Gallery, which
remained
his art dealer until his death. His experimentation with underground
films began around that time - an interest that culminated in
widespread notoriety if not overwhelming box office acclaim.
''Eat,'' a 45-minute film, showed the artist Robert Indiana eating a
mushroom. ''Haircut'' showed a Warhol groupie having his hair cut over
a span of 33 minutes, and another, ''Poor Little Rich Girl,'' was
filmed out of focus and showed Edie Sedgwick, a Warhol follower who
became a celebrity on the New York social circuit, talking about
herself.
In the 1970's, recuperated from his near fatal gunshot wound, Mr.
Warhol settled down to a sustained creative period in which his fame
as
a society figure leveled off, but his output, if anything, increased.
Working most often in silk-screen prints, he made series of pictures
of
political and Hollywood celebrities, including Mao, Liza Minelli,
Jimmy
Carter and Russell Banks.
In 1975, he published ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and
Back Again),'' a collection of statements and epigrams that elucidated
his contrary views on art.
In his glancing and elliptical style, Mr. Warhol wrote about subjects
ranging from art to money and sex. ''Checks aren't money,'' he wrote
in
one section of the book. In another, he said: ''Fantasy love is much
better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most
exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.''
In the 1980's, Mr. Warhol became more active in commissioned art
projects and a variety of other commercial activties. In 1983, he made
a series of prints - based on animals of endangered species - that was
first shown at the American Museum of Natural History.
A Near Exception
Although some of his later art projects seemed to diverge from his
calculating approach and to be motivated in part by social concern,
Mr.
Warhol generally avoided any such suggestion. He came closest to
making
an exception in 1985, when he exhibited a group of prints of clowns,
robots, monkeys and other images he made for children at the Newport
(R.I.) Art Museum in 1985.
''It's just that the show's for children,'' he told a reporter at the
time. ''I wanted it arranged for them. The Newport Museum agreed to
hang all of my children's pictures at levels where only kids could
really see them.''
After the news of his death was publicized yesterday, artists,
celebrities and politicians who knew Mr. Warhol spoke of his influence
on culture, and on their lives.
''He had this wry, sardonic knack for dismissing history and putting
his finger on public taste, which to me was evidence of living in the
present,'' said the sculptor George Segal. ''Every generation of
artists has the huge problem of finding their own language and talking
about their own experience. He was out front with several others of
his
generation in pinning down how it was to live in the 60's, 70's and
80's.''
Leo Castelli, Mr. Warhol's dealer of 23 years, said Mr. Warhol, more
than practically any artist of the last two decades, seemed to have a
continuing and strong influence on today's emerging artists. ''Of all
the painters of his generation he's still the one most influential on
the younger artists - a real guru,'' Mr. Castelli said.
Martha Graham, the dancer and choreographer, recalled her first
meeting
with Warhol. ''When I first met Andy, he confided to me that he was
born in Pittsburgh as I was, and that when he first saw me dance
'Appalachian Spring' it touched him deeply. He touched me deeply as
well. He was a gifted, strange maverick who crossed my life with great
generosity. His last act was the gift of three portraits [of Miss
Graham] he donated to my company to help my company meet its financial
needs.''
In his book, ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,'' the artist wrote a
short chap=ter entitled ''Death'' that consisted almost entirely of
these words: ''I'm so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that
things were magic and that it would never happen.''
Dr. Elliot M. Gross, the Chief Medical Examiner for New York City,
said
an autopsy on Mr. Warhol would be conducted today. Dr. Gross explained
that deaths occurring during surgery or shortly afterward are
considered deaths of an ''unusual manner.''
''It was an unexplained death of a relatively young person in
apparently good health,'' he said.
Mr. Warhol is survived by two brothers, John Warhola and Paul Warhola,
both of Pittsburgh.
CORRECTION-DATE: March 24, 1987, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition
CORRECTION:
The obituary of Andy Warhol on Feb. 23 listed his earliest major
successes incompletely. His first one-man show in New York, important
to his early renown as a Pop artist, took place in November 1962 at
the
Stable Gallery.
