Andy Warhol’s Rise to Success
By: Christopher P Jones
Tags: Culture, American History, Art History, Pop Art, Art

Andy Warhol’s Rise to Success

The early years of Pop Art’s grandee

Andy Warhol. Image source Wikimedia Commons

Andy Warhol never considered himself very interesting.

In 1967, the artist agreed to take a cross-country college lecture tour, only to send an impersonator in his place. A young actor named Allen Midgette, who travelled instead of Warhol, wore silver hairspray and acted the part by chewing a lot of gum — “because Andy did.”

After the hoax was revealed, Warhol justified himself by claiming, “I don’t really have much to say… They liked him better than they would have me.”

Two years before, when Warhol appeared on the Merv Griffin show in 1965, he remained almost entirely mute throughout his five-minute appearance. When he mumbled a single-word response to one question, the studio audience broke into applause.

Much of this was an intentional pretense, a feigned vacuousness that disguised a keen and fertile imagination. When visiting his London gallery in the early 1980s, for instance, asked by an interviewer what had prompted his latest round of self-portraits, Warhol replied, “I ran out of ideas.” His expression was bemused, almost incredulous, that he might be asked such a direct, face-value question about his less-than-face-value art.

Andy Warhol always preferred artifice to direct expression. Before 1962, which can be considered his break-through year, most of Warhol’s time was spent in commercial advertising, where he learnt the art of generating surface-appeal. Fashion advertising tends to work best when its products are given a touch of elusiveness.

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. He described Pittsburgh as “the worst place I have ever been.” His parents were emigrants into the US from Mikó, Austria-Hungary, located in today’s northeastern Slovakia.

At the age of eight, Warhol contracted rheumatic fever, which later turned into Chorea — a condition also known as St. Vitus’s Dance. The “dance” part refers to involuntary, unpredictable body movements connected with the condition, and from which Warhol apparently suffered. During these years, he was often bedridden for several months at a time. At his mother’s encouragement, he took up drawing, which soon became his favourite pastime. He spent time listening to the radio and with pictures of movie stars around his bed. He also took up photography, and set up a makeshift darkroom in the family basement.

After high-school, Warhol went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study commercial art. His early drawings and paintings were characterised by simple, delicate outlines, made in pencil or black ink, sometimes filled with colour, often left blank inside. There is no shading, no attempt at the depiction of volume. Warhol himself referred to his drawings as the “fairy style.” Think Egon Schiele, yet without the neurotic edge.

Whilst he was never a natural draughtsman, art school allowed Warhol to develop a style of painting that would later win him commissions in the field of advertising. Soon after, he moved to New York and showed his portfolio to editors at fashion magazines.

It was the late 1940s, and post-war advertising was looking for a style that captured a more experimental sensibility. Warhol’s whimsical approach won him plenty of commercial work, and he soon became known for illustrating shoes for Glamour magazine and Harper’s Bazaar, and later, designing window displays for New York’s leading departments stores.

The 1950s were extremely successful for Warhol. His income from his advertising work increased year on year: in 1959 he earned $53,000, roughly equivalent to nearly half-a-million dollars in today’s terms. In 1960, he bought a four-storey house on Lexington Avenue and 89th Street for $60,000.

Warhol’s hopes of joining the avant-garde of American art — to become known as a serious artist — remained with him throughout the decade, even though his own personal artwork achieved only a fraction of his commercial success during these years. Yet, by the end of the decade, artistic preferences in the New York scene were evolving, and were beginning to cross-over with Warhol’s pop-culture style.

American art in the later 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the Abstract Expressionists, the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Yet by the early 1960s, tastes were turning towards a different group of artists, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. These artists had begun to incorporate everyday objects into their works, and in doing so, blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture, high-art and low. They made references to popular culture, using photographs from newspapers, found-objects, maps, letters and numbers. Jasper Johns, for instance, made repeated paintings of the American flag — iconic motifs transformed into artistic subject matter.

This shift in taste worked in Warhol’s favour and allowed his commercial work to enter into the mainstream of the art world. He began to adopt a deliberate naivety in his persona, one that looked to the most conventional forms of popular culture for material. His paintings evolved into silkscreen prints, allowing him to reproduce magazine. photographs as a stencil and then print them repeatedly onto canvas.

It is from this mechanical technique that Warhol’s first collection of imagery emerged. Up until 1962, he worked more or less in seclusion. From this point, his art work began reaching a wider audience. His first solo shows, in Los Angeles and later in New York, quickly gained important clients — the architect Philip Johnson and MoMA’s Alfred H Barr bought his paintings.

Warhol showed his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans series around this time. Consisting of thirty-two identical canvases, each with of a painting of a Campbell’s Soup can (each a different flavour), the works made Warhol’s name. He expanded his screenprint series into filmstars — Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor — as well as darker images of the electric chair and car crashes taken from newspaper clippings.

The images are effective because they play with our notions of the banal. Each print in a series is the more or less the same as the previous one; and yet one finds oneself scanning the image for variations.

To repeat the face of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, over and over again, is to reinforce the monopoly of a tiny selection of images that mass-advertising perpetrates on the consuming public.

Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol. Tate Gallery, London. Image source Wikimedia Commons. By http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976&tabview=image, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21757251

Marilyn Monroe’s face is shown dozens of times. Each face is imperfect in some way: some are printed too heavily, others are faint, as if the screenprint ink was running low. As the image grows more familiar, the face appears to alter expression, sometimes pouting, or where the paint has thinned, almost grimacing. The mind partially invents these differences in order to discern some traditional element of portraiture. These technical variations however, only emphasise the mechanical process behind the portraits.

Warhol understood the vacuousness of the repeated image and its power to draw the viewer into the rhythmic beats of the pattern. Like a film-reel passing slowly before us, we become hypnotised by the dizzying ability of our technical age to reproduce, clone after clone, product after product, print after print.

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Christopher P Jones is a writer and artist. He blogs about culture, art and life at his website.