Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum Page B

master mastery.
    Pollock’s champion in the early 1960s was Frank O’Hara, the insouciant, nervy poet and curator at MoMA, which as early as 1958 had proclaimed its indifference to Warhol by refusing­ the donation of one of his shoe drawings. Warhol admired and envied members of the aesthetic gay intelligentsia—Rauschenberg­, Johns, and O’Hara key among them—and he attempted to court O’Hara, although O’Hara disliked Warhol’s work and only came around to an appreciation of it a year or so before his own untimely accidental death in 1966. According to O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch, Warhol sought the good graces of the smart gay set: “Warhol gave O’Hara an imaginary drawing of the poet’s penis, which he crumpled up and threw away in annoyance.” (Recall that Garbo, too, had crumpled one of Andy’s drawings.) Warhol wanted to draw O’Hara’s feet: the poet declined the offer.
    Andy’s breakthrough as an artist came in 1962, and it had nothing to do with O’Hara, who I wish had shown more tolerance for the pasty-faced, unlettered Mr. Paperbag, whose art had affinity with such O’Hara gems as “Lana Turner has collapsed!” and “To the Film Industry in Crisis.” In August 1962 Andy began photosilkscreening, commencing with a baseball player and then actors Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty. (Although his portraits of Liz and Marilyn earned him the most fame, he preceded female deities with male; his goddesses, not intrinsically women, may indeed be men at one remove. )On August 5, Marilyn Monroe fatally overdosed, and the very next day he silkscreened her needy face. Dead, she begged for respectful (handle-with-care) replication. Andy held that Marilyn desires or deserves no image but her own, a death row of doubles, or a single face enshrined in a godless, lonely field of gold. Andy also began silkscreening fatalities: he had already painted a disaster, apparently at Geldzahler’s suggestion—depicting the front page of the New York Mirror , June 4, 1962, the headline reading “129 Die in Jet.”
    Silkscreening allowed him to appropriate an image—publicity­ still, press clipping. A shop printed a negative of the Warhol-chosen photo on a screen, through which Andy and an assistant pushed paint to form a positive image on canvas. Sometimes he first hand-painted color zones or primed the entire canvas, and then screened the image on top. Silkscreening, faster and easier than painting, removed the obligation of using the hand; silkscreening undercut (and poached on) photography’s claims to depict the real. And silk­screening required a historically new variety of visual intelligence—a designer’s or director’s, perhaps, rather than a conventional painter’s. Andy had a clairvoyant sense of what subjects were worth copying; he had an iconoclastic notion of what surprising colors should garnish or offend the bare black-and-white image, and what blues or reds or silvers had the power to verify and ratify the self who gazed at them; and he knew precisely what cockeyed rhythms of repeated images could defamiliarize received truths. He had a crush on hazard and flaw—places where the screen slipped or got clogged with paint, moments where the image was smudged or not fully applied, or where one image accidentally overlapped and screwed up the clarity of another. He had hand-painted his earliest Pop works from projections or with stencils, but in silkscreening he was jubilant to discover an efficient way of making paintings that were virtually photographs, illicitly transposed—smuggled across the hygienic border separating the media.
    Silkscreens—baffles—introduced distance between himself and the viewer. Literally, silkscreens were nets, webs, mazes—crisscrossing meshes, composed of silk (the stuff of fine clothing, especially women’s wear); and thus his