---
Andy Warhol, Pioneer of Pop Art, Dies After Heart Attack
FROM: The Washington Post (February 23rd 1987) ~
By Richard Pearson, staff writer
Andy Warhol, 58, a writer, philosopher, film-maker and artist whose
portraits of soup cans, celebrities and the social scene made him
perhaps the best-known figure in what has come to be known as pop art,
died yesterday at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in New York
City after a heart attack.
A hospital spokesman said Warhol was admitted to the hospital Friday
and underwent gallbladder surgery Saturday. The spokesman said that
"his postoperative condition was stable" and that his death was
"clearly unexpected."
Warhol became famous in the early 1960s for his now-legendary artworks
featuring Campbell Soup cans. Later works, using photography and
silk-screening techniques, included portraits of everyday objects and
such celebrities as Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn
Monroe.
When critics attacked his work as boringly unoriginal, he would reply
that he was not a "creator" of art but a "recreator."
Critics questioned whether he wanted his work, representing such
everyday items as Brillo pads, to satirize commercial vulgarity or
whether he wanted to glorify commercial America. Were those soup cans
lampooning success, or were they symbols of an affluent society? To
some, Warhol used soup cans as Cezanne used apples. At least to
Warhol,
soup was good art.
He referred to his New York art studio as "the factory" and turned out
pictures, often a huge number of prints, all with tiny variations. He
championed the mechanics of his art, saying that by working with
photographs he mechanically reproduced what was "real."
By the early 1960s, he was a recognized leader of the art avant-garde,
hailed by some as an opponent of abstract expressionism and a man who
used some of the tools of Dadaism for a new art form.
"Andy Warhol was a serious artist whose posture was unseriousness,"
said William Rubin, director of the department of painting and
sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "He was a pioneer
of
image-appropriating pop art, and the implications of his work proved
essential to the subsequent postmodernist movement."
Last year, one of his works, a painting of 200 one-dollar bills, sold
for $ 385,000 at an auction in New York City. He once said that he
often drew works featuring money because an art teacher had once told
him to draw what he liked best in the world. Warhol used the same
advice when it came to soup: He claimed that before he drew his first
soup can, he had lunched on soup for 20 years.
His life, if it did not imitate his art, at least mirrored it. He
appeared shy, often spoke in a near-whisper with a hand over his
mouth,
seemingly hiding behind a blond wig and large glasses. Yet he sought
publicity, courted attention and basked his pale form in an entourage
of admirers and social figures. He had managed an electronic rock band
called the Velvet Underground, made unique forays into the world of
print, danced the night away at discos and made cameo appearances in
movies. At the time of his death, he was host of an MTV cable program
called "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" -- a reference to his famous
comment that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.
After achieving fame and fortune in the fickle world of art, he began
meeting other challenges. He had always been fascinated with home
movies and began to devote the bulk of his time to making the kind of
movies that big Hollywood studios were not making anymore, if they
ever
had. These included "Sleep," a six-hour epic in which an unmoving
camera watched a man sleep, "Empire," in which his camera focused on a
facade of the Empire State Building for eight hours, and "Eat," which
showed a man eating a mushroom.
Some of Warhol's acting troupe achieved stardom of a sort. They
included Baby Jane Holzer, who appeared in Warhol's 1964 film "Wee
Love
of Life," in which he introduced plot and some action. It also was his
first film with sound. Holzer also appeared in his "13 Most Beautiful
Girls," which actually had 14 girls, but who was counting? Warhol
remarked that he found the finished product so dull that he thought
nobody would notice the error.
Another of his actresses, the socialite Edie Sedgwick, portrayed
herself spending a day at her East Side apartment. Warhol allowed that
he found this work dull also. His worst luck with actresses was
undoubtedly with Valerie Solanis. In 1968, she shot Warhol at his
office with a .32-caliber revolver, puncturing his lungs, spleen,
liver
and stomach.
Another of his films "Blue Movie," was a 140-minute film that involved
130 minutes of philosophical discussion followed by 10 minutes of
action that justified the movie's title. "The Chelsea Girls," a 1966
movie, has been referred to as "The Sound of Music" of the
underground.
In a pseudo-documentary style, it examines the mores of the sexually
inventive and the lives of drug addicts. It was screened for the
Cannes
Film Festival.
Yet criticism seldom seemed to bother Warhol. However controversial
his
work, whether in film or art, it gained success. The Whitney Museum
filled an entire floor with his work in a 1979 exhibit. He had one-man
art shows on at least three continents, and his films were eventually
shown in some mainstream theaters.
His publishing ventures included Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and
"Andy Warhol's Philosophy," a 451-page book of transcribed interview
in
which he is questioned by "Ondine," a friend of Warhol's who was under
the influence of amphetamines during the interview.
Warhol has said that the meaning of his work is that he does not care
about anything.
He was born Andrew Warhola near Pittsburgh to Czech immigrant parents.
In interviews, Warhol variously cited 1927 and 1928 as his year of
birth, with Reuter and United Press International reporting that 1927
was the year. His father, who died when Warhol was a child, had worked
as a coal miner. After graduating from what is now Carnegie-Mellon
University, Warhol worked at odd jobs before moving to New York City
in
his twenties.
As an illustrator for advertisements, he won the 1957 Art Director's
Club Medal for a giant shoe ad. He also is remembered for a 1961 Lord
&
Taylor department store window display he did using blown-up paintings
of the Dick Tracy comic strip. By 1959, his first serious work was
being exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in New York.
His work has been described as "banality endowed with an air of
mystery." Portions of his life story were no less mysterious and,
perhaps, beneath a veneer of artistic individuality and hedonism,
perhaps no less banal. He used to baffle reporters with contradictory
accounts of his birth, education and early life. But in the mid-1960s,
his mother gave a reporter an interview, revealing not only that he
shared his Lexington Avenue apartment with her, but also that he
attended mass every Sunday.
---
FROM: The Los Angeles Times
By William Wilson, Times art critic
Andy Warhol, the deadpan Peter Pan of Pop Art, died of a heart attack
Sunday in a New York hospital. He was 58.
The artist had undergone gall bladder surgery at New York
Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on Saturday and was reported in
"stable" condition. But his condition suddenly worsened early Sunday.
"Sometime after 5:30 a.m. this morning Mr. Warhol arrested and his
private-duty nurse summoned the hospital staff. . . . The (cardiac)
arrest team worked for close to an hour on Mr. Warhol but all attempts
to revive him failed and he was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m.," a
hospital spokeswoman said.
Warhol, a frail and diminutive man with a shock of silver-blond hair,
was a major pioneer of 1960s Pop Art, but outgrew that role to become
a
major celebrity.
Sporting dark glasses and a black leather jacket, he became an icon of
the lore of that hectic decade as inescapable as Bob Dylan, the
Rolling
Stones or the Beatles.
Posters made from his flat-out images of commonplace objects like soup
cans and Brillo boxes introduced a mass audience to the pleasures of
socio-critical irony.
Activity in painting, film and the publication of tape-recorded texts
helped foster the idea of the artist as a multimedia performer,
entrepreneur and concept-maker, breaking down barriers between fine
and
popular art and between media-celebrity and the once-esoteric fame of
painters and sculptors.
Warhol became noted for pithy aphorisms like, "In the future,
everybody
will be famous for 15 minutes."
Employing ordinary commercial imagery so seemingly untransformed that
it was widely taken for a humorous hoax, he came to note in the early
1960s with poster-like paintings of Campbell's soup cans, first shown
publicly at Los Angeles' Ferus Gallery in 1962.
He went on to produce images of everything from Blue-Chip Stamps to
dollar bills and Brillo boxes.
Celebrity Portraits
A trademark-image were portraits of celebrities, such as Marilyn
Monroe
or Elvis Presley, repeating the same photographic face in a
checkerboard pattern. The image was made poster-like by its production
on a silk-screen device.
Although mainly known as a cool ironist, Warhol leaves a legacy of
riveting Expressionist style paintings commenting wordlessly on the
violence and tragedy of the time.
Today, connoisseurs of his art regard these images of electric chairs,
racial violence and the nauseating absurding of women poisoned by
canned tuna as among his most significant art. He often evoked mordant
tragedy, as in his image of Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral of her
assassinated husband.
Warhol insisted that he loved the feeling of boredom and that he
wanted
to "be a machine." Much of his art was mechanically reproduced and as
he came to be better known, he turned the making of works over to
assistants in his New York studio, the Factory.
The artist claimed to be dedicated to anonymity. He had a rubber stamp
made of his signature and sometimes sent look-alikes in his place to
public appearances, claiming they would do just as well as himself.
