ANDY WARHOL

A RETROSPECTIVE
EDITED BY KYNASTON McSHINE

WITH ESSAYS BY
KYNASTON McSHINE
ROBERT ROSENBLUM
BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH
MARCO LIVINGSTONE

PUBLISHED BY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

"ff youwanttoknowall aboutAndy Warhol,just hol's ironic referenceto the saltimbanquemuse but of spirit-superior individualswho would
lookatthesurfaceof my paintingsand filmsand and her corporate tattooes. That this dialectic forgea personalmode of consumptionfar above
me,andthereI am. There'snothing behind it." might originate in two types of collectivecon- the banalitiesof the everyday.Democraticcon-
sumption has been recently suggested: "With sumerssoughtto makeconsumptionmoreequal
"Myworkhas no future at all. I know that. A
the aid of ideal types two distinct consumer and participatory.They wantedto rescue every-
few years. Of course my things will mean
styles may be seen emerging in the 1880'sand day consumptionfrom banality by raising it to
nothing."
-Andy Warhol1 the 1890's:an elitist type and a democraticone. the levelof a politicaland social statement."5
For all their differences in detail, many, if not It will remain a mystery whether Warhol
A callingcard designed by Andy Warhol on a attempted to reconcile these contradictions in
longsheet of light green tissue paper, mailed his own life by changing his professionaliden-
to clientsand patrons, advertising and design tity from commercial artist to fine artist in
agenciesabout 1955, depicts a circus artiste 1960.6 By 1959 Warhol had become very suc-
holdinga giant rose. Her tightly cropped cos- cessful in the field of advertisingdesign, earn-
tumerevealsa body tattooed with over forty ing an average annual sum of $65,000 and
corporatelogos and brand names (plate 25). numerousArt Directors Club medals and other
Thebody displayssuch brands as Armstrong tokens of professional recognition. Warhol's
TiresandWheaties;Dow chemicalsand Pepso- own later commentarieson commercialart and
dent;HuntsCatsup, which would literally pop his motives for abandoning it are designed to
upas a three-dimensionalcan in Andy Warhol's constructa fieldofblague that seems to address
Index(Book) in 1967; and Chanel No. 5 and the impertinence of the interviewers' inquisi-
Mobil,whichwouldresurfacethirty years later tivenessrather than the questionitself.
inhisportfolioof silkscreen prints titledAds.2 Nevertheless, by 1954-55 Warhol had al-
Theartiste'sface carries a single tattoo, enno- ready shown his ambitions toward fine art: in
blingher doll-likefeatures with a laurel wreath order to distinguishhimselfwithin the mundane
aroundthe letter L for Lincoln (the car). The world of commercial design he (fraudulently)
lowerpart of the costumecarries an inscription claimed success in the realm of fine art, which
in the faux naif script which had already he would only attain ten years later. In a folder
endearedits author to his art-director clients, produced as a promotional gift for one of his
simply stating: ''Andy Warhol Murry Hell clients, Vanity Fair, Warhol declared "Happy
3-0555," the artist'stelephonenumber.3 ButterflyDay" (figure1),and in a gold-stamped
It wouldseem that even at the beginning of I. Andy Warhol. Sketch for "Happy Butterfly Day" text: "This Vanity Fair Butterfly Folder was
his various careers, Warhol "embodied" the brochure. c. 1955. Ink and pencil on paper, 125/sX designedfor your desk by Andy Warhol,whose
93/s"(32.1 x 23.8 cm). The Estate of Andy Warhol
paradoxof modernist art: to be suspended paintings are exhibited in many leading muse-
betweenhigh art's isolation, transcendence, ums and contemporarygalleries."7
andcriticalnegativityand the pervasivedebris most,of the experimentsin consumermodelsof This reference to the museum as the institu-
of corporate-dominatedmass culture-or as thosedecades fall into one or the other of these tion of ultimate validation is deployed again
TheodorW. Adorno has put it, "to have a his- categories.Both the elitist and the democratic thirty years later by Warhol(or on his behalf), in
toryat all while under the spell of the eternal consumersrebelledagainstthe shortcomingsof rather different circumstances.Towardthe end
repetitionof mass production"4 -constitutes mass and bourgeois styles of consumption,but of his career it would seem that Warhol had
thefundamentaldialecticwithin the modernist in seekingan alternativethey movedin opposite successfully integrated the two poles of the
artist'srole. Its origins in Romanticismand its directions.Elitist consumers considered them- modernist dialectic, the department store and
imminentdisappearance are invoked in War- selvesa new type of aristocracy,one not of birth the museum (what he once called "his favorite 39
 placesto go to"). In the "1986 Christmas Book an oppressively stable, monolithically indus- the questionof audiencesfor his work, in one of
of the Neiman-MarcusStores"a portrait session trial, capitalistcivilizationwas now in place."10 his most important interviewsin 1967:"Pop art
with Andy Warhol was offered for $35,000: This newcivilizationwouldcreate conditions is for everyone.I don't think art should be only
"Become a legend with Andy Warhol.... in which mass culture and high art would be for the select few, I think it should be for the
You'llmeet the Premier Pop artist in his studio forced into an increasinglytight embrace, and mass of American people and they usually
for a private sitting. Mr. Warhol will create an these would eventuallylead to the integration accept art anyway."14
acrylicon canvasportrait of you in the tradition of the sphere of high art into that of the culture One of the first corporate art sponsors and
of his museumqualitypieces."8 By contrast,on industry.But this fusionwouldnot merelyimply one of the major supporters of Moholy-Nagy's
the occasion of his actual debut in the world a transformationof the artist's role and chang- work in Chicago,as well as a fervent advocate
of high art, his appearance in "New Talent ing cultural practices, or affect images and of the industrializationof modernist aesthetics
U.S.A.," a special issue of Art in America in objectsand their functions within society.The in the United States, was WalterPaepcke,presi-
1962,Warhol(equally fraudulently)described real triumph of mass culture over high culture dent of the Container Corporation of America.
himselfas "self-taught."9 would eventuallytake place-quite unexpect- He had (prematurely)anticipated in 1946 that
Warhol'sinverted bluffs (of the commercial edly for most artists and critics-in the fetish- mass culture and high art would have to be
world with fine-art legitimacy, the high-art ization of high art in the larger apparatus of reconciled in a radically commercializedBau-
world with brutish innocence) indicate more late twentieth-centuryideology. haus venture but, in his view,purged of political
than a shrewd reading of the disposition of Allan Kaprow, one of the more articulate implicationsconcerning artistic interventionin
commercial artists to be in awe of museum members of that new generation of artists, social progress. The cognitive and perceptual
culture,which they have failed to enter, or, for would grasp this transformationof the artistic devices of modernism would have to be
that matter, its complementaryformation, the rolea fewyears later: "It is said that if a man hits deployed for the development of a new com-
dispositionof the high-art connoisseur to be bottomthere is only one directionto go and that modity aesthetic (product design, packaging,
shocked by anyone who has claimed to have is up. In one way this has happened, for if the and advertisement)and wouldbecome a power-
broken the rules of high art's tightly controlled artist was in hell in 1946,now he is in business. ful and important industry in postwar America
discursive"game." Such strategicallybrilliant ... Thereis a chancethatthe modern 'visionary' and Europe, without, however, resolving the
blagues (earlier practiced by Charles Baude- is evenmoreof a clichethan his counterpart, the contradictionsof modernism. In the words of
laire, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Duchamp and 'conformist,'and that neither is true."11 the "visionary" businessman: "During the last
broughtup to late twentieth-centurystandards As his calling card suggested, Warhol was century in particular,the Machine Age with its
by Warhol)indicateWarhol's awarenessof the uniquely qualified to promote the shift from mass production procedures has seemingly
rapidlychangingrelationshipsbetweenthe two visionaryto conformistand to participatein this required specializations which have brought
spheresof visualrepresentationand of the dras- transitionfrom "hell" to business: after all, his about an unfortunate divergence in work and
tic changesof the artist'srole and the audience's educationat the Carnegie Institute of Technol- philosophy of the individualproducer and the
expectationsat the beginning of the fifties.He ogy had not been a traditional fine-arts studio artist. Yet artists and business men, today as
seemed to have understood early on that it educationand had providedhim with a depolit- formerly,fundamentallyhavemuch in common
would be the task of the new generation of icized and technocraticallyoriented American and can contribute the more to society as they
artists to recognizeand publicly acknowledge versionof the Bauhauscurriculum, as it spread come to complement their talents. Each has
the extentto whichthe conditionsthat had per- in the postwar years from Laszlo Moholy- within him the undying desire to create, to con-
mitted the formation of the Abstract Expres- Nagy'sNewBauhausin Chicagoto other Amer- tribute something to the world, to leave his
sionist aesthetic, with its Romantic roots and ican art institutions.12 mark upon society."15
notionsof the transcendentalcritique,had actu- In fact, when reading early interviews with Thirty years later this dogged entrepreneur-
ally been surpassed by the reorganizationof Andy Warhol one can still find traces of the ial vision found its farcical echo in Warhol's
societyin the postwar period: "It was the Sec- populist, modernist credo that seems to have triumphant proclamation of diffidence at a
ond WorldWar... which cut off the vitality of motivatedWarhol(and Pop art in general),and momentwhen he had replacedthe last remnants
modernism. After 1945, the old semi-aristo- both aspects-questions of production and of an aestheticof transcendenceor criticalresis-
cratic or agrarian order and its appurtenances reception-seem to have concerned him. For tance with an aesthetic of ruthless affirmation:
were finished in every country. Bourgeois example, he remarked in a little-known inter- "Business art is the step that comes after Art. I
democracywasfinallyuniversalized.Withthat, view of the mid-sixties: "Factory is as good a started as a commercial artist, and I want to
certain critical links with a pre-capitalistpast name as any. A factory is where you build finish as a business artist. After I did the thing
were snapped. At the same time, 'Fordism' things.This is where I make or build my work. called 'art' or whatever it's called, I went into
arrivedin force.Massproductionand masscon- In my art work, hand painting wouldtake much businessart. I wantedto be an Art Businessman
sumptiontransformedthe WestEuropeanecon- too long and anywaythat's not the age we live or a BusinessArtist. Being good in Business is
omiesalongNorth Americanlines.There could in. Mechanical means are today, and using the most fascinatingkind of art." 16
no longerbe the smallestdoubt as to what kind them I can get more art to more people. Art That triumph of mass culture over traditional
10 of society this technology would consolidate: shouldbe for everyone."13 Or, when addressing aesthetic concepts produced two new types of
 CANTER

"cultural"personalities.The first were the ad- seemed to mirror the fate of traditional artistic
men,whowouldbecome passionate collectors creativity. Warhol's success as a commercial
of avant-gardeart (in order to embrace the designer depended, in part, on his "artistic"
"creativity"that would perpetually escape performance,on his deliveryof a certain notion
themandto possessprivately what they would of creativitythat appeared all the more rarefied
systematically destroy in their own "work" in in a milieu whose every impulse was geared to
thepublicsphere).The second type was repre- increase commodification.Warhol introduced
sentedby such artists as James Harvey, who, precisely those noncommercialelements (false
accordingto Time magazine, "draws his naivete, the charm of the uneducated and
inspiration from religionand landscapes.... At unskilled, his illiterate mother, preindustrial
nightshe works hard on muscular abstract bricolage)into the most advanced and most
paintingsthat show in Manhattan's Graham sophisticatedmilieu of professional alienation:
Gallery.Buteighthours a day,to make a living, advertising design. Warhol was fully aware of
helaborsas a commercialartist."17 this paradox and phrased it in his famous early
WhenHarvey,who had designed the Brillo interviewwith Gene Swensonin a languagethat
boxin theearlysixties,encountered his design revealsthe extent to which its speaker had inter-
on 120woodsimulacraby Warhol (and/or his nalizedthe lessonsof John Cage and transposed
assistants) at the StableGallery in New Yorkin LE SAINT D£S SAINTS
C'EST DE MOI Q\,l'IL S'AGIT DANS Cl'. PORTRAIT
them into everydayexperience: "It's hard to be
1964(plate182),he could only deflect his sense creativeand it's hard also not to think what you
of profoundcrisis of artistic standards by 2. Francis Picabia. Le Saint des Saints. 1915.Ink on do is creative or hard not to be called creative
threatening Warholwith a lawsuit. paper. Whereaboutsunknown because everybodyis alwaystalking about that
Warhol,bycontrast,was fairly well prepared and individuality. Everybody's always being
to reconcilethe contradictionsemerging from creative.And it's so funny when you say things
the collapseof high culture into the culture aren't, like the shoe I would draw for an adver-
industryandto participatein it with all the skills tisementwas called a 'creation' but the drawing
andtechniquesof the commercialartist. He had of it was not. But I guess I believe in both ways.I
freedhimselfearlyon from outmoded concepts was getting paid for it, and I did anything they
oforiginality and authorshipand had developed told me to do. I'd have to invent and now I don't;
a senseof the necessityfor collaborationand a after all that 'correction' those commercial
Brechtianunderstandingof the commonality drawingswould have feelings, they would have
of ideas.18 a style. The attitude of those who hired me had
feeling or something to it; they knew what they
COMMERCIAL FOLKLORE
wanted, they insisted, sometimes they got very
Warhol'scareer, in fact, seems to exemplify emotional. The process of doing work in com-
eachstageof the high-culture/mass-culturepar- mercial art was machine-like, but the attitude
adox,from its division through its eventual had feeling to it."19
fusion,inhiseasytransitionfrom one role to the By contrast, his successful debut as an artist
other.In his early career as a commercial artist in the sphere of fine art-and here the paradox
he featuredall the debased and exhausted becomes fully apparent-would depend pre-
qualities
of traditionalconcepts of the "artistic" cisely on his capacity to erase from his paintings
thatartdirectorsand admen adored: the whim- and drawings more completely than any of his
sicalandthe witty,the wicked and thefaux naif. peers (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
Oneof the resourcesfor such an artistic realm in particular) the traces of the handmade, of
ofpleasurewasthe aristocraticallyrefined pre- artistry and creativity,of expression and inven-
industrialcharm of rococo and neoclassical tion. What appeared to be cynical "copies" of
drawing, as had already been the case in twen- 3. Marcel Duchamp.Bicycle Wheel. 1951(third ver- commercialart early in 1960scandalizedthe art
tiesArt Deco advertisement, packaging, and sion, after lost original of 1913).Assemblage: metal world, whose expectations (and self-decep-
bookillustration.The other resource was a par- wheel mounted on painted stool; overall, 50½" tions) at the moment of the climax of Abstract
ticularlycharming variety of folk art with (128.3 cm) high. The Museum of Modern Art, New Expressionism were shaken even more since it
York.The Sidneyand Harriet Janis Collection
whichdozensof artists in America-since Elie had forgotten or conveniently disavowed the
Nadelman-had identified, at least as collec- work of Francis Picabia (figure 2) or the im-
tors.Afterall, the folk-art object, with its pecu- plications of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades
liar form of an already extinct creativity, (figure 3). 41
 The notorious anecdote in which Warhol
showedtwo versions of a painting of a Coca-
Cola bottle to Emile de Antonio in 1962, one
gesturally dramatic, carrying the legacy of
Abstract Expressionism, the other cold and
diagrammatic,making the claim of the Ready-
made,now in the domain of painting (plate 91),
attests to Warhol's uncanny ability to produce
according to the needs and demands of the
moment(and to his technical skills to perform
these tasks). It also seems to betray a brief
instanceof hesitationin Warhol's calculationof
how far he could really go with the breakdown
of local painterlyconventionsand the infusion
of commercialdesign devices in order to make
his entry into the NewYorkart world. After all,
at the time his statusin this realm was tenuousat I. MiHf'r says1 lowered 11ecl- highest rasbion. \1/hy? Bccnuso tlrn l\:1iddlingHeel alono can moko tbo slender taper of o shoo cveq
best. As late as July 1962,what was to havebeen ,!1•ndcrc1·, more topcrPd. it nlso nrn.kcs for a lovely, cffortlc~s stonce-thu only perfect stance for tho unstressed, easy dogatlco of nc\9l
do1hc'-. ,xck-"'" tlic way the \liddling: llccl looks, the way it feels, the woy it walks and dances......., Como sco it on pumps., stn.:<all
Warhol's first New York exhibition-at the aandals mid C,·f'ning slippers llt 1.]fiUor'l
prestigiousMarthaJacksonGallery-had been
cancelledwith the followingargument:"Asthis
galleryis devotedto artists of an earlier genera- 4. I. Miller advertisementby Warhol,The New YorkTimes
tion, I now feel I must take a stand to support
their continuing efforts rather than confuse
issueshereby beginningto showcontemporary
Dada. The introduction of your paintings has
alreadyhad very bad repercussionsfor us. This
is a good sign, as far as your work and your
statement as an artist are concerned. Further-
more, I like you and your work. But from a
business and gallery standpoint, we want to
take a stand elsewhere.Therefore, I suggest to
you that we cancel the exhibition we had
plannedfor December 1962."20
In fact, Warhol'searly "art" work (between
1960and 1962)was characterizedby an appar-
ent lackof painterlyresolution,often misreadas
a parody of Abstract Expressionism. His pic-
tures werepainted in a loose,gesturallyexpres-
sive manner, but their imagery was derived
fromclose-updetails of comic strips and adver-
tisements.21 De Antonio (in several recollec-
tions identified as a "Marxist") gave him the
right advice (and so did the dealer Ivan Karp,
who also saw both paintings): destroy the
Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola bottle and
5. Windowdisplaydesign, Les Grands Magasinsdu Printemps, Paris. c. 1908
keep the "cold," diagrammaticone.22
What is most obvious in these early pairs of
hand-painteddepictions, such as Storm Door, newpaintingin the same waythat his traditional art and his fine art, 23 but a more extensivestudy
1960and 1961(plates 100, 101),or Before and artistic inclinations had once qualified him for ofWarhol'sadvertisementdesign would, in fact,
After 1, 2, and 3 (plate 79), is that Warhol's success in the world of commercial design. It suggest that the key features of his work of the
technicalexpertiseas a commercialartist qual- frequently has been argued that there is very early sixties are prefigured: extreme close-up
ified him for the diagrammatic nature of the little continuity between Warhol's commercial fragments and details, stark graphic contrasts
6. Ellsworth
Kelly.Colorsfora Large Wall. 1951.Oil on canvas, mountedon sixty-four 7. Jasper Johns. Gray Alphabets. 1956.Encaustic on
woodpanels;overall,7'10¼" x 7'10½" (239.3 x 239.9 cm). The Museumof Modern newspaperon canvas,66 x 46" (167.6 x 116.8cm).
Art,NewYork.Giftof the artist Privatecollection

and silhouettingof forms, schematic sim- garde practices of the mid-fifties inspired his his own pictorial production. The first one
plification,and,mostimportant, rigorous serial advertising design of that period and imbued (figure9) featuresthe careful overallregulariza-
composition (figure4). it with a risque stylishness that the average tion of a nonrelational composition (as in the
Thesenseof composingdepictedobjects and commercial artist would have been unable to obviousexampleof Johns'sFlag paintings after
arranging displaysurfacesin serially structured conceive.Twooutstandingexamplesfrom War- 1954),a strategy which would soon be mechan-
gridsemergesafter all from the seriality that hol's campaigns for I. Miller shoes in The New ically debased in Warhol's hands and be
constitutes the very nature of the commodity: York Times of 1956 confirm that Warhol had depleted of all of Johns's culinary, painterly
itsobjectstatus,its design,and its display.Such already grasped the full range of the painterly differentiation.And the second one (figure 10)
serialityhad become the major structural for- strategiesof Johns and Rauschenberg,particu- shows the impact of Rauschenberg's direct
mationof object-perceptionin the twentieth larly those aspects that would soon determine imprinting techniques and persistent use of
century,determiningaesthetic projects as dif-
ferentasthoseof SiegfriedKracauerand Walter
Benjamin, ontheonehand,and BusbyBerkeley,
ontheother.AmedeeOzenfant had rightfully
included a serialcommoditydisplayin his 1931
bookFoundations of ModernArt (figure5).And
bythe mid-fiftiesthe serial-grid composition
hadregainedthe prominence it had enjoyed in
thetwenties:EllsworthKelly's serial arrange-
mentof monochromedisplay panels such as
Co/orsfor a large Wall,1951,and Johns'sGray
Alphabets, 1956(figures6, 7), for example,pre-
figurethecentralstrategyof Warhol's composi-
tionalprinciple as do, somewhat later, the
seriallystructuredarrangementsof ready-made
objectsbyArmanin Europe (figure 8).
And, of course, the opposite is also true:
Warhol'sreal affinity for and unusual famil- 8. Arman (Armand Fernandez).Boom!Boom! l960. Assemblageof plasticwaterpistols in a plexiglasscase, 8¼ x
iarity(fora commercialartist) with the avant- 23¼ x 4½" (21 x 59 x 11.2cm). The Museumof Modern Art, New York.Gift of Philip Johnson 43
 .
·n1e bnresl 1hiogs next I!) hru-cfecr , , , Our Nearly ~Naked
.
-' Sandals,on uclnination point heela.arc
Summec'spreniest P"•·ndoxc~ """'I.,. ~ n;,:"Y,
so liule shoe! Right,• skimmingolblsck
lf'ii cnrdiol~r iurite .voo to ('isit the Shoe Sfl/01111tlle11riJJerirld when' slenderly t·lt•gu11tshoes by I.. Iii/In', 0f11•idl,',•111.~. s~1ederibbons, ~-95, Left, thrca;l l\~) thin Mn1p~or Ultwkpatent, black suede.,26.95:or moon'Struckgold·
and J11gcn1U!tflrt ,ww lo be.,ft'en i11addition 10 the bea11tif11//.J(•lgir111
imports fur which /J1•11delhas ullMy.<; 'lm•11
fi111w11.,·.
l Miller at l-/enriBN1del 10 11..., .;~,11.;,,..,., ... , ......
of course,I.1\1illcr
kid, 31.95.£°J"clus1ve,
,....... 1u.-
'
.. •---~-•
- •
...... _i::.._~-
......,..l.._,,,.,,.,.
j
..... ........
~
9. I. Miller advertisementby Warhol,The New YorkTimes 10. I. Miller advertisementby Warhol,The New YorkTimes

indexicalmarking since his collaborationwith mantle the traditional format of easel painting because Pollock "had destroyed painting,"25
John Cage on the AutomobileTirePrint of 1951 had already been stated in 1958 in a text by and becauseof the vulgarizationof the Abstract
(figure 11), a method soon to be emptied by Allan Kaprow ("The Legacy of Jackson Pol- Expressionist style by its second-generation
Warhol of all the expressivity and decorative lock") that seems to have functionedas a man- imitators.This assumptionsuggests-as histor-
artistry the technique had regained in Rausch- ifestofor the newgenerationof Americanartists ians and critics have argued ever since-that a
enberg'swork of the late fifties. after Abstract Expressionism: "Pollock's near mere stylistic rebellion against New York
destructionof this tradition [of easel painting) Schoolpaintingand its academicizationwas the
THE RITUALS OF PAINTING
maywell be a return to the point where art was principalmotivatingforce in the advent of Pop
It appears, then, that by the end of the fifties more activelyinvolvedin ritual, magic and life art.26 This stylistic argument, descriptive at
Warhol, both commercially competent and than we haveknownit in our recent past. If so, it best, mistakesthe effectsfor the cause, and can
artistically canny, was singularly prepared to is an exceedingly important step, and in its be most easily refuted by remembering two
effect the transformationof the artist's role in superiorway,offers a solutionto the complaints historicalfacts. First, that painters such as Bar-
postwar America. This transformation of an of those who would have us put a bit of life into nett Newmanand Ad Reinhardt were only rec-
aesthetic practice of transcendental negation art. But what do we do now? There are two ognized in the mid-sixties and that Willem de
into one of tautologicalaffirmationis perhaps alternatives.One is to continue in this vein.... Kooning and Mark Rothko continued to work
best articulated by John Cage'sfamous dictum The other is to give up the making of paintings with ever-increasingvisibility and success. If
of 1961 in Silence: "Our poetry now is the entirely."24 anything, by the mid-sixties, their work (and
realizationthat we possess nothing. Anything In spite of Kaprow's acumen, the essay was most certainly Pollock's) had achieved an
therefore is a delight (since we do not possess marred by two fundamental misunderstand- almost mythic status, representing aesthetic
it ... )." ings.The firstwasthe idea that the hegemonyof and ethicalstandardsthat seemed,however,lost
The fact that this transformationwould dis- Abstract Expressionism had come to an end and unattainable for the future. Second, the

11. Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage. Automobile Tire Print. 1951. Monoprint on paper, mounted on canvas, 16½" X 22' (41.9 x 671.8 cm). Collection Robert
44 Rauschenberg(on extended loan to the NationalGallery of Art, Washington,D.C.)
younger generationof NewYorkSchoolartists, participatory aesthetic emerging out of Pol- cisely those notions to the level of absolute
fromJohnsand Rauschenbergto Claes Olden- lock's work: "But what I believe is clearly dis- farce.
burgand Warhol,continually emphasized- cernible is that the entire paintingcomes out at Tango,for example,had been the title of one
both in their works and statements-their the participant(I shall call him that, rather than of Johns'scrucialmonochromaticand participa-
affiliation
with,and venerationof, the legacy of observer)right into the room.... In the present tory paintings in 1955,embodyingCage'scon-
AbstractExpressionism.Of course, they also case the 'picture' has moved so far out that the cept of participation in its invitation to the
emphasized the impossibilityof achievingthat canvas is no longer a reference point. Hence, viewerto wind up the painting'sbuilt-in music
generation's transcendentalartistic aspirations althoughup on the wall, these marks surround box (figure12).Johns explicitlystatedthat such
andstandards. us as they did the painter at work, so strict a a participatoryconcept motivatedhis work at
The second(and major) misconception in correspondence has there been achieved be- the time: "I wanted to suggest a physicalrela-
Kaprow's essaybecomesevident in his contra- tween his impulseand the resultantart."27 tionship to the pictures that was active. In the
dictoryremarkson the revitalizationof artistic In fact, what did occur in the formation of Targets one could stand back or one might go
ritualand the simultaneousdisappearance of Pop art in general,and Warhol's work in partic- very close and lift the lids and shut them. In
easelpainting.Kaprow conceives of the ritu- ular, was just the opposite of Kaprow's proph- Tangoto wind the key and hear the sound, you
alisticdimensionof aestheticexperience (what ecy: the demiseof easel painting,as initiatedby had to stand relativelyclose to the painting, too
WalterBenjaminhad called the "parasitical Pollock, was acceleratedand extendedto com- close to see the outside shape of the picture."28
dependence of art upon the magicritual") as a prise as well the destructionof the last vestiges Sevenyears afterJohns'sTangoand four years
transhistorical,universallyaccessiblecondition of the ritual in aestheticexperience itself.War- after Kaprow's "prophetic" text, Warhol pro-
thatcanbe reconstitutedat any time merely by hol came closer than anybody since Duchamp duced two groups of diagrammaticpaintings,
alteringobsoletestylistic means and artistic (in the WesternEuropean and Americanavant- the Dance Diagrams of 1962 (plates 160-163)
procedures. Kaprow'sideas of 1958are in fact garde at least) "to [giving] up the making of and the Do It Yourself paintings, begun the
comparable to Benjamin'sthoughtof the twen- paintings entirely." What is more, Warhol's same year (plates 153-159).These works seem
ties,whenthe latterdevelopedthe notion of a paintingseventuallywouldopposethoseaspira- to have been conceivedin response to the idea
participatory aestheticin the contextof his dis- tions towarda new aestheticof participation(as of renewing participatory aesthetics, if not in
cussionof Dadaism. Kaprow speaks with it had been preached and practiced by Cage, direct response to Johns's and Rauschenberg's
astonishing naiveteof the possibility of a new Rauschenberg,and Kaprow)by degradingpre- paintingsor evenKaprow's "manifesto."
Boththe Dance Diagramsand the Do It Your-
self paintingsbring the viewer,almost literally,
into the plane of visual representationin what
one mightcall a "bodily synecdoche"-a twen-
tieth-centuryavant-garde practice intended to
instigateactive identificationof the viewerwith
the representation,replacing the contemplative
mode of aesthetic experience with an active
one. However,this tradition had, in the mean-
time, become one of the key strategies-if not
the principal one-of advertisement design
itself,solicitingthe viewer'sactiveparticipation
as Consumption.
Accordingly,in Warhol's work, the diagrams
that entice the viewer's feet onto the Dance
Diagram paintings and engage the viewer's
hands to fill in the Do It Yourselfpaintings are
frivolouslytransferred onto the pictorial plane
from the domain of popular entertainment (rit-
uals that are slightly "camp" and defunct: fox
trot, tango, etc.). What is more, they seem to
suggestthat if participatoryaestheticswere at so
infantilea levelas to invite participantsto wind
up a musicbox, to clap their hands, orto hide an
object (as suggested in some of Johns's and
12.JasperJohns.Tango.1955. Encaustic on canvas with music box, 43 x 55" (109.2 x 139.7 cm). Ludwig Rauschenberg's work; in fact he speaks ad-
Museum,Cologne miringly of Pollock's"dance"), one might just 45
 as well shift from the strategicgames of high art
to those real rituals of participation within
which mass culture contains and controls its
audiences.
This dialogic relationship of the Dance
Diagrampaintings with Kaprow's essayand the
statusof participatoryaestheticswas made even
more explicit in Warhol's rather peculiar deci-
sionto present these paintings in their firstpub-
lic installationhorizontally,on the floor, mak-
ing the display an essential element of the
painting's reading.29 Simulatingthe function of
actual diagramsfor dance lessons, the installa-
tion on the floor not only emphasized the face-
tious invitationto the viewer to participate in a
trivial ritual of mass culture, but literally par-
odied the position of the painting in Jackson
Pollock'sworking procedure on the floor of the
studio, as it had been described in Harold Ro-
senberg's famous essay "The American Action
Painters" of 1952(which reverberated through
Kaprow's text as well): "At a certain moment
the canvas began to appear to one American
painter after another as an arena in which to
act-rather than as a space in which to
reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express' an
object, actual or imagined. What was to go on
the canvas was not a picture but an
event.... The image would be the result of this
encounter."30
The destruction of Pollock'spainterly legacy
and the critique of aesthetic experience as par-
ticipatory ritual would resurface in Warhol's
work once again almost twenty years later. Pre-
cisely at the moment of the rise ofNeo-Expres-
13. Jackson Pollock. White Light. 1954. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 48¼ X 38¼" (122.4 X
sionism Warhol delivered one of his last coups 96. 9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
to an increasinglyvoracioushigh-cultureindus-
try desperately trying to revitalize the expres-
sionist paradigm and its failed promises. His Warhol's adoption of the modernist tradition of the paint in an almost mechanical manner. War-
series of Oxidation paintings of 1978 (plates monochrome painting, frequently concealed in hol deployed the same industrial enamel, and
376-379), whose monochrome surfaces were metallic monochrome sections of paintings or his use of aluminum paint was only the begin-
coated with metallic paint striated and spotted blatant in separate panels (the "blanks," as he ning of a long involvement with "imma-
with the expressivelygestural oxidizing marks called them with typically derogatory under- teriality," both of light reflectivity and of the
ofurination onto the canvas, brought full circle statement),aligns his painterly work of the early "empty" monochrome surface. Evolving from
the critique begun in the Dance Diagrams. sixties in yet another way with some of the key the various stages of gold Marilyns in 1962,
issues emerging from New York School paint- followed by the series of silver Elvises and
THE MONOCHROME
ing at that time. numerous other images silkscreened on silver
The Dance Diagrams of 1962contain two other Pollock had included industrial aluminum throughout 1963-64 (such as SilverMarlonand
important aspects of Warhol's art, which, along paint in key paintings such as Lavender Mist Tuna.fish Disaster [plates 233,269, 270]), War-
with serial-grid composition, became the cen- (Number]), 1950, or White Light, 1954 (figure hol produced the first diptych paintings with
tral strategies of Warhol'sentire painterly pro- 13). The material's industrial derivation had large monochrome panels in 1963 (Mustard
duction: mechanically reproduced ready-made generated a scandal, while its light reflectivity Race Riot [plate 277] and Blue Electric Chair
46 imagery and monochromatic color schemes. concretized the viewer's optical relationship to [plate284]), the first monochrome metallicdip-
tych in 1964(RoundJackie, plates 245 246) and early ixties.Their monochromepaintings seem to have led him to Kaprow'senvisioned
andthe ilver Liz diptych in 1965. A wa the were imbued with a notion of tran cenden- "action, except that he, typically, refrained
casewith the Dance Diagrams and th Do It talism,reminiscentof the Symboli t origin of fromit.33 Warhol'smore kepticalevaluationof
Yourselfpainting the monochrome d1ptych the monochrom strategy.On the other hand the optionsavailablefor culturalpracticewould
completelydevaluedand invertedone of mod- Iike other moderniststrategiesof reduction,the prove Kaprow's prophecie once again to be
ernisms most sacred pictorial strategies the monochrome inadvertently turned into triv- fal ely optimi tic.
emptyspace,originatingin Symbolist ources. iality eitheras the resultof incompetentexecu- Thus the monochrome field and the light-
Uponitsappearancein twentieth-centuryart it tion of such a device of apparently upreme reflective urface, eemingly emptied of all
hadbeen hailed by Wa ily Kandinsky in the implicity,or of merelyexhaustingthe trategy manufacturedvisual incident,had becomeone
followingterm : "I alway find it advantageou by endless repetition,or as an effect of artists' of the central concerns of the neo-avant-garde
ineachworkto leavean empty space; it has to and viewer' growing doubts about a ·trategy artists of the early to mid-fifties.Thi was evi-
do with not impo ing. Don't you think that in who e promi e had become increa ingly in- dent not only in Rauschenberg's work but
thisthererestsan eternal law-but it'sa law for compatiblewith its material objects and their equallyin the work of Kelly and Johns (and a
tomorrow." 31 functions.32 fewyear, later that of Frank Stella)as much as
That "empty space" as Kandin ky's tate- The process of critical re-evaluationof the their Europeancontempora.rie Lucio Fontana
mentclearlyindicates,wasyet anotherstrategy monochrometraditionhad begunonce again in and Yves Klein. Rauschenberg, for in tance,
negatingaestheticimposition functi ning a a the Americancontext in Rauschenberg' early had done a seriesof mall squarecollageswith
spatialsutureallowingthe viewera relationship 1951White Paintingsand wouldfind its climax .goldand ilverleaf in 1953 whichhe exhibited
of mutualinterdependencewith the "open' (alongwith lhe officialterminationof Warhol' at the StableGallerythatyear;and he continued
artisticconstruct.The empty pace functioned painterly production) in the Silver Cloud - through 1956 to u e the crumpled foil on
equallya a spaceof hermeticre istance,reject- identified by Warhol as "paintings"-silver roughly textured fabric, a combination that
ingideologicalmeaninga igned to paintingas "pillows" inflated with helium, floating eliminated drawing and gesture and, in tead,
wellas the fal e comfort of convenientread- through (and supposedlyout of) the Leo Cas- generated surface and textural incident
ings.It wascertainlywith thoseaspiration that telliGalleryin 1966(plate302).Shortlybefore, exclusivelyfrom the material's inherent tex-
themonochromestrategyhad been utilizedby Warholannounced publicly that he had aban- tural and procedural qualities. Frank Stella
ewmanand Reinhardtthroughout the fifties doned paintingonce and for all, which would beforeengagingin his seriesof large aluminum
painting in 1960(th squarepainting Averroes
and Avice1111a, for example), had already pro-
duced a group of smaller squarish painting
in 1959, uch as Jill (figure 14), which were
covered with geometrically orderet.1,highly
reflectivemetallictape ( opposed to Rausch-
enberg's randomly broken and erratically
reflectivefoil urfaces).
Warholhas explicitly tated that the mono-
chrome paintings of the early to mid-fiftie
influenced bis own deci ion to paint mono-
chrome panels in the early sixties: "I always
liked Ell worth'swork, and that'swhy I aJway
painted a blank canvas.I loved that blank can-
va thing and I wishedl had stuck with the idea
of ju t paintingthe ame paintinglike the oup
can and neverpaintinganother painting.When
someonewantedone, youwouldjust do another
one. Does anybodydo that now? Anyway,you
do the same paintingwhelher il looks different
or not."34
In spite of Warhol' typically diffident
remarks about the historicalreferencesfor ru
use of monochrome panels his flippancy
clearly al o indicate his awarenes of the dis-
14. Frank Stella. Jill. 1959. Burglar-alarmtape on Masonite,9i;. X 8¾" tance that separated his conception of the
(24.8 x 22.2 cm).CollectionLawrenceRubin, ew York monochromefrom that of Kelly, for example. 47
 Recognizingthat no single strategy of modern- seemed to have shifted between the ritualistic
ist reduction, of radical negation and refusal, performance of painting (to which Rosenberg's
could escape its ultimate fate of enhancing the and Kaprow's readings had aspired) and the
painting's status as object and commodity, the recognition that his painting had thrived on a
destructionof any and all metaphysicalresidue profoundlyantipainterlyimpulse. This promise
of the device (be it in neoplasticist, Abstract of mechanisticanonymitywithin the process of
Expressionist,or, as it was identified,hard-edge pictorial mark-making, however, not only
and color-fieldpainting of the fifties) seems in seemed to imply the eventual "destruction" of
fact to havebeen the task that Warholhad set for painting proper (as Kaprow had anticipated as
himself in the deployment of monochromy in well)but had also brought it (much less dramat-
the early sixties.It seems possible, therefore,to ically) into historical proximity with the post-
argue that Warhol'searliest paintings explicitly Cubist devices of antipainterly strategies and
refer to that venerablelegacy,and that paintings ready-made imagery (a proximity which Pol-
such as Yellow Close Cover Before Striking, lock himself had reached in such works of 1949
1962 (plate 109), or Red Close Cover Before as Outof the Web[Number7]orCutOut). Ifthat
Striking,1962,perform the same critical inver- anti-artisticand anti-authorialpromise (and the
sionwithregard to the color-fieldlegacy and the rediscoveryof that promise's historical antece-
work of Newman, for example, as the Dance dents) had perhaps not yet been fulfilled in
Diagrams and the Do It Yourselfpaintings do Pollock's own work, then it had certainly
with regard to the legacy of Jackson Pollock. become increasingly urgent in the responses
Once again, what makes Waihol's uncom- that Pollock'swork had provoked in Rauschen-
promising negation of that legacy work is the berg's and Johns's painting of the early to
ingeniousrealizationof an external condition, mid-fifties. Rauschenberg, for example, had
not the individual assault on a venerated pic- made this evident as early as c. 1949 in Female
torial tradition. It is the contamination of the Figure(Blueprint)(figure 15), where he redis-
elusivemonochrome with the vulgarity of the covered one of the conventions of ready-made
most trivial of commonplaces(in this case, the imagery-the immediate (indexical)imprint of
diagrammaticdetail of the sulphur strip of a the photogram and rayogram-and introduced
matchbookcover),which makes his work exe- it into New York School painting.37 Further-
cute the task of destruction so convincingly.As more, he challenged traditional concepts of
had been the case with his assault on the ritu- authorial authenticity and sublime expressivity
alisticlegacy of Abstract Expressionism, War- in his collaboration with John Cage in 1951on
hol knew early on that this process would even- the Automobile Tire Print, in his Erased de
tually dismantle more than just the strategy of KooningDrawingin 1953 (figure 16),and most
the monochrome itself. He realized that any programmatically, of course, in his major
implementationof the monochrome would at assault on painterly presence in the seemingly
this point inevitably lead to a different spatial devalidatingand repetitiousFactumI (figure 17)
definition(not to say dissipation)of painting in and FactumII (figure 18) in 1957. Johns, per-
general, removing it from the traditional con- 15. Robert Rauschenberg. FemaleFigure(Blueprint).
haps even more programmatically, had re-
ception of a painting as a substantial, unified, c. 1949. Monoprint on blueprint paper, 8 1 ¾" x 36" established these parameters not only in his
integrated planar object whose value and (266. 7 x 91.4 cm). Private collection direct-casting methods, which he had derived
authenticity lie as much in its status as a from Duchamp, but equally in his stenciled,
uniquelycrafted object as in its modes of dis- in any color you like, with the blank costs collage, and encaustic paintings since 1954.38
play and the readings ensuing from them.35 In $1600.Signed of course."36 One should, therefore, realize that Warhol's
a little-known 1965 interview Warhol com- apparently scandalous, radical mechanization
READY-MADE IMAGERY
mented on these aspects: "You see, for every of pictorial mark-making drew, in fact, on a
large painting I do, I paint a blank canvas, the Warhol's "found" representations and their fully developed tradition, a tradition which
same backgroundcolor. The two are designed diagrammatic nature departed from the para- ranged from the key figures of New YorkDada
to hang together howeverthe owner wants. He dox that the more spontaneous the pictorial (Man Ray's Rayograms and Picabia's engineer-
can hang it right beside the painting or across mark had become in Pollock's work, the more ing diagrams) to Rauschenberg's and Johns's
the room or above or below it. ... It just makes it had acquired the depersonalized traits of work of the early to mid-fifties, where ready-
thembiggerand mainly makes them cost more. mechanization. made imagery and indexical mark-making had
48 Liz Taylor,for instance, three feet by three feet, Painterlyexecutionsince Pollock, tnerefore, been rediscovered,and had been inscribed into
 the legacy of New York School painting. In light
of this range of previously established tech-
niques to apply and repeat mechanically fac-
tured pictorial marks, the frequently posed
question of whether it was Rauschenberg or
Warhol who first used the silkscreen process in
painting is utterly futile.
Warhol's mechanization, at first timid and
unresolved in his earliest paintings, which still
adhered to the manual gesture, developed from
1960 to 1962 and led from the hand-painted
di&gramsthrough the rubber stamps and stencil
paintings in 1961-62 to the first fully silk-
screened canvases-Baseball, Troy Donahue,
Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley-which
were shown, along with Dance Diagram (Tango)
(plate 161),in his first New York exhibition.
The historical difficulty Rauschenberg and
Johns had to overcome was that the preemi-
nence of Abstract Expressionist painting-its
definition of mark-making as expressive ges-
16. RobertRauschenberg.Erasedde KooningDrawing.1953.Tracesof ink and tural abstraction-had not only completely
crayonon paper, 19 X 14½"(48.3 X 36.8 cm). Collectionthe artist obliterated the ready-made imagery and me-
chanical drawing procedures of Dadaism but

,
had also required that, in order to be "seen" at
all in 1954 they had to conform to the locally
dominant painterly conventions. Hence, they
engaged in pictorializing the radically antipic-
torial legacy of Dadaism. Clearly, Rauschen-
berg's development of his own pictorial bri-
colage technique-applied in the first dye-
transfer drawings such as Cage or Mona Lisa,
both 1958, and unfolded as a method subse-
quently in the monumental cycle Thirtyjour
Illustrations for Dante's Inferno, 1959-60
(figure 19)-had successfully fused both the
increasingly dominant presence of mass-
cultural imagery with high art and the inherited
idiom of Dada collage with the conventions of
expressive gestural abstraction. Clearly, there-
fore, Rauschenberg appeared to fifties audi-
ences as the enigmatic genius of a new age.
,_,..,
'--=•• What Warhol had to consider in 1962 was
:l~;::.
:!:::::
1-aa• !- .....
whether he too, like his peers, had to remain to
' ' some degree within the pictorial format in order
to avoid the failed reception that some of
Rauschenberg's own more radical nonpictorial
works had encountered, or whether his efforts
to depictorialize Johns and Rauschenberg could
go as far as the more consequential work of
17. Robert Rauschenberg.Factum I. 1957. Combine 18. Robert Rauschenberg.FactumII. 1957.Combine
painting,62x 35½"(157.5 X 90.2cm). The Museum painting, 62 x 35½" (157.5 x 90.2 cm). Morton G. artists such as Kaprow and Robert Watts or
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Panza NeumannFamily Collection,Chicago European nouveaux realistes such as Arman.
Collection After 1958-59 all of these artists had aban- 49
 doned all gestl\res of compromise with New ,. narrative with the same degree of a ceticism
York eh I pictoriali m in order to recon- with which Duchamphad negated them in his
titllle radical ready-mad· strategie · and like Readymad
their Fluxuscolleaguesthey would ultimately The restriction to th single iconic image/
fail to generate inlere t among a New York repetition find its procedural complementin
audiencea idly awaitingthe next delivery of Warhol' purging all remnants of painterli-
pictorialproducts that could be packaged in nes from Rau chenberg' expre i ely com-
collectionsandexhibitions.39 By contra t War- promised photographic image and in hi
hol seem at firstto havefelt reluctantabout an confronting the viewer with a factual silk-
outrightcommitmentto mechanicalrepresen- creen reproductionof the photographicimage
tationand ready-madeobjects (a had already (a in the Elvi es the Di aster and the
been evident in hi earliest painting ), and as Thirteen Most WantedMen, for example). In
late a 1966he con idered it still necessary to these paintings the silkscreened photographic
defend hi ilk creen technique against the imprint remain the only trace of the pictorial
commonlyheld su picionthat mechanicalpro- 19. Robert Rau chenberg. Thirty-four llf11s1ra1io11s manufacturing proce , and thi technique
ceduresand ready-madeobjectswere ultimate- for DQ11te'.v
Inferno.Ca1110 XXVII: CircleEight, Bolgia a sault once again one of the central tenets of
ly unarti tic and fraudulent:"ln my art work, 8, The Evil Counselors. 1959-60. Transferdrawing, the modernist legacy-forcing tho e eager to
hand paintingwouJdtake much too long and watercolor,gouacbe,and penciloo paper,14½ x 11½" redi covermedium-pecificpainterline indi-
(36.8 x 29. cm). The u um of ModernAn, ew
anywa that' not the age we're living in. York.Givenanonymou,ly
viduality,and the uniquenessof the painterly
Mechanical mean are today.. . . ilkscreen mark to detect it in the accidental Iippagesand
work is a honest a method as any, including flawsof a casual1y executedsilkscreenproces .
handpainting.' 40 framework a condition of compromise upon In the followingstatement,a ferventadmirerof
But Warhol's olution. found in 1962, whichhe wouldalway in i t. Clement Greenberg' painterly norm , con-
respondedto all of the.e problem : in his paint- Warhol' adaptation of Rau chenberg' frontedwith Warhol'swork make a grote que
ing he isolated,singularized,and centralized mechanicalmethods of image tran. fer (dye or attemptto regaindiscur ive control and tries to
representationin the mannerof a Duchampian silkscreen subjected the e technique to accommodate the blow that the mod mist
Readymade(and in the mannerof Johns Flag numerou.critical tran formations.Frrst of all painterlya thetic had received from Warhol'
andTarge ), and extractedit thereby fromthe and mostobviously,Warholdeprivedhi paint- proposition : "He [Warh I] can in fact now be
tiresomeaffiliationof collageaestheticsand the ings of the infinite wealth of associativeplay seenas the sensitivema ter of a wide variety of
nagging accu ation of neo-Dada, which had and simultaneous multiple reference , which surfaceincident,and a majoreffectof the expe-
been leveledconstantlyagain t hi older pee Rauschenberg's traditi nal collage ae thetic rienceoflooking at hi paintingsis an unusually
SimultaneouLy,thi trategy,with i increa ed had still offered to the viewer. By contrast, immediate awarenes of the rwo-dimenional
emphasi on the mere photographicimageand Warhol' imagedesign (whetherin it emblem- fact of their painted surfaces.... Both factors
its crude and infinitereproducibilityfurthered atic ingle-unit tructure or in its repetitionof underilne the reality of the paint its If as a
the ero i n of the painterly legacyof the ew a single unit) extingui hcs all poetic re ources depositon the urface,quite apart from it inter-
YorkSchool and eliminated all trac of the and prohibits the viewer free as ociation of dependencewith the image it supports.'41
compromi.e that Rau ·chenberg had had to the pictorialelements, replacingthe latter with When paint is in fact added manually(as in
make with that legacy.Warhol's photographic the experienceof a confrontationalre triction. many of the Marilyn and Liz portraits), it is
silk creen of singleimagesas wella the serial In a very literal manner Warhol' ingularized appliedin uch a vapid manner,detached from
repetitionof singleimageseliminatedthe ambi- image be me herm tic: secluded from other g ture a expres ion a muchas it i di located
guitybetweenexpres ive gesture and mechan- imagesor stifled by their own repetition, they from contoura depiction(both feature would
icalmarkfromwhichRauschenberg'sworkhad can no Ion er general "meaning" and "narra- b come hallmarks of Warhol' later portrait
drawn its ten ion (and its relative convention- tion" in the manner of Rau chenberg' larger work) that it increases rather than contradicts
ality).Al o the centralizedready-madeimage yntactic a emblage. Paradoxically,the re- the laconicmechanicalnatureof the enterprise.
eliminated the relational composition, which triction and hermetici m of the semantically Extractingthe photographicimage from its
had functioned as the patial matrix of i olated image was at first generally experi- painterly ambiguity not only brought the
Rauschenberg' relativelytraditional pictorial enceda the effectof ab olute banality or as an mechanical nature of the reproduction 10 the
tructure and temporal narrative. Yet whiJe at1itudeof divine indifference,or, worseyet a foregroundbut also emphasized the lapidary,
seeminglya radical breakthrough, the photo- an affirmationof con umer culture. ln fact it factual (rather than "arti tic ' or 'poetical )
graphic ilk creen procedureand the composi- operated,fir 't of all, a the rejectionof conven- natureof the image, a quality which seems to
tional trategies of inguJarizationand serial tionaldemands upon the artistic object to pro- have been much more urprising and can-
repetitionallowedWarholat the ame time to vide the plenitude of iconic representation. dalousto viewersin the early ixti than it i
50 remainwithin the boundaries of the pictorial Warholnegates those demands for a pictorial now.Even a critic who in the early sixtie was
unusuallywell acquaintedwith Duchamp and finalindustrialization). Warhol(and Pop) literaturehas merely reiter-
theDadalegacyseems to have been deceived Severalquestionsremainconcerningthe sta- ated the cliches of iconographicreading since
by the apparent crudity of Pop art's factual tus and functionsof the photographicimagery the mid-sixties.
imagery:"I find bjs images offensive;I am silkscreened by Warhol onto his canvase , The first of these questions concerns the
annoyedto have to see in a gallery what I'm questionsthat havebeen completelyobliterated degree to which the exualizationof the com-
forcedtolook at in the supermarket.I go to the by the sensationaleffectsof Warhol's iconogra- modity and the commodificationof sexuality
gallerytoget awayfromthe supermarket,not to phy. In fact, one could say that mo t of the attracted artists, beginning in the early to
repeatthe experience."42
COMMONICONOGRAPHY
Warhol'sdialogue with Rauschenberg'swork
findsits parallelin his critical revisionsof the
legacyof JasperJohns. If the emblematiccen-
tralityof thesingleimageand the alloverserial-
gridcompositionwere the key compositional
devicesthat Warholderived from Johns'sTar-
get~andFlags, Alphabetsand Numbers, then
hecertainlyinsistedon counteractingthe neu-
tral and universalcharacter of Johns's icons
withexplicit, mass-cultural images instantly
recognizable as the real commondenominators
ofcollectiveperceptualexperience.In spite of
their commonality, Johns's Alphabets and
Numbers,Targets and Flags, by comparison
withWarhol'simagerysuddenlylooked arcane
andhermetic,and appearedto representobjects
remotefromeverydayexperience.By respond-
ingto paintingssuch as Johns'sFlag on Orange
Field,JI, 1958(figure 20), with his emblem-
aticGold Marilyn Monroe, 1962 (plate 199),
Warholmade Johns's work seem to be safely
entrenchedin a zone of unchallengedhigh-art
hegemony.By contrast, his own new mass-
culturaliconographyof consumptionand the
portraits of collective copic prostitution
lookedsuddenly more specific, more con-
cretelyAmericanthan the Americanflagitself,
perhapsin the waythat EdouardManet'sOlym-
pia had appearedmore concretely Parisian to
the French bourgeois in 1863 than Eugene
Delacroix'sLiberte.
Warhol's drastically different painterly
execution(the chintzy monochrome canvas
surface,brushed with cheap gold paint and
enhancedwith a crudely superimposed, silk-
screenedsingle photograph) drew the well-
craftedquietism of Johns's paintings into an
uncomfortable proximity to mass-cultural
glamorandcrass vulgaritywheretheir high-art
statusseemed.to disintegrate(if it were not for
theirrepressibleintimationthat Warhol'spaint-
ingswould soon be redeemed as the master- 20. Jasper Johns. Flag on OrangeField, II. 1958. Encausticon canva , 54 x 36½"(137.2 X 92. 7 cm).
pieceswhichheraldedan era of high art's own Pri~atecollection 51
 mid-fifties. British Pop, in particular, had
thrived on juxtapositionsof product imagery
with (semipornographic)movie-star imagery,
and had fused the language of vulgar gossip
magazineswiththat of the idiocyof advertising
copy(themostnotableexamplesbeing Eduardo
Paolozzi's/ Wasa RichMan'sPlaything,1947, or
RichardHamilton'sJust Whatls It ThatMakes
Today'sHomes So Different, So Appealing?,
1956.43 It is also in Rauschenberg'swork of the
mid-to late fiftiesthat we can findthe germina-
tionof that iconographyand the methodsfor its
display.Warhol'suse of this iconographywas
prefigurednot only in the numerousreferences
to massculturalconsumptionin Rauschenberg's
work of the fifties (for example, Coca-Cola
Plan,1958[figure21])but also in the frequent
usage of pinup imagery,the serially repeated
gossip-columnimage of Gloria Vanderbilt in
Gloria,1956(figure22), or the use of an FBI
"wanted"posterin Hymnal,1955.
21. RobertRauschenberg.Coca-ColaPlan. 1958.Combinepainting,27 x 26 x
Rather than search for the iconographic 6"(68.6 x 66 x 15.2cm).The Museumof ContemporaryArt, Los Angeles.The
sourcesof Warhol'swork, it seemsmore impor- Panza Collection
tant to recognizethe degree to which postwar
consumerculture was a pervasive presence. It
appearsto have dawnedon artists of the fifties
that such imageryand objects had irreversibly
takentotal control of visual representationand
public experience. The following exhibition
review from 1960 not only indicates that
awarenessin the work of an artist other than
Warholworkingat the sametime,but alsodeliv-
ers an astonishingly complete and detailed
accountof the imagesthat Warholhimselfsub-
sequentlychose as the key figures of his icon-
ographic program: "The show, called 'Les 11· f
Lions'(BorisLurie,Imagesof Life, MarchGal-
lery,New York,May-June 1960),excitingdis-
turbing nightmaresof painting, montages cut
out of magazinesand newspapers, images of
.
,•

