Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum

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