Nearly 10 years after his death of a heart attack at age 58, Andy Warhol is still in the popular imagination–which is undoubtedly how he wanted it, for in life he became an icon as much for his cultivation of celebrityhood as for his art.
This year he enters a new phase of immortality by being a central character in two commercial films, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” which opened in Chicago Friday, and “Basquiat,” scheduled for release early in the summer.
Such films will embed the Warhol persona–fluffy white wig and all–in the mind of a generation unborn when he was at his height in the 1960s, redefining the image of an artist not only to other artists but to the public at large, which always has loved a good show, especially if it’s more entertainment than art.
In the last 50 years, no seriously acclaimed artist put on a show more entertaining than Warhol’s, not even Salvador Dali, who with curlicue mustache and incomprehensible speech raised the stakes on the madman-genius so beloved of audiences since the late 19th Century and the myth of Vincent van Gogh.
Artists have redefined their self-image as a species at various periods in history, and Warhol did it for our time. He undercut pretense and did away with Romantic mythology by bringing camp into the world of painting and sculpture. He also focused artists on the goals of fame, money and power. And by stating such businesslike aspirations, which artists often held but seldom expressed, Warhol endeared himself (as much as a homosexual could in the 1960s) to a Middle America that basically shared his values.
No artist before Warhol turned up as often on TV talk shows, maundering about how “easy” the life of an artist was. Of course, this was not true, even for Warhol, who proved, in fact, addicted to many forms of work, including painting, printmaking, filmmaking, record producing, magazine publishing, modeling, acting and, for a brief time, running a rock club.
That he did not discriminate among the activities was, for the general public, part of his fun. Warhol appeared to put everything in art and life on the same level; apart from fame, money and power, nothing meant more than anything else. Artists before him achieved success by agonizing over apparently small decisions. He didn’t seem to care about even the big ones and still got more attention than all of his predecessors combined.
Part of this was because sophisticated members of Warhol’s audience refused to believe they were getting the whole story and, so, hung on his every word. The other part was that the people who saw him on TV were perfectly willing to take him at face value, talking dazedly about acne and diets and the bad hair of characters on “Dynasty.”
Shaping culture
And why not? What else do television “personalities” talk about? Warhol was ostensibly interested in the same things as anyone at a trailer park. Besides, that sort of thing was in his art: Campbell’s Soup and Brillo and Marilyn and Liz and Jackie. Back in the ’60s, all of them could easily have been in the ads and stories of a single issue of that blue-collar missal, the National Enquirer.
You didn’t have to get the it’s-so-bad-that-it’s-good attitude in order to notice Warhol’s art had a higher level of pop-culture content from the art previously seen at museums. But if you did get that Troy Donahue and Natalie Wood were lousy actors whom Warhol proclaimed “stars” by making them the subjects of paintings, maybe you also realized this was how the media works, conferring distinction by selection.
The “Camelot” of the Kennedy presidency was, for example, declared rather than earned. In predicting that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, Warhol showed profound understanding. If viewers could accept people as “stars” simply by seeing them again and again on television, they also would accept recognizability over achievement. So Warhol called the nobodies in his films “superstars,” and, sure enough, after ample exposure, some began to be accepted as such.
Most of them were, of course, just freaks and junkies common to the “Swingin’ Sixties,” a decade that Warhol seems to have stage-managed. That is the period of “I Shot Andy Warhol,” a biopic of Valerie Solanas, the panhandler, prostitute and militant lesbian who wanted him to produce a play that, as one of the characters in the film says, was “way too disgusting even for us.”
Solanas enters the scene at Warhol’s silver foil-lined studio through a female impersonator known as Candy Darling, who tells her, “If anyone can make you a star, Andy can.” Solanas gives the passive, halting artist a copy of her play, and he puts her in one of his impromptu movies.
We see Warhol through Solanas, much as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were seen through the eyes of a maid in the recent novel and film “Mary Reilly.” But how he emerges is nonetheless revealing, for everyone at the Factory, as the studio was known, performs more labor than Warhol, yet he is the force–always engaged in tentative, whispered conversations– who has set them in motion.
This is the Warhol who in real life said he wanted to be a machine. He acts primarily through others and often watches the situations he creates as a detached observer. The image of the artist traditionally presented in fictional films, from “Lust for Life” and “Moulin Rouge” to “Camille Claudel” and “La Belle Noiseuse,” is here replaced by a ghostly presence who does so little that in relation to the celebrity he achieved he seems a mere functionary, a minor character.
Director Mary Harron, who also collaborated on the film’s screenplay, is particularly perceptive in giving the Factory itself the aura normally reserved for an artist. This glow of both elusive and elicit activity–art to drugs–confirms for Solanas the extraordinary power of Warhol, a power she felt was gradually eating her up. After shooting Warhol and curator Mario Amaya (who had happened by the studio) on June 3, 1968, she said: “He had too much control of my life.”
The freewheeling atmosphere of the Factory, with its pansexual “superstars” and groupies, is also a source for Warhol’s continuing appeal, as it represents to a new generation the anti-authoritarianism of the ’60s just as his sponsorship of the rock group the Velvet Underground indicates his cutting-edge coolness. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, “Blow Up,” gives a picture of the “Swingin’ Sixties” in London; the Factory typifies the excesses of the decade in New York.