"
}
~
,\;

.
_Jl
our life held together on canvases with paint . "
... atom bomb tests [italics mine] and green
Salem Cigarette ads ... HomeMade Southern
StyleInstantFrozenLessWorkFor YouTomato
Juice. Obsessively repeated throughout the
paintings, girls ... Marilyn, Brigitte, Liz and
Jayne,the sweet and sticky narcotics that dull
the pain.... Life Magazine taken to its final
ultimate absurd and frightening conclusion,
pain and death given no more space and atten-
tionthanpicturesof Elsa Maxwell'slatestparty. 22. Robert Rauschenberg.Gloria. 1956. Combine painting, 66½ x 63¼" (168.9 x
Andall of us spectatorsat our own death, hover- 168.3 cm). The ClevelandMuseum of Art. Gift of the ClevelandSociety for Contem-
52 ing over it all in narcotizeddetachment, bored porary Art
 asgodswithTheBomb, yawningoverThe Elec- ond individual exhibition in New York (figure
tion,comingto a stop at last only to linger over 23), and it seems that his simultaneous attrac-
thetenderdream photos of Marilyn. (And they tion to both the anonymous mug shot and the
callit Life.)"44 photo-booth portrait originated in the auto-
Howcommon the concern for these images matic photograph's achievementof destroying
actuallywas at the end of the fifties and how the last remnants of specializedartistic vision.
plausibleand necessary Warhol's iconographic Paradoxically, while denying the validity of
choiceswerebecomes even more evident when manualskill and technical expertise,the photo-
lookingonce again at Kaprow's essay "The booth picture concretized (howevergrotesque-
Legacyof Jackson Pollock." In the last two ly) the growing need for collective represen-
paragraphs,Kaprow predicts almost literally a tation and made that instant representation
numberof Warhol's actual iconographic types universally accessible. In the automatic por-
(or,did Kaprowread these types from the same traits of the photo booth the "author" of the
Rauschenberg paintings that Warhol had picture had, in fact, finally become a machine
absorbed?):"Not only will these bold creators (Warhol'sfrequentlystated desire).
showus as if for the firsttime the world we have The systematicdevaluationof the hierarchies
alwayshad about us, but ignored, but they will of representationaltechniques corresponds to
discloseentirely unheard of happenings and 23. "The Personality of the Artist." Announcement the abolitionof the hierarchy of subjects worth
eventsfoundin garbage cans, policefiles, hotel for exhibition Warhol,Stable Gallery, New York, 1964 while representing, as Warhol's most famous
lobbies, seen in store windows and on the dictum makes clear: "In the future everybody
streets,and sensedin dreams and horribleacci- ity: "My death series was divided into two will be famous for fifteen minutes."It was only
dents [italics mine] .... The young artist of parts, the first one famous deaths and the sec- logicalthat Warholsent the firstpatrons to com-
todayneed no longer say 'I am a painter' or 'a ond one people nobody ever heard of. ... It's not mission their own portraits to the photo booth,
poet' or 'a dancer.' All of life will be open to that I feel sorry for them, it'sjust that people go as the accounts of Ethel Scull (plate 325) and
him.He will discoverout of ordinary things the by and it doesn't really matter to them that Holly Solomon (figure24) testify.
meaningof ordinariness. He will not try to someone unknown was killed.... I still care While Warhol constructed images of Mari-
makethem extraordinary.Only their meaning about people but it would be much easier not to lyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor,and Elvis Pres-
willbe stated. But out of nothing he will devise care, it's too hard to care."47 ley that refer to the tragicomical conditions of
theextraordinary,and then maybe nothingness In a later interview, in 1972, Warhol their existencein glamor,the lasting fascination
as well.People will be delighted, or horrified, described the dialectic of Self and Other in his of these paintingsdoes not originate in the myth
criticswill be confused or amused, but these, I images of death in terms that would seem to of these figures but in the fact that Warhol
amsure,will be the alchemies of the 1960's.''45 confirm, after all, that an early knowledge of constructed their images from the perspective
In 1963Warholjuxtaposed the most famous Bertolt Brecht had left its mark on the self- of the tragic condition of those who consume
(and common) photographic images of glam- declared indifferentcynic: ''Actuallyyou know the stars' images: "I made my earliest films
orous stars with the most anonymous (and it wasn't the idea of accidents and things like using for several hours just one actor on the
cruel)imagesof everydaylife: photojournalists' that, it'sjust somethingabout, well it all started screen doing the same thing: eating or sleeping
imagesof automobile accidents and suicides with buttons, I always wanted to know who or smoking: I did this because people usually
(culledfroman archive of photographsrejected invented buttons and then I thought of all the just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat
evenby the daily papers for their unbearable people who worked on the pyramids and then him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at
horrorof detail). In the following year Warhol all those, I just always sort of wondered what- the star for as long as you like no matter what he
constructed another dialectic pair of photo- everhappenedto them why aren't they along, so does and to eat him up all you want to. It was
graphicconventions:the police mug shot, from I alwaysthought, well it would be easier to do a also easier to make."49
FBI "wanted" posters depicting the Thirteen painting of people who died in car crashes The dialecticof spectacle-cultureand collec-
MostWantedMen, and the photo-booth picture, because sometimesyou know, you never know tive compulsion, revealing in every image that
in his earliestseries of self-portraits(plate 3).46 whothey are.... The people that you know they glamor is only the stunning reflex of collective
Warhol thus grouped together the photo- want to do things and they never do things and scopic fixation, permeates Warhol's entire
graphicconventions that regulate social prac- they disappear so quickly, and then they're oeuvre. It culminates in his films, which oper-
ticesof looking:looking at the Other (in envy at killed or somethinglike that you know, nobody ate in the movie theater as real-timeexperience
fame and fortune, and in sadistic secrecy at knows about them so I thought well maybe I'll during an expanded viewing time as a de-
catastrophe),and at the disappearing Self (in do a painting about a person which you don't construction of the audience's participation in
futilesubstitutes).And he articulatedthe dialec- know about or something like that. ... " 48 that compulsion;at the same time they operate
tic of the photographic image as social repre- Early in 1964 Warhol used a photo-booth on the screen as instances of collective enable-
sentationwith astonishing programmatic clar- auto-portraitas the poster to announce his sec- ment, grotesque and deranged as the agents of 53
 a coat of silver-aluminum paint and letting them
speak of having been silenced into abstract
monochromy (plate 301).

SERIAL BREAKDOWN
AND DISPLAY
The endless discussions of Warhol's Pop icon-
ography, and, even more, those of his work's
subsequent definition in terms of traditional
painting, 52 have oversimplified his intricate re-
flections on the status and substance of the
painterly object and have virtually ignored his
efforts to incorporate context and display strat-
egies into the works themselves. Features that
were aggressively antipictorial in their impulse
and evidently among Warhol's primary con-
cerns in the early exhibitions have been oblit-
erated in the process of the acculturation of his
art. This is true for his first exhibition at Irving
Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962
and his second exhibition at that gallery a year
later, and also for numerous proposals for some
of the subsequent exhibitions, between 1963
and 1966. On the one hand, the installation of
the thirty-two pamtings at the Ferus Gallery was
determined by the number of varieties of
Campbell's soup available at that time (Warhol
actually used a list of Campbell's products to
mark off those flavors that had already been
painted). Thus, the number of objects in an
exhibition of high art was determined by the
24.· Andy Warhol. Portrait of Holly Solomon. 1966. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas; nine
panels, overall 6' 9" x 6' 9" (205.7 x 205.7 cm). Collection Holly Solomon

