POPism Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  POPism

  Andy Warhol, a painter and graphic artist, also produced a significant body of film work, including the famous Chelsea Girls. Equally well known in the late sixties and early seventies as resident in his studio, the Factory, Warhol died in New York in 1987.

  Pat Hackett worked closely with Andy Warhol for twenty years, co-authoring two books and a screenplay as well as serving as his diarist.

  ANDY WARHOL and PAT HACKETT

  POPism

  The Warhol Sixties

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1980

  Published in Penguin Modern Classics 2007

  1

  Copyright © Andy Warhol, 1980

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90526–6

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANDY WARHOL

  Andy Warhol’s Index

  a (a novel)

  Andy Warhol’s Exposures

  The Andy Warhol Diaries

  The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Because Steven M. L. Aronson is a great friend, he continued editing this book even after he left publishing. His wit, eccentric insights, and just plain discrimination were invaluable. Line by line, thread by thread, he shaped the scenes that were the sixties.

  A. W. and P. H.

  FOREWORD

  This is my personal view of the Pop phenomenon in New York in the 1960s. In writing it, Pat Hackett and I have reconstructed the decade, starting in ’60 when I began to paint my first Pop canvases. It’s a look back at what life was like then for my friends and me—at the paintings, movies, fashions, and music, at the superstars and the relationships that made up the scene at our Manhattan loft, the place known as the Factory.

  —Andy Warhol

  1960–1963

  If I’d gone ahead and died ten years ago, I’d probably be a cult figure today. By 1960, when Pop Art first came out in New York, the art scene here had so much going for it that even all the stiff European types had to finally admit we were a part of world culture. Abstract Expressionism had already become an institution, and then, in the last part of the fifties, Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg and others had begun to bring art back from abstraction and introspective stuff. Then Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.

  The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.

  One of the phenomenal things about the Pop painters is that they were already painting alike when they met. My friend Henry Geldzahler, curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum before he was appointed official culture czar of New York, once described the beginnings of Pop this way: “It was like a science fiction movie—you Pop artists in different parts of the city, unknown to each other, rising up out of the muck and staggering forward with your paintings in front of you.”

  The person I got my art training from was Emile de Antonio—when I first met De, I was a commercial artist. In the sixties De became known for his films on Nixon and McCarthy, but back in the fifties he was an artists’ agent. He connected artists with everything from neighborhood movie houses to department stores and huge corporations. But he only worked with friends; if De didn’t like you, he couldn’t be bothered.

  De was the first person I know of to see commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art, and he made the whole New York art world see it that way, too.

  In the fifties John Cage lived near De in the country, up in Pomona, and they’d gotten to be good friends. De produced a concert of John’s there, and that’s how he first met Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. “They were both of them on their hands and knees driving nails, building the set,” De told me once. “They were penniless then, living down on Pearl Street, and they’d take baths when they came out to the country because they had no shower at their place—just a little sink to take a whore’s bath in.”

  De got Jasper and Bob work doing windows at Tiffany’s for Gene Moore, and for those jobs, rather than use their real names, they both used the same pseudonym—“Matson Jones.”

  “Bob would have all these commercial ideas for the window displays, and some of them,” De once said, “could be very bad. But a really interesting one he had was to put stuff down on blueprint paper so you’d get a transfer of image. That was around ’55 when you couldn’t give away one of his paintings.” De laughed his hefty laugh, evidently recalling the wide range of Bob’s ideas. “His displays that were crude were beautiful, but the ones that were sort of ‘arty’ were terrible.” I remember De telling me all this so well, because right at that point he said, “I don’t know why you don’t become a painter, Andy—you’ve got more ideas than anybody around.”

  Even a few other people had told me that. I was never sure, though, what my place could be in the whole painting scene. De’s support and his open attitude gave me confidence.

  After I’d done my first canvases, De was the person I wanted to show them to. He could always see the value of something right off. He wouldn’t hedge with “Where does it come from?” or “Who did it?” He would just look at something and tell you exactly what he thought. He’d often stop by my place for drinks late in the afternoon—he lived right in the neighborhood—and we’d usually just gab while I showed him whatever commercial drawings or illustrations I was working on. I loved to listen to De talk. He spoke beautifully, in a deep, easy voice with every comma and period falling into place. (He’d once taught philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and literature at the City College of New York.) He made you feel somehow that if you listened to him long enough, you’d probably pick up everything you’d ever need to know in life. We’d both have a lot of whiskey out of some Limoges cups I had, my serving system at the time. De was a heavy drinker, but I had my fair share, too.