"I'd prefer to remain a mystery," he said. "I never give my background
and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked."
Casual observers regarded such acts as humorous or irritating
"put-ons"
in the jargon of the time, but they were taken as seriously as holy
writ in the art world.
Warhol was widely regarded as the source of the decade's idea that
"Everything is Art" as he went on to produce an important rock group,
the Velvet Underground, films, album covers such as that depicting the
crotch of a pair of blue jeans with a real zipper for a Rolling Stones
album and the gossip magazine Interview.
Boring Movies
Early films, like "Empire," were galvanically boring exercises
consisting of nothing but an eight-hour-long shot of the Empire State
Building. When asked to illuminate the subtleties of these films
Warhol
would explain that he was afraid to turn off the camera because he was
just learning how to use it.
Later films, often made in collaboration with director Paul Morrisey,
became more accessible and employed stunningly attractive unknowns
that
Warhol drew from an entourage of characters who hung around the
Factory. Warhol called them his "superstars." They often used
outrageous names like "Ultra-Violet" and sometimes included such
underground actors as the brilliant Taylor Mead.
Warhol's best-known film was the cult classic "Chelsea Girls," which
runs 3 1/2 hours on two screens. It includes one scene in which a
drugged actor goes berserk and attacks the camera, plus much gritty
scatological wit.
When it was suggested to Warhol that such scenes should be cut, he
said, "Well if it gets to a place the projectionist doesn't like, he
can just turn down the sound or put his hand over the lens."
Despite his unassuming demeanor, Warhol had a charismatic personality
that acted as a magnet and catalyst for people who were talented,
disturbed, or both.
In 1968, one of the artist's female followers shot him in the chest in
the Factory elevator because he was "exercising too much influence"
over her life. The shooting, within hours of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's
assassination in Los Angeles, changed Warhol's life in that he became
more cautious of his associates and frequented more conventional
circles.
"I met a lot of people I thought were imaginative and creative,
because
they were beautiful or different," he reflected later. "A lot of them
turned out to be drug freaks or just plain crazy. Now, I'm afraid to
get close to people like that any more. I just watch life like a
movie.
Movies are better movies than life."
Objects of Worship
Warhol openly worshiped money, celebrities and fame, acting the role
of
a street-urchin fan. As years passed, the artist himself gained both
celebrity and wealth, although even in a suit or tuxedo he continued
to
cultivate the rumpled appearance that earned him the sobriquet
"Raggedy
Andy."
Locally, his work is included in the collections of both the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. One
of
his paintings of dollar bills recently fetched $385,000 at auction.
He was invited to the White House and acted in television commercials.
His move to media and jet-set celebrity, coupled with a sense that his
art had failed to outlive the spirit of the 1960s, made Warhol
increasingly irrelevant in the art world until the recent rise of
Post-Modernist art. As Marcel Duchamp acted as a guru to Warhol's
generation, he himself came to be regarded as an archetypal role model
by younger artists.
The frank banality of Warhol's art came to be seen once again as a
mirror and criticism of modern society's mass-produced impersonality.
Recent art that sees a lack of originality as a virtue is often
aesthetically traceable to Warhol.
Warhol recently resumed creating works for some favored organizations,
such as the Save the Children campaign, and he was scheduled to appear
Friday at an awards ceremony for socially conscious corporations.
He was born Andy Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Aug. 6, 1927, one of
three sons of Czech immigrants. After attending Carnegie Institute of
Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburg, he moved to
New York in 1949, where he lived in a basement apartment on 103rd
Street with a mixed group of young men and women, all of whom had
artistic ambitions in dance, theater or art.
Warhol, although young and scruffy, had skill as a commercial artist
and drew for such fashionable publications as Glamour, Vogue and
Harpers Bazaar, specializing in drawings of shoes. His earliest
attempts at fine art came from taking literally the advice of an art
teacher who said he should paint things he really liked. Since Warhol
liked ordinary things -- like comic strips, canned food and soft
drinks
-- he painted them.
Tells of Experience
"I'd been eating soup for lunch for 20 years, so I painted it," he
explained.
Warhol is survived by two brothers who still live in the Pittsburgh
area. However, both John and Paul Warhola declined to comment on the
death of their brother. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
His first cousin, Michael Warhola of Pittsburgh, remembered Warhol
fondly:
"He was always painting when he was a kid," he told United Press
International. "He was very nice, pleasant. He was sickly when he was
a
kid. He was a regular kid. That's all."