. that enablement might appear in the uncensored Philip Johnson in 1964 to decorate the facade
and unstructured, decentralized and rambling of the New York State Pavilion at the New York
performances by individuals who have not been World's Fair. It was for this occasion that the
trained in the professional delivery of visual collection of diptychs and single-panel portraits
seduction. Warhol has declared the intentions of the Thirteen Most WantedMen (figure 25;
of his real-time film projects with his usual plates 287-300) was originally produced, and
clarity: "Well this way I can catch people being it comes as no surprise that Warhol's realistic
themselves instead of setting up a scene and sabotage of a state government's desire to rep-
shooting it and letting people act out parts that resent itself officially to the world was rejected
were written because it's better to act out natu- under the pretext of legalistic difficulties. 51
rally than act like someone else because you When Warhol was notified of the decision that
really get a better picture of people being them- his paintings had to be removed he suggested
selves instead of trying to act like they're that the pictures of the thieves be replaced by
themselves."50 pictures of one of the chiefs, World's Fair direc- . 11r~···
The subversive humor of Warhol's reversal
of representational hierarchies culminated in
his execution of a commission he had received
tor and park commissioner Robert Moses-a
proposal that was also rejected. Warhol, with
laconic detachment, settled for the most
=·---------
25. Andy Warhol. Thirteen Most Wanted Men. 1964.
Installation view, New York State Pavilion, New York
54 with several other Pop artists from architect "obvious" solution, covering the paintings with World'sFair, 1964
 externalfactor of a product line. (What system, the same rigor with which those systems of blue monochrome paintings in the Galleria
oneshouldask on this occasion, normally deter- everyday determination deny the experience of Apollinaire in Milan in 1957 (repeated a few
mines the number of objects in an exhibition?) subjectivity. months later in Paris). Commenting on his exhi-
On the other hand, the paintings' mode of dis- Yet, at the same time, these paintings are bition Klein said: "All of these blue proposi-
play was as crucial as were the principle of imbued with an eerie concreteness and cor- tions, all alike in appearance, were recognized
serial repetition and their commercial, ready- poreality, which in 1961had distinguished Piero by the public as quite different from one
made iconography. Standing on small white s
Manzoni Merda d'artista. But Warhol differs another. The amateur passed from one to
shelvesrunning along the perimeter of the gal- here-as in his relationship to Johns's imag- another as he liked and penetrated, in a state of
leryin the way that display shelves for consumer ery-in that he transferred the universality of instantaneous contemplation, into the worlds of
the blue.... The most sensational observation
was that of the 'buyers.' Each selected out of
the ... pictures that one that was his, and each
paid the asking price. The prices were all dif.
ferent of course." 55
Klein's installation (and his commentary on
it) reveals both the degree of similarity between
his attitude and that of Warhol:Sserial break-
down of modernist painting, and the radical
difference between the two propositions, sepa-
•1
2":.-
rated by five years. While Klein's high-culture
conservatism clearly intended to create a para-
dox, paralleling that of painting's simultaneous
existence as commodity and renewed meta-
physical aspirations, Warhol's position of relent-
less affirmation cancelled any such aspirations
and liquidated the metaphysical dimension of the
modernist legacy by rigorously subjecting each
painting to an identical product image and price.
That the serial breakdown of the painterly
object and its repetition within the display were
not just a topical idea for his first exhibition but,
rather, a crucial aesthetic strategy, became evi-
26. Installation view, Campbell'sSoup Cans, Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1962
dent in 1968, when Warhol was approached by
Mario Amaya to install his first European retro-
objects would normally function in a store, the corporeal experience onto the paradoxical level spective exhibition at the Institute of Contem-
paintings were simultaneously attached to the of mass-cultural specificity (not bodily con- porary Art in London. Warhol suggested the
wall in the way that pictures would be tradition- sumption but product consumption forms the installation of the series of thirty-two Camp-
ally installed in a gallery (figure 26).53 And material base of experience). bell's Soup Can paintings throughout the entire
finally,there is the inevitable dimension of War- The absurdity of the individual, aesthetic space allocated for his show as the exclusive
hol's own biography explaining why he chose decision-making process becomes all the more subject of the retrospective. Amaya refused this
the Campbell's Soup Can image: "I used to patent in the variations of details in the soup- proposal just as the curators at the Whitney
drink it. I used to have the same lunch everyday, can labels. It is precise! y in the exact imitation Museum of American Art in New York refused
for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over of the minute variations and in the exact obe- Warhol's 1970 proposal to install only Flower
and over again." 54 dience to the available range of products that the paintings or Cow Wallpaper (glued backwards
All three factors affect the work itself, and series of Campbell's Soup Can paintings goes onto the exhibition walls) as the contents of his
take a reading of it beyond the mere "scan- far beyond what has been perceived as a mere retrospective exhibition at that institution. 56 Fur
dalous" Pop imagery for which it mostly iconographic scandal. his second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, in
became known. What has been misread as Inevitably, the Campbell's Soup Cans of 1963 (the first one seems to have been at best a
provocative banality is, in fact, the concrete 1962 and their installation recall a crucial succes de scandale, judging by the fact only a
realization of the paintings' reified existence, moment of neo-avant-garde history when few of the paintings, each offered at $300, were
which denies the traditional expectation of an seriality, monochromy, and mode of display sold), Warhol suggested once again a "mono-
aesthetic object's legibility. Warhol's work broke down the reign of the easel painting: graphic" exhibition, the recently produced
abolishes the claim for aesthetic legibility with Yves Klein's installation of eleven identical series of single and multiple Elvis images, silk- 55
 screened on large monochrome silver surfaces. the ready-made object. Except for the occa- the institutional control and validation of that
In fact, he apparently suggestedthat the "paint- sional joke campaign, such as signing actual medium. Therefore, he decided not to trans-
ings" should be installed as a "continuous sur- Campbell'ssoup cans, Warhol would never use gress these conservativelimitations inherent in
round," and he shipped a single continuous roll the three-dimensionalready-made object in its painterly practice and refrained from acquiring
of canvas containing the silkscreened images to unalteredindustrialexistence, as a raw object of (or reconstituting) the status of the unaltered
Los Angeles.57 consumption.Yetat the same time he would go Readymade in any of his works until 1966.
As in his first installationin Los Angeles, this further than any of his peers in Pop art (not, Perhaps it was Warhol's skeptical and oppor-
propositionthreatened the boundaries of paint- however, as far as many of his peers in the tunistic positivism (to anticipate that all radical
ing as an individualand complete pictorial unit. Fluxus movement) to challenge the traditional gestures within the framework of high-art pro-
But now it not only subvertedwhat remained of assumptionsabout the uniqueness, authenticity, duction would end up as mere "pictures" in a
that status via serial repetition, but destroyed it and authorship of the pictorial object, the very gallery) that allowed him to avoid the mistakes
altogetherby the sheer spatial expansionof that foundationsupon which high modernist art had inherent in Duchamp's radical proposition of
repetition. What had been a real difficulty for rested until Duchamp defined the Readymade the Readymade. Duchamp had in fact been
Pollock, the final aesthetic decision of how and in 1917,and upon which the reconstruction of oblivious to both the false radicality of the
where to determine the size of painterly action, modernism had rested in the New York School Readymade and the problem of its inevitable
or, as Harold Rosenberg put it, how to avoid until the arrival of Warhol in 1962. Again and aestheticization. One of the rare comments
crossingover into the production of "apocalyp- again, Warhol tantalized collectors, curators, Duchamp actually made about Warhol's work
tic wallpaper,"had now become a promise ful- and dealers by generating doubts about the seems to indicate that he himself understood
filled by Warhol's deliberate transgression of authenticity and authorship of his work and that implication after all when looking at War-
those sacred limits. actually succeeded in destabilizing his own hol's work: "What interests us is the conceptthat
It was, therefore, utterly logical that Warhol market. For example: "I made multiple color wants to put fifty Campbell's Soup cans on a
conceived an installation of wallpaper for his silkscreen painting-like my comic strip tech- canvas."59
supposedlyfinalexhibitionas a "painter" at the nique. Why don't you ask my assistant Gerard
RECEPTION
Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, wallpaper im- Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my
printed with the by now notorious (then utterly paintings."58 The recognitionofWarhol's ingenuity and radi-
bland) image of a cow, that animal whose repu- Two contradictory explanations seem to be cality obviously depended to a considerable
tationit is to havea particularly vapid and intent necessary here. The first is that Warholemerged degree on the historical limitations of his orig-
gaze. Juxtaposed with the Cow Wallpaper was from a local tradition of artists who had distin- inal audiences: in fact his strategies could
Warhol'sseries of floating silver "pillows," the guished themselves by pictorializing the Dada appear to be scandalous only in the face of the
Silver Clouds, which moved through the gal- legacy in their engagement with the heroic tra- New YorkSchool climate of the late fiftiesand
lery, animated by air and visitors' body move- dition of the New York School. In the early that generation's general indifference, most
ments (plates 302, 305). Rumor has it that War- sixtiesWarhol aspired to the power and success often fused with aggressive contempt-as
hol said of the cows, "This is all of us." But the of Johns and Rauschenberg, not to the increas- exemplified by Clement Greenberg-for the
decor would not have needed that statement to ing marginalization that awaited artistic prac- Dada and Duchamp legacy. By contrast, War-
make its point: all of modernism's most radical tices that had abandoned picture making (Hap- hol's interventionsin the aesthetics of the early
and utopian promises (to evolve from pictorial penings and Fluxus, for example). The critical sixties would seem fully plausible and neces-
plane through sculptural object to architectural distance that Warhol wanted to insert between sary to a vieweraware of the implicationsof the
space, to shift the viewerfrom iconic represen- himself and his two major predecessors would Dada legacy in terms of that movement'scon-
tationto the self-reflexive,the indexicalsign and thus still have to occur first of all within the tinual emphasis on and reflection of the sym-
the tactile mode of participation) are annihi- means of painting. Warhol, therefore, had to biotic ties between the aesthetics of art produc-
lated in this farcical sacking of the modernist work through the last phases of the pictorializa- tion and those of commodity production.
legacy,the atopianjinale of the first ten years of tion begun by Rauschenbergand Johns, and go Warhol's "scandalous" assaults on the status
Warhol'sart. to the threshold of painting's abolition, a con- and the "substance" of pictorial representation
Warhol's art until 1966 (as opposed to his sequence which would soon emerge, mediated were motivated by the rapidly dwindling op-
films) thus oscillates constantly between an to a considerable degree by Warhol's work, in tions of credible artistic production (a fact that
extreme challenge to the status and credibility the context of Minimal and Conceptual art. had become more and more apparent as the
of painting and a continued deployment of The second explanation is more speculative conventions of modernism and avant-garde
strictly pictorial means operating within the and assumes that Warhol was so deeply practice had been finally rediscovered) and
narrowly defined framework of pictorial con- involvedwith the pictorial medium, the auton- even more so by the increasing pressure now
ventions.Inevitably,the question arises (and it omy of aestheticconventionsand the stabilityof exertedby the culture industry on the tradition-
has been asked again and again) whether or artistic categories inherent in that medium, ally exempt space of artistic marginality.Icon-
whyWarholnevercrossed the threshold into the because he gradually had learned to accept the ography and blague, production procedure and
56 actual conception (or, rather, reconstitution)of relative conventionalityof his audience and of modes of display in Warhol'swork mimetically
 internalizethe violenceof these changingcon- the imperialistvictor:''Afterthe heroicyearsof Europe.It seemsthat they recognizetheir iden-
ditions.His paintingsvanish as artistic objects AbstractExpressionisma younger generation tity just as well in Warhol's work and perceive
to the same degree as the option to sustain of artists is workingin a new Americanregion- it as cultural legitimization. While they are
dissentdisappear within an organized system alism, butthis time becauseof the mass media, instrumental in inflicting those conditions of
of immediate commercial and ideological the regionalismis nationwide,and evenexport- enforced consumption that Warhol's work
recuperation. able to Europe,for we havecarefully prepared seems to condone passivelyas "our universal
But of course as had been the case with and reconstructedEurope in our own image nature," it would still seem that they are mis-
Duchampand Dada before, these practices since 1945 so that two kinds of American takenin readinghis posturesand his artifactsas
vehementlycelebrated the destruction of the imagery,Kline,Pollock,de Kooningon the one an affirmativecelebrationof theirs.
authorandtheaura,andof artisticskill, whileat hand, and the Pop artists on the other, are Warholha unifiedwithinhisconstructsboth
thesametime they recognizedin that destruc- becomingcomprehensibleabroad."60 the entrepreneurialworld-viewof the latetwen-
tionan irretrievableloss. And yet within this In the advanced, capitalist European coun- tieth century and the phlegmaticvision of the
momentof absolutelos , Warholuncoveredthe tries Warhol'swork was adamantly embraced victimsof that world view,that of the consum-
historicalopportunity to redefine (aesthetic) (at firstin WestGermany,but subsequentlyalso ers. The ruthless diffidence and strategically
experience. Tounderstandthe radicalityof War- in France and Italy) as a kind of high-culture calculated air of detachment of the first,
hol'sgesture,both with regard to the legacies version of the preceding and sub equent low- allowed to continue without ever being chal-
of Duchampand Dada and with regard to the culture cults of all things American. It seems lenged in terms of its responsibilitycombines
immediately precedingandcontemporaryartis- that these cult forms celebratedin masochistic with that of its opposites the consumers, who
tic environmentof the Cage legacy, does not folly the ubjectionto the massivedestruction can celebrate in Warhol's work their proper
minimizehis achievementsat all. that the commodityproductionof late capital- status of havingbeen erased as subjects.Regu-
Quitethecontrary:the ambitionto makehim i m wouldhold in store for the postwar Euro- latedas they are by the eternallyrepetitiveges-
an all-AmericanPop artist belittles Warhol's pean countrie . Inevitably, Warhol's work tures of alienatedproductionand consumption,
historicalscope as much as it underrates the would acquire the suggestion of prophetic they are barred-as are Warhol's paintings
universalityof those conditionsof experience foresight. -from access to a dimension of critical
determiningWarhol's work. As early as 1963 Therefore,it cannot surprise us to findentre- resistance.
HenryGeldzahlerdescribedthe reasonsfor this preneurs,industrialists,and advertisingtycoons
universalitywith the breathtakingfranknessof among the key collectors of Warhol'swork in

I I

57
 NOTES

I. Quoted in Gretchen Berg, "Andy: My True of the World?"Artnews 63 (October 1964),p. 34. ing on at the time. Sometimes I don't change the
Story,"Los AngelesFreePress (March 17, 1967), 12. Nan Rosenthalhas recently discussed the details idea. Or, sometimesI don't use the idea right away,
p. 3 (reprinted from East Village Other); and of the curriculum at Carnegie Lnstituteof Tech- but mayrememberit and use it for somethinglater
Gregory McDonald,"Built-in Obsolescence:Art nology and its profound impact on Warhol's on. l love ideas."(Malanga,"A Conversationwith
by Andy Warhol,"BostonSunday Globe(October education, in a paper delivered at the Warhol Andy Warhol,"pp. 125-27.)
23, 1966),p. 17. symposiumorganized by the Dia Art Foundation 19. G. R. Swenson,"What ls Pop Art?: Answersfrom
For generously sharing research and detailed in New Yorkin April 1988. 8 Painters, Part I,'' Armews 62 (November 1963),
knowledgeof Andy Warhol's work with me in the Patrick Smith has suggested a comparison pp. 24-27, 60-63.
preparationof this essay,r would like to thank the between Warhol's mechanizationof fine-art pro- 20. Martha Jackson, letter to Andy Warhol,July 20,
Department of Painting and Sculpture of The duction procedures and the ideas taught by 1962.The Estate of Andy Warhol.
Museumof Modern Art. Equally,I would like to Moholy-Nagyat The Institute of Design in Chi- 21. A similar hesitation with regard to style can be
thankThe Andy WarholFoundationfor the Visual cago and in his writings, in particular The New found in the early work of Roy Lichtenstein,who
Arts, for giving me informationand access to its Vision (1930). Apparently, this book was well in the late fifties was making the transition from
archive . known to Warhol and discussed by him and his Abstract Expressionism to the deployment of
2. See Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, eds., friends in the late forties. See Smith, Andy War- ready-made imagery and ready-made (commer-
Andy WarholPrims: A CatalogueRaisonne(New ho/'s Art, pp. 110-12and nn. 191-205. cial) techniquesof pictorialexecution.This led to
York:RonaldFeldmanFine Arts, EditionsSchell- I 3. Douglas Arango, "Underground Films: Art or Warhol's surprise discoverythat he had not been
mann, and AbbevillePress, 1985),pp. 106-07. NaughtyMovies,"MovieTV Secrets(June 1967), the only one to use the iconography of comic
3. PatrickSmith has suggestedthat the script is actu- n.p. strips in his work. WhM w~s worse for Warhol
ally the handwritingof Warhol's mother and that 14. Gretchen Berg, "Nothing to Lose:Jnterviewwith was that Leo Castelli at that time believed that
Warholhad a stamp made so he could replicate Andy Warhol,"Cahiersdu Cinema in English 10 his gallery should show only one artist using this
his mother's naive handwriting at any time. See (May 1967),pp. 38-43. type of imagery. Lichtenstein ha recorded his
Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol's Art and Films ln 1971Warholsaid: "Jfl remembercorrectly,l memory of his encounter with Warhol's work of
(Ann Arbor: UMl ResearchPress, 1986),p. 32. felt that if everyonecouldn't afford a painting the this kind: "l saw Andy's work at Leo Castelli's
The pun on his telephone number,MurrayHill printed poster would be avai.lable .... " (Gerard about the same time l brought mine in, about the
3-0555, seems to have been a persistent joke; Malanga, "A Conversationwith Andy Warhol,'' spring of 1961.... Of course, I wa amazed to see
thus, in 1954he had publishedan advertisementin Print Collector'sNewsletter I [January-February Andy's work because he was doing cartoons of
Ergo, a cooperativebrochure by a group of free- 1971],pp. 125-27.) ancy and DickTracy and they were very similar
lance cornmercial artists, Iisting his phone as The same argument for the egalitarian con- to mine." (Glaser, "Oldenburg, Lichtenstein,
"Mury heel." See Andreas Brown, compiler, ception motivating Pop art was made by Claes Warhol,"p. 21.)
Andy Warhol:His Early Works/947-1959 (New Oldenburg,forexample:"J think it wouldbe great 22. Emile de Antonio's commentary has been
York:Gotham Book Mart Gallery, 1971),p. 14. if you had an art that could appeal to everybody." reported in two versions. In the first, he said,
4. Theodor W. Adorno, "Riickblickendauf den Sur- (Bruce Glaser, "Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, War- "One of these is crap. The other is remarkable-
reali:;mus,"in GesammelteSchriften II (Frank- hol: A Discussion,"Artforum 4 [February 1966], it's our society, it's who we are, it's absolutely
furt: Suhrkamp, 1974),p. 103. pp. 20-24.) beautifuland naked, and you ought to destroy the
5. RosalindH. Williams, Dream Worlds(Berkeley: It is all the more a tonishing that one of Pop first and show the second." (Jesse Kornbluth,
University of California Press, 1982), p. 67; art's early critical opponents (and subsequent "Andy,"New York[March 9, 1987),p. 42.)
quoted in Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art converts) refused to acknowledgethe egalitarian The other versionconfirmsthe assumptionthat
into Pop(NewYorkand London:Methuen, 1987), potential of Pop art from the beginning (and, in there was a momentof real hesitationin Warhol's
p. 12. retrospect, it turns out that the skepticism was early work: "One day he put up two huge paint-
6. This change of professional identity was, of wholly justified). In her review of Lawrence ings of Coke bottles.Twodifferentones. One was,
course, not that abrupt; it appears that Warhol Alloway's 1963 exhibition Six Painters and the I could say,an early Pop Art piece of major impor-
continued to work a a commercial designer at Objectat The SolomonR. GuggenheimMuseum tance. It was just a big black-and-white Coke
least unti1 I962. Barbara Rose wrote: "In the past, when an artist bottle. The other was the same thing except it was
7. Andy Warhol, "Happy ButterflyDay,'' published like Courbet or van Gogh appropriated material surroundedby AbstractExpressionisthatchesand
by Vanity Fair, c. 1955. The Estate of Andy from popular culture, it was with the intent of crosses.And 1said to Andy, 'Why did you do two
Warhol. reaching a larger public-in fact of producing a of these? One of them is so clearly your own. And
8. See Trevor Fairbrother, "Warhol Meets Sargent kind of elevated popular art. Pop art in America the second is just kind of ridiculous because it's
at Whitney,"Arts Magazine 61 (February 1987), had no such inte111io11; it was made for the same not anything. It's part Abstract Expressionism
pp. 64-71. exclusiveand limitedpublic as abstractart" [ital- and part whateveryou're doing.' And the firstone
9. "New Talent U.S.A.," Art in America 50 (1962), ics mine]. ("Pop Art at the Guggenheim," Art was [the only] one that was any good. The other
p. 42. A reproductionof Andy Warhol's painting lmemational 2 [1963],p. 20.) thing-God only knows what it is. And, I think
Storm Door 1960, was surprisingly included in 15. WalterP. Paepcke,"Art in Industry,'' Modem Art that helped Andy make up his mind as to-you
the "prints and drawings" section of this issue, in Advertising(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946), know: that was almost the birth of Pop. Andy did
selected by Zachary Scott, an actor and print n.p. it." (Smith, Andy Warhol'sArt, p. 97.)
collector.The size is incorrectly indicated as 36 16. The Philosophyof Andy Warhol(FromA to Band Warhol followed this advice only partially: he
x 34" (as opposed to the painting's actual size of Back Again) (New York:Harcourt Brace Jovano- exhibitedthe "cold" version at his first New York
46 x 421/s"),whichcauses one to wonderwhether vich, 1975),p. 92. exhibitionat the Stable Gallery in 1962but did not
inclusionof the work in this sectionrequiredsome 17. "Boxing Match,"Time (May 15, 1964),p. 86. destroy the other version.
adjustmentof mediumand size. 18. Warholwas notorious for consciouslyemploying 23. See Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (New York:
10. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," other people's ideas, and he was quite candid (and Abbeville Press, 1983), p. 17: "Though Warhol
New Left Review (London) 144 (March-April coy) about this supposed absence of originality: has neverchanged his personal style, he did aban-
1984),p. 106. "I alwaysget my ideas from people. Sometimes I don commercial art as decisively as he possibly
58 11. Allan Kaprow,"Should the Artist Becomea Man change the idea to suit a certain project l'm work- could. The line between hi first and second
 careersis astoundinglysharp." exhibition:"From the start-which I take to be Flower paintings on the recently designed Cow
24. AllanKaprow,"The Legacyof Jackson Pollock," the late forties-his art was conceivedin terms of Wallpaper,that he decided to publiclydeclare the
Armews57 (October1958),p. 56. its ab olute essentials, flat color and a rec- end of painting (or at least his involvementwith
25. Ibid. tilinearity derived from the shape of the canva , it): "I was having so much fun in Paris that I
26. Foran early exampleof this argument,see Robert and the earliest paintings on view have a decided it was the place to make the announce-
Rosenblum"Pop and on-Pop:An Essay in Dis- simplicitywhich is pretty near irreducible.... ment I'd been thinking about making for months:
tinction,"Art and literature 5 (Summer 1965), "When the equilibriumis not in it elf o intrin- I wasgoing to retire from painting.Art just wasn't
pp. 80-93. sicallycompellingand the handlingof the paint is fun for me anymore." (Andy Warhol and Pat
See also Alan Solomon,Andy Warhol(Boston: kept adamant the re ult is that the painting tends Hackett, POPism: The Warhol '60s [New York:
Instituteof ContemporaryArt, 1966),n.p.: "Jn a not to hold the eye: the spectator's gaze keep Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1980],p. 113.)
broader sense, I uppose the prevalence of cool bouncingoff, no matter how hard he tries to keep It seems noteworthy, once again, that while
passivitycan be explained as part of the reaction it fixedon the painting. (I'm thinking now most of Warhol considered it appropriate to empha ize
to abstractexpressioni m, since the present atti- all of the vertical painting divided into unequal ironically that "Paris wa · the place to make the
tude is the polar opposite of the action painting halve of ochre yellowand whitedated 1962in the announcement,"some American critics have not
idea of kinetic self-expression.(Thi has a great current show, in which the colours themselves, been able to acknowledge that Warhol's decla-
dealto do with Warhol's attitudes towardstyle and unlike the warm fields of blue that are perhaps ration of silence placed him in a Rimbaud/
performance.)" Newman's most effective element-have no Duchamptraditionof self-imposedrefu al to pro-
For a more recent example, proving the per- inherentdepth to them and end up erecting a kind duce art. See Ratcliff, Andy Warhol,p. 7, where
sistence of this simplistic argument of stylistic of hand-ball court wall for the eye)" [italics Warhol'srenunciationof paintingis identifiedas a
innovation,see Ratcliff,Andy Warhol,p. 7. mine]. (Michael Fried, "New York Letter," Art "Garboesque" decision.
27. Kaprow,"The Legacyof Jackson Pollock," p. 56. lmernarional6 [December 1962),p. 57.) Ten years after his fir t declaration Warhol,
28. See MichaelCrichton, Jasper Johns ( ew York: That the monochrome aspects in the work of after having taken up painting again, still strug-
Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Newmanwere subjectto a more general reflection gled with the problem (or the pose): "l get so tired
Abrams, 1978),p. 30. Andrew Forge described in the early ixties was also indicated by Jim of painting. I've been trying to give it up all the
this new collaborativeaesthetic in the context of Dine's rather unsuccessful parody Big Black time, if we could just make a living out of movies
Rau chenberg's work in terms that equally de- Zipper, 1962 (The Sonnabend Collection, Bal- or the newspaperbusiness, or something. It' so
emphasizevisuality: "The idea of collaboration timore Museumof Art). boring, painting the same picture over and over."
with others has preoccupied him endlessly,both 32. A typicalexample was Rothko's refusal to supply (Quotedin Glenn O'Brien, HighTimes24 [August
through the medium of his own work and in an the meditativepanels for the Seagram Building's 1977),p. 21.)
open situation in which no single person domi- corporate dining room. Kaprow in 1964 cited 34. Barry Blinderman, "Modern 'Myths': An Inter-
nates.In Black Market (a 1961combine painting) "the blank canvas" among these critical acts in view with Andy Warhol," Arts Magazin.e 56
he invitedthe onlooker to exchange mall objects which the elitist hermetici m and the meta- (October 1981),pp. 1-44-47.(Reprinted in Jeanne
withthe combineand to leavemessage ." (Robert physicalclaims of monochromyhad been revised: Siegel, Artwords 2 [Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Rauschenberg [New York: Harry N. Abrams, "Pursuitof the idea of 'best' becomesthen (insid- Press, 1988),p. 16.)
1972),p. 15.) iously)avoidanceof the idea of 'worst' and Value 35. One could refer to the complexity of Warhol's
29. According to Eleanor Ward Dance Diagram is defeatedby paradox. Its most poignant expres- critical reflection on all of the implications of
(Tango)wa included in Warhol's first individual sions havebeen the blank canvas, the motionless modernist pictorial convention and his actual
NewYorkexhibitionat her Stable Gallery in 1962 dance, the silent music, the empty page of poetry. decision to feature these in rather unusual dis-
and installedon the floor.See Ward's recollection On the edge of such an abyss all that is left to do is plays in order to point out-if it were not already
of that exhibitionin John Wilcock, ed., The Auto- act." (Kaprow,"Should the Artist Becomea Man obvious-how tame and conservativeby compar-
biography& Sex Life of Andy Warhol( ew York: of the World?"p. 34.) ison the so-called eo-Geo and the neo-Con-
Other Scenes, 1971),n.p. Subsequently,a Dance 33. Allan Solomonmade the connection between the ceptualist artists are in their simple-mindedand
Diagramwa installed in a horizontal position in monochrome paintings and the floating Silver opportunistic "painting and sculpture" mentality,
Sidney Janis's exhibition The New Realists in Clouds in 1966, albeit in the rather evasive lan- disguised behind the facade of postmodernist
October 1962 and in Warhol's first "retrospec- guage of the enthusiastic critic: "When Warhol pretense.
tive" exhibition, in I965 at the Institute of Con- made the Clouds which are floatingplastic sculp- 36. Roger Vaughan, "Superpop, or a Night at the
temporary Art in Philadelphia. It was a particu- ture, he called them paintings, because he thought Factory," New York Herald Tribune (August 8,
larly Warholianirony,even if unintended, that the of filliag them with helium and sending them out 1965).Ironically,as a member of the staff of the
attendance at the exhibition's opening was so of the window,neverto return. 'That would be the Castelli gallery recalls, many collectors left the
great that all the paintings (not ju t those on the end of painting,' he said, as serious as not. (He blank panel behind when acquiring a diptych by
floor)had to be removed from the exhibition for also likes the idea of plain surfacesas ultimateart. Warholat that time.
the durationof the preview. Many of his paintings have matching bare panels 37. One of Rauschenberg's Blueprints was shown in
30. HaroldRosenberg,"The AmericanAction Paint- which he feels increase their beauty apprecia- the exhibitionAbstractionin Photographyat The
er ," Ar111ews 51 (December 1952), pp. 22-23, bly.)" (Solomon,Andy Warhol.) Museumof Modern Art, New York,in May-July
48-50. A year later Warhol described the project in 1951,and was listed in the catalogueas Blueprint:
31. Quotedin Annabelle Melzer,Dada and Surrealist more concise terms: "I didn't want to paint any- PhotogramforMural Decoration.