  I worked at home in those days. My house was on four floors, including
a living area in the basement where the kitchen was and where my mother lived with a lot of cats, all named Sam. (My mother had shown up one night at the apartment where I was living with a few suitcases and shopping bags, and she announced that she’d left Pennsylvania for good “to come live with my Andy.” I told her okay, she could stay, but just until I got a burglar alarm. I loved Mom, but frankly I thought she’d get tired of the city pretty quick and miss Pennsylvania and my brothers and their families. But as it turned out, she didn’t, and that’s when I decided to get this house uptown.) She had the downstairs part and I lived on the upper floors and worked on the parlor floor that was sort of schizo—half like a studio, full of drawings and art supplies, and half like a regular living room. I always kept the blinds drawn—the windows faced west and not much light came in anyway—and the walls were wood-paneled. There was a somber feeling about that room. I had some Victorian furniture mixed in with an old wooden carousel horse, a carnival punching machine, Tiffany lamps, a cigar store Indian, stuffed peacocks, and penny arcade machines.

  My drawings were stacked neatly, I was very organized about that. I’ve always been a person who’s semiorganized, constantly fighting the tendency to clutter, and there were all these little piles of things in bunches here and there that I hadn’t had a chance to sort through.

  At five o’clock one particular afternoon the doorbell rang and De came in and sat down. I poured Scotch for us, and then I went over to where two paintings I’d done, each about six feet high and three feet wide, were propped, facing the wall. I turned them around and placed them side by side against the wall and then I backed away to take a look at them myself. One of them was a Coke bottle with Abstract Expressionist hash marks halfway up the side. The second one was just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white. I didn’t say a thing to De. I didn’t have to—he knew what I wanted to know.

  “Well, look, Andy,” he said after staring at them for a couple of minutes. “One of these is a piece of shit, simply a little bit of everything. The other is remarkable—it’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.”

  That afternoon was an important one for me.

  I can’t even count the number of people after that day who when they saw my paintings burst out laughing. But De never thought Pop was a joke.

  As he was leaving he looked down at my feet and said, “When the hell are you going to get yourself a new pair of shoes? You’ve been wearing those that way all over town for a year. They’re crummy and creepy—your toes are sticking out.” I enjoyed De’s honesty a lot, but I didn’t get new shoes—it’d taken me too long to break that pair in. I took his advice about most other things, though.

  I used to go around to all the galleries in the late fifties, usually with a good friend of mine named Ted Carey. Ted and I both had wanted to have our portraits done by Fairfield Porter, and we’d thought that it would be cheaper if he painted us in tandem and then we could cut it apart and each take half. But when he’d posed us, he sat us so close together on the couch that we couldn’t slice a straight line between us and I’d had to buy Ted out. Anyway, Ted and I followed the art scene together, keeping up with what was going on.

  One afternoon Ted called up very excited to say he’d just seen a painting at the Leo Castelli Gallery that looked like a comic book and that I should go right over there and have a look myself because it was the same sort of thing I was doing.

  I met Ted later and we walked upstairs to the gallery. Ted was buying a Jasper Johns light bulb drawing for $475, so it was easy to maneuver ourselves into the back room, and there I saw what Ted had been telling me about—a painting of a man in a rocket ship with a girl in the background. I asked the guy who was showing us the stuff, “What’s that over there?” He said it was a painting by a young artist named Roy Lichtenstein. I asked him what he thought of it and he said, “I think it’s absolutely provocative, don’t you?” So I told him I did paintings that were similar and asked if he’d like to come up to my studio and look at them. We made an appointment for later that afternoon. His name was Ivan Karp.

  When Ivan came by, I had all my commercial art drawings stashed away out of sight. As long as he didn’t know anything about me, there was no sense bringing up my advertising background. I still had the two styles I was working in—the more lyrical painting with gestures and drips, and the hard style without the gestures. I liked to show both to people to goad them into commenting on the differences, because I still wasn’t sure if you could completely remove all the hand gesture from art and become noncommittal, anonymous. I knew that I definitely wanted to take away the commentary of the gestures—that’s why I had this routine of painting with rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long—songs like the one that was playing the day Ivan came by for the first time, “I Saw Linda Yesterday” by Dickey Lee. The music blasting cleared my head out and left me working on instinct alone. In fact, it wasn’t only rock and roll that I used that way—I’d also have the radio blasting opera, and the TV picture on (but not the sound)—and if all that didn’t clear enough out of my mind, I’d open a magazine, put it beside me, and half read an article while I painted. The works I was most satisfied with were the cold “no comment” paintings.

