The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The art world’s first souperstar
This monumental biography of Andy Warhol is extremely fun – but fails to crack the enigma. By Mick Brown
of Parnassus beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.”
Warhol would have loved that. As a college student, Picasso was a favourite of his, and at the height of his pop art fame he made the rivalry explicit by wearing the Breton striped T-shirts Picasso was famous for – part tribute, part self-promotion. Andy Warhol was the artist as brand, avant la lettre: as the title of this book suggests, his greatest creation was himself. So who was he exactly?
Warhol’s parents were immigrants from what is now Slovakia, who settled in the industrial nowhere land of Pittsburgh. His father was a labourer, the family poor. Warhol was a sickly child who suffered from the shakes and chronic skin problems. His summers were spent lying in bed, listening to the radio with “cut-out paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow”. It was an upbringing he disowned as quickly as he could. When he arrived in New York in 1949, as an art-school graduate in search of work as an illustrator, he told a magazine editor who asked for a potted biography: “My life wouldn’t fill a penny postcard.”
The young Warhol was “very shy and cuddly, very much like a bunny”, according to one friend, “an angel in the sky” according to another. He was also gay – a fact that, as Gopnik, an American art critic, sets out to demonstrate, would be crucial in shaping his “outsider” relationship to art and the milieu he moved in, and ultimately the milieu he created; crucial, too, in the way that public attitudes towards his work shifted from rejection to celebration.
In the late Forties, when two Pittsburgh judges had referred to homosexuals as “society’s greatest menace” and police were drawing up lists of “known perverts”, Warhol – then a window dresser in a Pittsburgh department store – favoured a pink corduroy suit, a tie dipped in paint and brightly coloured fingernails. Yet the notion of Warhol as “a feeble, androgynous waif ”, says Gopnik, is “a mirage”. As a young man, he lifted weights at the YMCA two or three times a week, and Lou Reed described him as being “like a demon, his strength is incredible” – at least until 1968, when an assassination attempt by a disturbed woman, Valerie Solanas, left him chronically debilitated.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, he had an obsession with penises. Friends, acquaintances – total strangers – would be asked to drop their pants, according to one friend, and “Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he’d say, ‘Thank you’.” Sometimes “there’d be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon…”
An unrequited romantic, throughout his life he would fall in love with a succession of younger men, usually unhappily. But he seems to have had little enthusiasm for sexual relations. One partner, the photographer Carl Willers, recalls that he was “more passionate about food and eating”.
It was a gay aesthetic, Gopnik argues, that informed what Warhol described as the “fairy style” curlicue illustrations of shoes with which he first made his name as an artist, and the camp taste for “lowly pop culture”, which he would elevate to the realm of fine art. In characteristically faux-naif fashion, he traced the origins of his pop art to the time he spent working as a window dresser at Bonwits in New York, when he used comics and advertisements as a backdrop to his displays of dresses and handbags. “Then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries.”
This would lead to what Gopnik calls Warhol’s “eureka moment – one of the greatest in the history of art”, the Campbell soup can, and the notion that mass-produced commercial goods could be art – and, eventually, that art could be profitably mass-produced. His first Los Angeles exhibition in 1962 showed 32 soup cans, which were bought by the gallery owner Irving
WARHOL: A LIFE AS ART
‘He was like the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your drag queens, your junkies”’
Blum for $1,000. In 1996, Blum sold them to Moma for $15million. “They might be worth half a billion now,” Gopnik observes.
What Warhol was selling, as one friend put it, was “not so much art as milieu”, a milieu “dripping with edge and irony”. In 1964, he moved into a former hat factory in midtown Manhattan, where he produced the silk-screen prints of Marilyn, Elvis, electric chairs and suicide leaps, attended by a coterie of acolytes, and disciples – junkies, hustlers, transvestites and chronic narcissists, whom Warhol turned into his “superstars”. There was Ondine, “the Factory’s favourite gay speed freak”; Warhol’s principal muse, the bruised and beautiful heiress Edie Sedgwick, whose “charming incapacities” and decline into addiction and chaos Warhol chronicled with clinical indifference; and the flame-haired, honking-voiced Viva – “Warhol’s Garbo”, as the newspapers had it: a reference that had everything to do with her gaunt, porcelain features and nothing to do with reticence. Viva’s “verbal diarrhoea”, as Gopnik puts it, “left her no time for social niceties. Any thought that could cross her lips did.”
Then there were the drag queens Jackie Curtis, Cindy
Darling and Holly Woodlawn – a reflection of Warhol’s fascination with gender. At college, for one self-portrait assignment, he shocked his class by depicting himself as a girl with Shirley Temple ringlets, explaining: “I always want to know what I would look like if I was a girl.” Many years later, when asked what “famous person” he would most like to be, he replied “Christine Jorgensen” – America’s first famous transsexual.
“Andy was like the Statue of Liberty,” one friend tells Gopnik. “‘Give me your tired, your hungry – your drag queens, your junkies.’ He was the saint of misfits.” But Warhol’s friend, the critic and art curator Henry Geldzahler, put it more acutely when he described Warhol as “a voyeur-sadist” who needed “exhibitionist masochists in order to fulfil both halves of his destiny”. Like a priest, Warhol could offer absolution for the perverse, but no promise of an afterlife. Most left his circle – or were ejected – feeling used, embittered and betrayed.
One comes to the conclusion that there was an emotional vacancy in Warhol. He didn’t know how to feel. A lover, John Giorno, recalls watching the news of Kennedy’s assassination unfold on television. “I started crying and Andy started crying. Hugging each other, weeping big fat tears and kissing. It was exhilarating, like when you get kicked in the head and see stars. Andy kept saying, ‘I don’t know what it means.’ ”
But what did he believe? Like Bob Dylan, he deliberately cultivated the art of the put-on and concealment. Typical was this exchange with a journalist: “How close is pop art to ‘Happenings’?” “I don’t know.” “What is pop art trying to say?” “I don’t know.”
When I interviewed Viva over lunch some years ago, she described how Warhol “would just want to gossip, like a woman would gossip basically – or his idea of what a woman would think gossip was. What Andy really liked to talk about was men’s penises.” (At this point a deathly silence fell over the crowded restaurant, all heads turning to hear what Viva would say next.)
Henry Geldzahler wrote that Warhol “plays dumb just as his paintings do, but neither deceives us”, adding that he was “incredibly analytical, intellectual, and perceptive”. And, he might have added, incredibly shrewd. In 1972, after Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, Warhol asked a friend, “Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion, should I do some Mao portraits?” The idea spawned some 2,700 images, transforming a man who, as one critic pointed out, had “murdered about 60 million Chinese and caused poverty and starvation in all China” into an icon.
But by then, Warhol had long since made the transition from underground artist to darling of the establishment, turning out portraits to order for Italian industrialists, wealthy socialites and the Shah of Iran, combining a Stakhanovite work ethic with manic socialising: a typical evening would take him from a Broadway opening to a fancy dinner, a rock star’s birthday, and, always, Studio 54. “It’s work,” he explained.
Gopnik’s rollicking book is a formidable achievement, but for all its dense accumulation of detail, scholarship and unabashed gossip, Warhol remains, as he doubtless would have wished, essentially, brilliantly, unknowable.
Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £30