painted car wrecks, electric chairs, race riots: scenes you couldnât bear to ignore because they aroused unholy fascination, what Freud described as unheimlich. Warhol appreciated any immediately recognizable image, regardless of its value. In 1963, when he began wearing a silver wig, his own appearance (documented in self-portraits) acquired the instantaneous legibility that he demanded of Pop objects.
Ashamed of his appearance, or wishing to spin it as performance, he covered his face with a theatrical mask when Ivan Karp, scouting for the Leo Castelli Gallery, came to call in 1961. Karp remembers that the artist in his studio was loudly playing the Dickie Lee song âI Saw Linda Yesterdayâ over and over: Andy claimed not to understand music until repetition drummed its meanings in. Henry Geldzahler, an associate curator at the Met, accompanied Ivan one day; Henry would become a staunch ally, although later he would alienate Andy by not including him in the 1966 Venice Biennale. Irving Blum and Walter Hopps from Los Angelesâs Ferus Gallery also visited, and eventually gave Andy his first solo painting show.
At first, however, no one accepted or exhibited his paintings. Leo Castelli already represented Roy Lichtenstein, committed to comics, and Castelli deemed that one Pop artist was enough. Andy showed paintings for the first time not in a gallery but in a Bonwit Teller window, in April 1961: with this gesture, he paid dual allegiance to commerce and artâa split he hardly took seriously, though pundits didâand proved that his work could roost in clothing stores, those feminine bazaars of fetish and decor.
More mysterious than how Andy became a painter, or why he chose to paint comic-book and commodity images (perhaps he calculated that these American objects and icons were a safely majority taste, while the naked men and shoes heâd rendered in the 1950s were a minority taste), is why he became a painter at all. Heâd always wished to express his body, to push it through a silken mesh of given images; heâd always wanted to be a âfineâ (classy) artist, and had merely been biding his time. His sketches and presentation books had a limited audience; he knew that painters were more famous than commercial or coterie artists. He took inspiration from the careers preceding and surrounding himâJackson Pollock made a splash in Life magazine in the late 1940s, and Andyâs peers Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had recently arrived. Andy bought a Johns drawing of a lightbulb and was desperate to be noticed by Johns and Rauschenberg, lovers who kept their sexual identities under wraps. Andy was too fey in manner, as he admits in his memoirs, to hide his homosexuality, and De Antonio told him that the reason Johns and Rauschenberg avoided him at parties (and mocked him behind his back) was that Andy was too effeminate, and that his swish conduct threatened to rock the boat they were trying manfully to row toward success. In praise of what he could not embody, in 1962 and 1963 Andy did two silkscreen paintings of Rauschenberg, one titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , in which he pictured his peer as heroic artist, epitome of rugged pioneer self-made masculinityâa cowboy, or at least a dreaming farmhand. Eventually Rauschenberg and Warhol became grudging acquaintances (photos of the two embracing in the 1970s reveal the limits of their mutual affection), and Warholâs fame (though not his reputation among influential critics) trumped Pollockâs. Warholâs decision to become a painter in the first place was an attempt to queer the Pollock mythâto prove that art stardom was a swish affair: all this business of men dripping paint on floors and posing in T-shirts and khakis in barns! The desire to be like a manâto be a painter like Pollockâwas a project in resemblance, in imitation: not to be a master, but to be like a master, and thereby to
Ashamed of his appearance, or wishing to spin it as performance, he covered his face with a theatrical mask when Ivan Karp, scouting for the Leo Castelli Gallery, came to call in 1961. Karp remembers that the artist in his studio was loudly playing the Dickie Lee song âI Saw Linda Yesterdayâ over and over: Andy claimed not to understand music until repetition drummed its meanings in. Henry Geldzahler, an associate curator at the Met, accompanied Ivan one day; Henry would become a staunch ally, although later he would alienate Andy by not including him in the 1966 Venice Biennale. Irving Blum and Walter Hopps from Los Angelesâs Ferus Gallery also visited, and eventually gave Andy his first solo painting show.
At first, however, no one accepted or exhibited his paintings. Leo Castelli already represented Roy Lichtenstein, committed to comics, and Castelli deemed that one Pop artist was enough. Andy showed paintings for the first time not in a gallery but in a Bonwit Teller window, in April 1961: with this gesture, he paid dual allegiance to commerce and artâa split he hardly took seriously, though pundits didâand proved that his work could roost in clothing stores, those feminine bazaars of fetish and decor.
More mysterious than how Andy became a painter, or why he chose to paint comic-book and commodity images (perhaps he calculated that these American objects and icons were a safely majority taste, while the naked men and shoes heâd rendered in the 1950s were a minority taste), is why he became a painter at all. Heâd always wished to express his body, to push it through a silken mesh of given images; heâd always wanted to be a âfineâ (classy) artist, and had merely been biding his time. His sketches and presentation books had a limited audience; he knew that painters were more famous than commercial or coterie artists. He took inspiration from the careers preceding and surrounding himâJackson Pollock made a splash in Life magazine in the late 1940s, and Andyâs peers Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had recently arrived. Andy bought a Johns drawing of a lightbulb and was desperate to be noticed by Johns and Rauschenberg, lovers who kept their sexual identities under wraps. Andy was too fey in manner, as he admits in his memoirs, to hide his homosexuality, and De Antonio told him that the reason Johns and Rauschenberg avoided him at parties (and mocked him behind his back) was that Andy was too effeminate, and that his swish conduct threatened to rock the boat they were trying manfully to row toward success. In praise of what he could not embody, in 1962 and 1963 Andy did two silkscreen paintings of Rauschenberg, one titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , in which he pictured his peer as heroic artist, epitome of rugged pioneer self-made masculinityâa cowboy, or at least a dreaming farmhand. Eventually Rauschenberg and Warhol became grudging acquaintances (photos of the two embracing in the 1970s reveal the limits of their mutual affection), and Warholâs fame (though not his reputation among influential critics) trumped Pollockâs. Warholâs decision to become a painter in the first place was an attempt to queer the Pollock mythâto prove that art stardom was a swish affair: all this business of men dripping paint on floors and posing in T-shirts and khakis in barns! The desire to be like a manâto be a painter like Pollockâwas a project in resemblance, in imitation: not to be a master, but to be like a master, and thereby to
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