  Ivan was surprised that I hadn’t heard of Lichtenstein. But he wasn’t as surprised as I was, finding out that someone else was working with cartoon and commercial subjects, too!

  I had a very good rapport with Ivan right away. He was young, he had an “up” attitude to everything. He was sort of dancing around to the music.

  For the first fifteen minutes or so, he looked through my stuff tentatively. Then he dug in and began to sort it out. “These blunt, straightforward works are the only ones of any consequence. The others are all homage to Abstract Expressionism and are not.” He laughed and said, “Am I being arrogant?” We talked for a long time about this new subject matter of mine and he said he had intimations that something shocking was about to happen with it. I felt very good. Ivan had a way of making you feel good, so after he left, I sat down and wrapped the Little Nancy cartoon painting that he said was his favorite and sent it over to him at the gallery with a red bow on it.

  The next day he brought by some people who had been receptive to Lichtenstein’s things in the back room at Castelli’s. (Castelli wasn’t officially showing Lichtenstein yet—it was an informal sort of thing.)

  A few months later I asked Ivan how he’d come to have those first paintings of Roy’s in the gallery. He said that one day he was in the gallery lecturing to some college students on how you evaluate new artists’ works (how you decide whether or not you want to show tliem), when a nervous-looking young guy appeared in the doorway with his paintings—he was too shy to come in when he saw all the students there. Ivan had had to look at his paintings in the hallway. The students were naturally eager to see a real-life demonstration of what Ivan had just been explaining to them, and they naturally expected Ivan to be his usual confident, unflappable self. But when he took a look at Lichtenstein’s work, he got confused—they were “peculiar and aggressive,” very remote from anything he’d seen before, and he told Roy that he’d like to keep two paintings in back room racks to show to Leo Castelli.

  Ivan, I found out, had started working for Castelli in ’59. “I was working with Martha Jackson then,” he told me, “and Michael Sonnabend came to me one day and said, ‘Ivan, you’re much too good for this, come have lunch with me and some friends.’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything for lunch.’ And it was the Carlyle, which I’d never been to, with very thick tablecloths and napkins, and standoffish, slightly disdainful waiters, and I’ll do anything for a lunch like that, so I went to work for Leo Castelli, who was then still married to Ileana. [She later became Ileana Sonnabend.] With my first paycheck, I bought a new suit.”

  Leo had an art history background and a very good visual sense, but it was
Ivan who got him to be adventurous, to poke around new artists’ studios. Ivan was young and open to new possibilities; he wasn’t locked into any strict art philosophy.

  Ivan managed to be “light” without being frivolous. And he was so good with words. His whole manner was like a witty aside, and people loved it. His loose, personal style of art dealing went perfectly with the Pop Art style. Years later I figured out why he was such a successful art dealer—this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that. During the sixties he wrote five novels—that’s a lot of writing. Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there’s something they’d rather be doing gives them a certain freedom. Anyway, that’s my theory about Ivan’s success.

  In the late post–Abstract Expressionist days, the days right before Pop, there were only a few people in the art world who knew who was good, and the people who were good knew who else was good. It was all like private information; the art public hadn’t picked up on it yet. One incident especially brought home to me how low the general art world awareness was.

  De had met Frank Stella when Frank was an undergraduate at Princeton, and they had stayed good friends. (De reminded me that he’d once brought Frank to my house and I’d pointed at a small painting of his that he had with him and said, “I’ll take six of those.” I don’t remember that, but it must have happened, because I do have six of that painting.) One of Frank’s black paintings hung in De’s apartment on East 92nd Street. Around the corner from De lived a famous psychiatrist couple who I’ll call Hildegarde and Irwin. They were what’s known as straight eclectic Freudians. I tagged along with De to a few parties that they gave, and those parties were just remarkable: the guests who weren’t psychiatrists were all black people from the UN or UNESCO—“all do-gooding groups,” as De put it. He used to laugh and swear that over the years, at all of their parties combined, “I’ve met exactly one attractive woman; they’re a terrible-looking group of people.”