Looking at the 1945 Schenley High School yearbook Sunday, he said it
showed a picture of a young, blond Andy, with a caption reading,
"Andrew 'Andy' Warhol, 'as genuine as a fingerprint.' "
Fellow pop artist Julian Schnabel, whose early work was influenced by
Warhol, called his death "a tragedy."
"He was absolutely one of the greatest we ever had in this country,"
Schnabel told the wire service.
Schnabel said he visited Warhol's studio last week and was overwhelmed
by his latest works, which included paintings of the Last Supper. "One
was about 36 feet long," he said. "The image was repeated about 50
times."
"In about 30 years, you'll see how really important his work is,"
Schnabel said. "As important as you think his work is now, it will be
more important later. He was so, so far ahead of everybody else."
Affection for Ordinary
The secret of Warhol's attraction probably lay in his frank affection
for the ordinary, his fundamental shyness and a kind of enigmatic
candor. He appealed as much to street people as to aesthetes.
In 1975, he came to Los Angeles to autograph his autobiography, "Andy
Warhol from A to B." Fans beleaguered him at a Hollywood bookstore,
where he cheerfully autographed anything they wanted, including a
girl's chest. They called the epicene little man St. Andy.
Asked how he felt about that, he said, "I think they are making fun of
me."
Later, chatting with a journalist about bitter New York winters,
Warhol
said, "They don't bother me. I wear panty hose."
---
FROM: The London Times (February 23rd 1987) ~
Mr Andy Warhol, a key face in the visual arts in the 1960s, who,
paradoxically, achieved more fame by what he refrained from doing than
by what he did, died yesterday in New York. He is believed to have
been
59.
Wherever his most famous works may ultimately stand in critical
estimation, his place as a 'superstar' of the arts during the 1960s
will always rate a footnote in art history.
If the term 'superstar' suggests a certain talent for publicity,
scandal and self-advertisement, that is not far wide of the mark. But
even at the time of his greatest fame, his private personality
remained
mysterious and elusive.
It appears, however, that his real name was Andrew Warhola, and that
he
was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of working-class Czech immigrant
parents. Certain it is that he graduated from Carnegie Institute of
Technology in 1949, and almost without a pause became one of the most
successful and sought-after commercial artists in New York.
At this period in his career, he was still drawing, in a rather camp,
fussy sort of style, and he became best known for his playfully
accurate drawings of cats and shoes, real and fantastic.
He was much employed in advertising; designed a number of influential
book-jackets; and deployed his brillant if rather precious gifts as a
draughtsman in a number of mostly humorous, privately-printed books.
This phase lasted for about ten years. But by the beginning of the
1960s he had begun to change direction, becoming first a painter (his
first important one-man show was in 1962), then by giving up painting
proper for silk-screen printing, sometimes touched up by hand.
It was at this point that he first gained widespread fame as the
painter of Campbell soup tins, and consequently a rallying point for
those interested, either as creators or connoisseurs, in the new Pop
Art movement. There was a certain internal logic in this transition -
having made a living from drawing for advertisements, Warhol might
seem
to be carrying over the same sort of subject-matter into the fine
arts.
But this was hardly apparent from the works themselves, for whereas
his
drawings had been highly personal and, in the series of shoes for
instance, whimiscal and fantastic, his paintings often seemed to
originate in photogarphs and to aim at a harsh precise and mechanical
finish.
After painting meticulously detailed pictures of Campbell's soup tins
and Coca-Cola bottles, it was somehow natural that Warhol's next step
should be to eliminate as far as possible the unreliable hand of the
painter.
The works could be that much more efficient, precise and mechanical
if,
instead of being laboriously painted from a photograph, it was
silk-screened directly on to the canvas or paper, so that it could be
multiplied ad infinitum (it is, after all, a considerable job to paint
by hand hundreds of virtually identical canvases).
The role of the artist's personal intervention in his work would then
be reduced to the choice of photographic material at the start and to
the way it was tinted in reproduction or touched up with additional
colour after reproduction.
One aspect of Warhol's artwork at this time seems to have some
significance in relation to his coming involvement in the cinema: his
interest in repetition as an artistic effect.