Performance(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, more so 1 thought that the way to finishoff paint- An article on Rauschenberg's photograms/
1980),p. 17. ing for me would be to have a painting that floats, blueprints was published in "Speaking of Pic-
Such a moment of the "breakdown" of the so 1 inventedthe floatingsilver rectanglesthat you tures," life (April 19, 1951).See also Lawrence
strategy of the monochrome is poignantly fill up with helium and let out of your windows." Alloway,"Rauschenberg'sDevelopment,"Robert
described by Michael Fried in a review of an (Berg, "Nothing to Lose," p. 43.) Rauschenberg(Washington,D.C.: National Col-
exhibitionof ewman's work in 1962, which he Later, Warhol remembered that it was on the lection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution,
published(as historicalchance wouldhaveit) side occasionof his exhibitionat the IleanaSonnabend 1976),pp. 16, 63.
by side with his reviewofWarhol's first New York Gallery in Paris, where he had installed the 38. The complex relation hip between Warhol, his 59
 slightly older peer Robert Rauschenberg, and his paintings without such subject matter, simply as used an FBI "wanted" poster in Hymnal, 1955.
slightly younger, but considerably more estab- 'overall' paintings of repeated elements. The nov- The use of the photo-booth strip leads direct!)
lished, peer Jasper Johns remains somewhat elu- elty and the absurdity of the repeated images of into the work of Jasper Johns, particularly in the
sive. Apparently, Warhol's ambition to be recog- Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue and Coca-Cola image of an unidentified man in FlagAbove Whit1
nized by these two artists was frustrated on several bottles is not great. ... The gist of this is that with Collage (I 955), but also the self-portraits b)
occasions, as Emile de Antonio has reported, for Warhol's work is able but general. It certainly has Johns used in SouvenirI and 11, 1964.
two reasons: first, because Warhol's background possibilities, but it is so far not exceptional. It For the cover of Time magazine in 1965Warho
as a real commercial artist disqualified him in should be considered as it is, as should anyone's, used a whole series of photo-booth pictures, anc
the eyes of these artists who, if they had to and not be harmed or aided by being part of a there are still dozens of photo-booth strips ol
make money, would decorate Bonwit Teller win- supposed movement, 'pop,' 'O.K.,' neo-Dada or Warhol and his friends in the Warhol archives.
dows under a pseudonym; and second, because, it New Realist or whatever it is." (Donald Judd, 47. Warhol, as quoted by Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol
seems, they sensed that Warhol's work was out- "Andy Warhol," Arts Magazine [January 1963], Films and Paintings(London and New York: Stu·
flanking theirs. Warhol later reflected on their reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings dio Vista, 1971),p. 38.
relationship in a conversation with Emile de 1959-1975 [Halifax and New York:Press of Nova 48. Bailey,Andy Warhol:Transcript.
Antonio, who remarks: "You're too swish, and Scotia College of Art and Design and New York The statement about the anonymous people
that upsets them.... You are a commercial artist, University Press, 1975], p. 70.) who built the pyramids is of course an uncon·
which really bugs them because when they do 42. Barbara Rose, "Pop Art at the Guggenheim," pp. scious quotation from Bertolt Brecht's famow
commercial art-windows and other jobs I find 20-22. (It is not quite clear from the text whether poem "Questions from a Worker Who Reads."Ar
them-they do it just 'to survive.' They won't this statement relates to Warhol or Lichtenstein, early argument for the profound influence ol
even use their real names. Whereas you've won but, in any case, it indicates the intense shock of Brecht's work on Warhol had been made b)
prizes' You're famous for it." (POPism, pp. 11- factuality that the new mass-cultural iconography Rainer Crone in his monograph (Andy Warho
12.) Or: "Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns didn't of Pop art provided even to well-prepared eyes.) [New York: Praeger, 1970]), partially on the evi•
want to meet Andy at the beginning.... Andy was In 1962Sidney Janis identified the artists in his dence of one reference by Warhol to Brecht in hii
too effeminate for Bob and Jap.... I think his exhibition The New Realists as "Factualists," and 1963 interview with Gene Swenson. Mon
openly commercial work made them nervous.... distinguished them from Rauschenberg and oth- recently, Patrick Smith has anxiously attemptec
They also, I think, were suspicious of what Andy ers who are "less factual than they are poetic or to detach Warhol from this political affiliation or
was doing-his serious work-because it had expressionist." (Janis, New Realists.)In his review the grounds of totally unconvincing "memories•
obvious debts to both of them in a funny way." of Warhol's movie The Chelsea Girls, Andrew by early acquaintances of Warhol, who were inter
(Smith, Andy Warhol's Art, pp. 294-95 .) Sarris recognized this "factualist" quality in War- viewed by Smith. See Patrick S. Smith, "Theatre
Leo Castelli remembers Warhol visiting his hol's work and went as far as comparing Warhol's 12 and Broadway," in Warhol: Conversatiom
gallery in 1958-59 as "a great admirer of film to one of the key works in the history of About the Artist (Ann Arbor: UM! Researd
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and he even documentary film: "The Chelsea Girls is actually Press, 1988),p. 41; and Smith, Andy Warhol'sArt.
bought a drawing, a good one, a light bulb drawing closer to Nanook of the North than to The Knack. It pp. 78ff.
of Jasper Johns." (In David Bailey, Andy Warhol: is as documentarythat The Chelsea Girls achieves 49. Berg, "Nothing to Lose,'' p. 40. In this regard,
Transcriptof David Bailey's ATV Documentary its greatest distinction." (Andrew Sarris, "The Michael Fried's brilliant review of Warhol's firs
[London: Bailey Litchfield/Mathews Miller Dun- Sub-New York Sensibility," Cahiers du Cinema New York exhibition has been proven wrong,
bar Ltd, 1972], n.p.) See also Ann Hindry, "Andy [May 1967],p. 43.) since it is not the dependence of Warhol's image1
Warhol: Quelques grand temoins: Sidney Janis, 43. For a recent discussion of the history of British on mass-cultural myths but participation in mass-
Leo Castelli, Robert Rosenblum, Clement Green- Pop art, see Brian Wallis, This Is Tomorrow cultural experience that animates the work: "An
berg," Artstudio (Paris, 1988),p. 115.Recognition Today (New York: Institute for Art and Urban art like Warhol's is necessarily parasitic upon the
by his peers seems to haveoccurred after all, since Resources, 1987). myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon
in the mid-sixties both Johns and Rauschenberg 44. Bill Manville, "Boris Lurie, March Gallery, the machinery of fame and publicity that markets
became owners of one or more paintings by Images of Life," The VillageVoice(June I6, I960). these myths; and it is not at all unlikely that these
Warhol. 45. Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,'' p. 57. myths that move us will be unintelligible (or al
39. For example, both Kap row and Robert Watts 46. It should be remembered that the identification of best starkly dated) to generations that follow.Thii
were already omitted from Sidney Janis's cru- the artist with the criminal is one of the topoi of is said not to denigrate Warhol's work but tc
cial exhibition The New Realists in 1962, and modernity since Baudelaire and that the identi- characterize it and the risks it runs-and, I admit
their absence was explained in Sidney Janis's fication of the two roles would have been familiar to register an advance protest against the adven
preface to the catalogue as due to "limitation of to Warhol from his readings of Jean Genet, to of a generation that will not be as moved b)
space." See Sidney Janis, "On the Theme of the whom he referred on severaloccasions. Of course, Warhol's beautiful, vulgar, heart breaking icom
Exhibition," The New Realists (New York: Sidney as has been pointed out before, the conflation of of Marilyn Monroe as I am.'' (Fried, "New Yor~
Janis Gallery, 1962),n.p. the artist's portrait with the police mug shot goes Letter,'' p. 57.)
40. Arango, "Underground Films." back to Duchamp, who had superimposed the 50. In Andy Warhol's index (Book) (New York: Ran
41. Richard Morphet, "Andy Warhol," in Warhol image of the artist over that of the "Most Wanted <lornHouse, 1967),n.p.
(London: Tate Gallery, 1971), p. 6. Another, Man" in his rectified Readymade Wanted$2,000 51. The argument was that some of the criminab
equally desperate attempt to detach Warhol 's Reward, 1923. Duchamp had included a replica of depicted in the Thirteen Most Wanted Men hac
iconographyfrom the reading of his work in order this Readymadein his Bofte-en-valisein 1941,and already received fair trial and that their image
to force it back into the discursive strictures of had also used the image quite appropriately for could therefore no longer be publicly displayed
(Greenbergian) modernism was made on the the poster of his first American retrospective at Previously (see Crone, Andy Warhol),this deci
occasion ofWarhol's exhibition at the Stable Gal- the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. Warhol sion was attributed to Governor Nelson A. Rocke
lery in I962 by Donald Judd: "The subject matter attended the opening of this exhibition and it is feller; however,recent research has placed this ir
is a cause for both blame and excessive praise. quite likely that the poster initiated Warhol's Thir- some doubt, suggesting that the decision wa
Actually it is not very interesting to think about teen Most WantedMen in 1964. Furthermore, as made by the fair's officials. Apparently the deci
60 the reasons, since it is easy to imagine Warhol's Patrick Smith has pointed out, Rauschenberg had sion to censor the second proposal by Warhol a:
 well caused a considerable strain on PhiIip indebtedto this essay in many ways,as well as to a turning the crew once again. Answering the
Johnson' relationshipwith Warhol:"'And then presentationby Stuckeyat the Warholsympo ium que lion of whethercollector had actuallycalled
he propo d 10 how a portrait of Robert Mose al the Dia Art Foundationin cw York in pril him and tried 10 return their paincingsafter Polk'
insteadof the Tliinee11Most \VantedMe11?'Yes, 19 8. tatement.. Warholsaid: "Yes, but I really do all
that'sright. .. incehe wa the boss of the World's 51. See John Coplan , "Andy Warholand Elvis Pres- the paintings. We were just being funny.If there
Fair,but I prohibitedthat.... Andy and I hnd a ley,"S1udiolntemational (February 1971),pp. 49- are any fake around I can tell. ... The modern
quarrelat that time, even though he is one of my 56. There are lightly conflictingopinion about way would be t do it like that, but [ do them all
fa oriteani ts.'" (Crone,A11dyWarhol,p. 30.) who made the deci ion lo Lretchthe canv on myself."See Blinderman, "Modem ' yth ': An
52. The first tep in this direction wa • as u ual lo tretcbers: Coplan sugge ls that. it wa Warhol Interview,"pp. 144--47;and Siegel, Arr111ords 2,
convinceWarholthat each work had 10 be igned who sent the tretchers prefabricatedto size from p. 21.
individuallyby him (no longer by his mother, for New York(which doesn't seem Lomake a lot of A similar attitude is di played by Warhol in a
example,a in the day of being a commercial en c); WolfgangSiano, in hi e ay "Die Kun I erie of photographsthat were u ed as eodpaper
anist), in pi1eof the fact that he had originally Andy Warhol' im Verhiihni zurOeffentlichkeit~ for Carter Ratcliff monograph, where Warh I,
consideredit to be crucial 10 abstain from igning (in Eri a Billeter,ed.,Andy \\~rho/ [Bern, 19711), taring into the camera. display the tools of
hi work:"Peoplejust won't buy thing that are suggests (without giving his source) that it was painting.
unsigned .... It's so silly.l really don't believe in originallyWarhol's intention to install the canva 59. Quoted in Gidal,Andy Warhol,p. 27.
signingmywork.Anyonecould do the thing lam roll coatinuou ly along the perimeter of the gal- According to bo1hTeeny Duchamp and John
doingand I don't feel they hould be igned" lery wall and that it wasthe deci ion of Irving Cage,Marcel Duchampwasapparentlyquite fond
(Vaughan.''Superpop.'' p. 7. Blumro divide lhe canvas roll into segments ond of Warhol' wo1k(wliii::hduo::·not reallycome a a
53. As early a 1961-62Claes Oldenburg created a tretch them a paintings. More recenlly, Gerard urprise); see David Bailey' interview with
programmaticfictionof a tore (The Store) as a Malangahas voiceddoubts that a roll of that ize TeenyDuchampand John Cage in his Andy War-
framingin titutionfor the production and recep- could have been creened continuou ly in the hol: Tra11scrip1.
tionof hi work. pace availablea1 the Factory al that time. 60. Henry Geldzahler, in Peter elz, ed., ''A ym-
54. Swenson"What ls Pop An?" p. 26. 58. See at Finkel tein, "In ide Andy Warhol,"Cav- po ium on Pop Art," Ans Magazi11e (April 1963)
55. This is not to uggest that Warhol knew about alier Magazine(September1966),p. 88. pp. 18ff.Ten year later Geldzahlerwouldaddress
Klein'sexhibition·quite the opposite. The paral- As late a 1971Warholwould till di pule the the question of the European uccess of Pop art
lels indicateto what extent the.sege lure origi- curator's and collector's insi tence on the tability once again, lightly toned d wn, but no le im-
nated in a universal condition. Howe er, one of artistic categories (and thereby weaken his periali t in attitude, and cenainly confusing the
houldnotethat Kleinhad an exhibitionat the Leo work' in titutional value): "I uppose you could cour e of historicaldevelopment:''And the quc -
CastelliGalleryin ew Yorkin April 1961and in call the paintings prints, but the material u ed for tion is why wouldGermany be particularly inter-
May-Juneof the same year at the Dwan Gallery the paintings wa canvas.... Anyone can do ested in this American phenomenonand the rea-
in Lo Angele , both titled Yvesle mo110hrome. them.' See Malanga, "Conversation with Andy on goe back. I think, 10 a remark that Gertrude
Warholwa ccnainly imere ted in Klein· work at Warhol,"p. 127.Evenafter he re umed painting in rein made quite early in the twentieth century
a later point in his life, when he acquired 1wo 1968 Warholdi seminated rumor that the new hich is that Americai the olde I country in t!ie
painting by Klein in the mid- eventie . For an paintings were in fact executed by his friend world because it entered the twentieth century
extensivedi cussion of Klein's project and his Brigid Polk. As she stated in Time magazine fir I and the point really is that the Germans in
own commentarieson thi exhibition, see an (October 17, 1969):''Andy? I've been doing ii all their po 11 ar boom got into a mood that America
Rosenthal,"A i red Le ilation: The Art of Yves for the la I year and a half, two year ndy 1 in in the twentiesand Andy cs entialize the
Klein,"in YvesKlein (Hou ton and ew York: do n't do art anymore. He' bored with it. I did American concentration on overabundance of
In titute for the Art , Rice Univer ity, and Aris all his new oup cans." commercialobject ." The fact i that the "mood
Publisher,1982),pp. 91-135. By contrast, since the mid-seventie . quite that America was in in the twenties" had been
56. For an excellent,detailed discus ion of Warhol's appropriately for both the general situation of a the mood that the European had been in in the
reOection on exhibition formats, see Charle F. return ID traditional form of easel painting and twentie , a well, and that mood had gener-
Stuckey, 'Andy Warhol' Painted Faces.' Art i11 hi o~n complacent opportuni m, Warhol ated Dadai m, the very ani tic legacy at the ori-
America(May 1980),pp. 102-11.My remark are recanted those rumors, not, however, without gin of Pop art.

61