Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto Page A

and mint-green—as if he were producing wallpaper. Sometimes he would pair a disaster painting with a blank monochrome canvas in the same color. It made for a more impressive work than the disaster taken alone. But it points to a contrast as well, between the world of disaster and devastation and the void—the world emptied of incident, lavender emptiness.

    Dying in America. Andy Warhol,
Marilyn Diptych
, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint and silk-screen ink on canvas, 82 × 57 in. (205.4 × 144.8 cm). Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

    The 1962 Stable show was a huge success, critically and financially, though Warhol’s prices were unusually modest. But in a way Warhol himself was carried along with his work, as if he were inseparable from it, with his wig, his weak eyesight, his bad complexion, his loopy, ill-defined musculature. Who, unless theyknew Lichtenstein or Oldenburg or Wesselman or Rosenquist personally, had any idea of what they actually looked like as men? But Andy became as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Mickey Mouse. He became a public personality. With the first Stable show Warhol became Andy, the Pop artist—an icon, identified with his bafflingly obvious work, and with the world in which Americans lived. He was the one that took that world and turned it into art that everyone felt they understood. Much of the publicity was negative, but there was a lot of it, and it didn’t matter what it said.
    One the best critics of the time responded to what the negativity left untouched. Michael Fried, cultivated and sophisticated as few journalistic critics, captured the great truths of the Stable shows: “Of all the painters working today in the service—or thrall—of a popular iconograph, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular. At his strongest—and I take this to be the Marilyn Monroe paintings—Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity (as in his choice of colors) and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time. That I for one find moving.”
    The tragedy of the commonplace—“beauty falls from air, queens have died young and fair”—is as true of New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s as it was of Paris and Lombardy at the time of the Renaissance. No one standing in front of
Marilyn
could say—how cheap, how empty. Warhol, in giving us ourworld transfigured into art, transfigured us and himself in the process. Even if the Death and Disaster paintings did not sell, even if Pop’s days were numbered, ours was becoming the Age of Warhol. An Age is defined in terms of its art. Art before Andy was radically different from the art that came after him, and through him.

THREE
The Brillo Box
    Because of the success of his first show at the Stable Gallery, Andy attained a degree of celebrity unshared by the other artists in the Pop movement: it in fact outlasted the movement itself, which was as much a cultural craze as an art movement, based on brashness and novelty. His productive career took a direction very different from that of any of his peers. It was not the typical career of the Artist in his Studio, producing a body of work to be shown at regular intervals at a gallery, harvesting critical reviews and sales to important collectors. More than any artist of comparable importance, Andy intuited the great changes that made the 1960s the “Sixties,” and helped shape the era he lived through, so that his art both became part of his times and transcended them. He invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film,and drugs, as well as art. But beyond even that, he changed the concept of art itself, so that his work induced a transformation in art’s philosophy so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art in the same way that it had been thought of even a few