In many of his graphics a number of images, generally the same, would
be placed in relation to one another, carefully sized and toned and
grouped within an overall multiple image. 'Stars' like Monroe and
Presley, or photographs of death and disaster, were treated in this
way
to produce some of Warhol's most famous works; occasionally also, as
in
his 'Robert Rauschenburg' (1963), a variety of different images might
be pressed into service.
Because of the nature of the silk-screen process, no two images would
be exactly alike in texture, colour and so on, and Warhol was
fascinated by the accidental variations which resulted. Images within
the same frame might also be deliberately varied by the application of
extra colour, as in the Elizabeth Taylor and Monroe pictures, or the
'Flowers' of 1965.
This kind of serial arr might seem a logical step towards film-making,
but since they were nearly all rigorously non-narrative,
non-progressive and turned for their effect on simultaneity of vision,
they were surely bound to lead to a rather peculiar sort of cinema.
In 1963 Warhol made his first film, on a trip to Los Angeles,
something
called Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of .., but later the same year
he
made the first famous film of his early period, Sleep. It is a
six-hour, silent picture of a man sleeping, actually made, according
to
Warhol (though it would be impossible to recognize this in the
finished
film), by a carefully arranged pattern of ten-minute segments shot
over
a couple of weeks and cunningly repeated to make a satisfactory
design.
All the same, the effect of Sleep, and of others like Kiss, Couch and
Empire (this last an eight-hour study of the Empire State Building
from
one fixed position), is one of unblinking scrutiny of an object which
remains uniform through a small cycle of change.
Boredom of a certain controlled sort, drugging the first levels of
consciousness, seems to be a part of the films' psychological design,
and though inevitably they exist in time, they are always working
against it, dulling our awareness of it.
These films immediately became a talking point, even for those who had
not seen them, and exerted a considerable influence (largely baleful)
on the experimental cinema of the 1960s.
But through the sequence of them, Warhol himself as a personality
became consistently more elusive. The nature of the films carried
further his apparent design of reducing the personal participation of
the artist to be minimum - they could be made, like many of his
graphics, without the artist's being there at all.
And indeed, having progressively withdrawn from painting and then even
from graphics, he began also to withdraw from active participation in
film-making. Though hundreds of films were made under the blanket
label
of 'Warhol', different personalities around the Factory, his centre of
operations, played the dominant in their creation at different times.
Warhol became the still centre of activities, surrounded by an
ever-changing entourage of junkies, traversities and freaks of all
kinds who would be elevated for a few weeks to the status of
'superstars' in sketchily improvized films, then drift away again. His
influence was pervasive, and yet impossible to pin down precisely;
frequently he seemed to be a catalyst more than an inventor.
And curiously, for the leading figure in a society of this sort, he
continued to lead a very quite life, of which one could glean only
that
he lived with his mother in circumstances of solid middle-class
respectabilty, was still quite devotly religious, and ofr himself
disapproved of a lot of the drug-taking and drop-out lifestyles of
many
of those around him (though never really of the inner circle).
His films during the later 1960s moved away from the abstraction and,
after a brief flirtation with extravagant camp, lonesome cowboys and
some more formal experimentation, settled on the classic Warhol style,
turning a cool, detached gaze on a lot of really weird people and so
allowing them to preserve their dignity as they lived out their
fantasies before the camera.
It is typical of the Warhol paradox that the first major success in
this style, Flesh (1968), was actually made by his most important
associate, Paul Morrissey, while Warhol himself was in hospital
recovering from being shot, in a much publicized incident, by a lady
from SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men).
Whatever position Warhol may ultimately come to hold in the artistic
pantheon of the 1960s and 1970s, there is no doubt that he will be
remembered at least as the artist who most surely go the measure of
art
as a show-business during this period, the role of publicity and
scandal in the making of art, the permanence (or anyway the chances
for
permanence) of the most resolutely disposable and momentary in art.
'In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes', he once
said.
It is hard to tell whether he made it all happens, or in some
mysterious way it all just happened to and around him. But through the
tangled art scene of his time he moved with the certainty of a
sleep-walker, and left behind him some of the most memorable and
characteristic images of a confused and possibly shallow and
superficial era.
He was a slight man who wore a white wig.