Mental and physical scars
The Solanas attack proved crucial for Warhol in more than one way. Richard Avedon’s famous photographic portrait taken 18 months later indicates Warhol survived bearing scars comparable with those of Frankenstein’s monster. But the psychological effect was more subtle, for Warhol said in the late 1970s, “I haven’t been creative since I was shot,” and many retrospective exhibitions have borne him out.
The film suggests he subsequently imagined Solanas in places she was not. But reality was worse. Warhol not only ran into her in Greenwich Village a decade later, but acquaintances continually reported sightings and, more than once, strangers reminded him of the incident. Recalling a woman asking for his autograph in Rome in 1980, Warhol said: “She looked like Valerie Solanas so I got scared she’d pull out a gun and shoot me.” The woman was a Vatican nun.
After 1968, Warhol appeared to take refuge from the low-life that gathered at the Factory by moving in ever-higher reaches of society. From these strata he worked at extracting portrait commissions–from, among others, Truman Capote, Princess Caroline of Monaco and the Shah of Iran– which he duly fulfilled and, finally, exhibited to little critical or popular effect.
Always a gadabout, Warhol actually increased his partygoing to cultivate commissions, and at times in the ’70s and ’80s being seen among the super-rich seemed his chief occupation. This perhaps became an instant means of gratification for the hunger he felt once his works no longer made an appreciable difference on his level of fame.
He also envisioned himself as a grandfather figure to young artists, including the drug-addicted Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he eventually collaborated. Basquiat and his graffiti-inspired art are the subjects of the film coming this summer, directed by painter (and, more recently, singer) Julian Schnabel.
Warhol assessed Schnabel near the beginning of his phenomenal success, in 1982, saying, “He copies people’s work and he’s pushy.” Nonetheless, Warhol posed for a portrait by Schnabel, later accusing the artist of wanting to get favorable press from the association. “He’s trying to be the new Andy Warhol,” the old Andy Warhol said, admitting, “that made me nervous, so I left and worked very hard at the office.”
Most of the hot young painters of the ’80s had adopted his vision of artist as consummate businessman. Keith Haring was the most practical in its application, opening stores to sell all manner of products with designs based on the upbeat creatures in his graffiti art. But David Salle, Robert Longo and countless others followed the Warhol model and, later, Jeff Koons, a commodities-trader-turned-sculptor, heightened it by building into his deliberately lowbrow subjects a contempt for the audience that Warhol himself never had.
Even in Chicago, whose artists long have prided themselves on remaining philosophically distant from New York, Warhol made a lasting impression. It’s hard to imagine Ed Paschke and Tony Tasset doing TV advertisements for Chevrolet and AT&T without Warhol’s print ads, product endorsements, and appearances on behalf of various commercial enterprises. He made the business of art every artist’s business.
Quality over camp
Long before the spectacle of the recent Jacqueline Onassis auction, Warhol set the pattern there, too, with an estate sale that, in fact, gave better value. Of the thousands of lots that went on the block in 1988 at Sotheby’s, relatively few contained junk of the sort that belonged to his famous subject. He had collected masterpieces of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, American Indian art and much else that indicated a love for the beautiful unexpected in one who so thrived on campiness.
The ultimate surprise, however, were the posthumous “diaries” stitched together by friend Pat Hackett from transcripts of daily phone conversations they had between late 1976 and 1987. Warhol emerges there as a social critic who saw with utmost clarity the vanities he always appeared to indulge. And the vision of him caring for indigents on weekends, as he did in his final years with the dedication of a religious calling, is perhaps the most enviable in an unconventional life that continues to haunt us.
THE WONDER YEARS
Andy Warhol’s remarkable life featured many moments in the spotlight. Here are some of the most significant events:
1928: Born Andrew Warhola, in Pittsburgh, Aug. 6.
1934: Begins collecting autographed photos of movie stars; his first is Shirley Temple.
1942: At 14, attends a free program on art appreciation and training at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), Pittsburgh.
1948-49: Graduates from Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in pictorial design. Moves to New York and seeks work as a commercial artist. Begins using the name Warhol.
1952: First individual exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote,” Hugo Gallery, New York.
1952-59: Works as a commercial artist in New York.
1960: Produces first canvases of comic-strip characters and advertisement works.
1962: Shows Campbell’s Soup cans, Elvises and Marilyns.
1963: Produces Race Riots series and, after the death of John F. Kennedy, Jackies. Buys a 16 mm camera and shoots his first film, “Sleep.” Moves his studio to 231 E. 47th St. It becomes known as the Factory. Replaces his gray hairpiece with a silver-sprayed wig.
1964: Creates first self-portraits.
1966: Releases “The Chelsea Girls,” the first of Warhol’s films to receive attention from national press.
1967: Produces the Velvet Underground’s first album and designs its cover.
1968: Is shot by Valerie Solanas at the Factory, then at 33 Union Square West, on June 3. Warhol undergoes surgery and nearly dies.
1969: Publishes first issue of Interview magazine.
1972: Begins painting commissioned portraits.
1970s-80s: Continues working in various media; is subject of numerous exhibits.
1987: Dies of a heart attack on Feb. 22, following gall bladder surgery.
Source: “Andy Warhol: A Retrospective,” edited by Kynaston McShine (Museum of Modern Art)
