POPism Read online

  One afternoon I decided to stop by De’s, and just as I got to the door, he was opening it and telling Hildegarde and another woman, a friend of hers who lived down the street, “Get out! I never want to see you again!” I couldn’t figure out what was going on, because he and Hildegarde were very good friends, so I just walked on into the apartment as they walked on out. It was a beautiful snowy day; the windows were open and the snow was blowing in.

  De explained to me that it had all started with Hildegarde pointing over at the Stella on the wall and sneering, “What’s that?” De had told her, “It’s a painting by a friend of mine.” She and her friend had burst out laughing. “A painting???” Then Hildegarde had walked over and lifted it off the wall and poured a bottle of whiskey on it. Then she’d picked up some ether they sniff in the streets during Carnival in Brazil that she’d just brought back from there for De and she sprayed it all over the painting. The Stella was wiped out. De kept saying to me, but it was really to himself, “What can you do? You can’t hit a woman…”

  As De finished telling me the story, I suddenly saw the ruined Stella lying in a corner. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there with my galoshes dripping a puddle on the floor. The phone rang and, coincidentally, it was Frank. De told him the whole story. I couldn’t believe it when I heard De say that the woman with Hildegarde was actually married to a sculptor—I mean, it wasn’t like some cleaning lady had seen an all-black painting and tried to scrub it clean with steel wool! De hung up the phone and said that Frank had promised to make him another one “just like it,” but he wasn’t consoled, he knew that it’s not possible to make two paintings exactly alike.

  Then the doorbell rang and it was Irwin, sheepishly holding a Motherwell. He said, “Can we give you this, and some money?” De told him to get the fuck out.

  One evening De and I were having dinner at “21.” I was always sort of starry-eyed, I guess, asking him about the artists he knew, and this night he was describing for me “the greatest art exhibit” he’d ever been to. In the mid-fifties, Jasper Johns had called De up and very formally invited him to dinner “a week from Wednesday.” De and his wife at the time—I think it was his third—were on the kind of terms with Jasper where they’d call each other up and say what’re you doing tonight? so this “week from Wednesday” business was unusual, the kind of formal thing they never did. (“Jasper was reserved,” De said, “but he wasn’t that reserved!”) When the day came, De and his wife went down to the building on Pearl Street where Jasper and Bob Rauschenberg lived. In those days Pearl Street was so beautiful and narrow that if there was a car parked on it you couldn’t get by. Jasper’s loft usually had paint and materials strewn all over, De said, because he worked there, too, but this particular Wednesday it was immaculate, there wasn’t a sign of his everyday life visible, except that on the walls were all his early paintings—the big American Flag, the first Targets, the first Numbers. (For me, just thinking about what that must have been like was thrilling.) “I was knocked out,” De said. “You feel something like that with your insides; the words for it come later—dryness, austerity… And to think there were people who’d seen those pictures when they were first painted and had laughed, just like they’d laughed at Rauschenberg!”

  I’ve often wondered why people who could look at incredible new art and laugh at it bothered to involve themselves with art at all. And yet you’d run into so many of these types around the art scene.

  De always said that the hardest thing was to have a friend who was an artist whose work you just couldn’t respect: “You have to stop being friends with them, because it’s too hard to look at their work and think, ‘yuk.’” So everyone that De was friends with he respected. At a party of his once, I heard him answer the phone and tell someone, “Yes, I do mind, because I don’t like his politics.” Someone had wanted to bring Adlai Stevenson.

  As we sat at “21” (I remember I had the National Enquirer in my lap—I was fascinated by all the Thalidomide stories) we talked about the art around town—about Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine’s street exhibit at the Judson Gallery, about Oldenburg’s beach collages in a group show at the Martha Jackson, about Tom Wesselmann’s first exhibit of the Great American Nude series at the Tanager Gallery—but my mind kept going back to what De had just told me about that exhibition that Jasper had made for himself in his own loft. De was such good friends with both Jasper and Bob that I figured he could probably tell me something I’d been wanting to know for a long time: why didn’t they like me? Every time I saw them, they cut me dead. So when the waiter brought the brandy, I finally popped the question, and De said, “Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, I’ll lay it out for you. You’re too swish, and that upsets them.”

  I was embarrassed, but De didn’t stop. I’m sure he saw that my feelings were hurt, but I’d asked him a question and he was going to let me have the whole answer. “First, the post–Abstract Expressionist sensibility is, of course, a homosexual one, but these two guys wear three-button suits—they were in the army or navy or something! Second, you make them nervous because you collect paintings, and traditionally artists don’t buy the work of other artists, it just isn’t done. And third,” De concluded, “you’re a commercial artist, which really bugs them because when they do commercial art—windows and other jobs I find them—they do it just ‘to survive.’ They won’t even use their real names. Whereas you’ve won prizes! You’re famous for it!”

  It was perfectly true, what De said. I was well known as a commercial artist. I got a real kick out of seeing my name listed under “Fashion” in a novelty book called A Thousand New York Names and Where to Drop Them. But if you wanted to be considered a “serious” artist, you weren’t supposed to have anything to do with commercial art. De was the only person I knew then who could see past those old social distinctions to the art itself.

  • • •

  What De had just told me hurt a lot. When I’d asked him, “Why don’t they like me?” I’d naturally hoped to get off easier than this. When you ask a question like that, you always hope the person will convince you that you’re just paranoid. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I just said something stupid: “I know plenty of painters who are more swish than me.” And De said, “Yes, Andy, there are others who are more swish—and less talented—and still others who are less swish and just as talented, but the major painters try to look straight; you play up the swish—it’s like an armor with you.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because those were all things that I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I should want to change. There was nothing wrong with being a commercial artist and there was nothing wrong with collecting art that you admired. Other people could change their attitudes, but not me—I knew I was right. And as for the “swish” thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that—just watching the expressions on people’s faces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish. I certainly wasn’t a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme.

  The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two-fisted types who’d grab each other and say things like “I’ll knock your fucking teeth out” and “I’ll steal your girl.” In a way, Jackson Pollock had to die the way he did, crashing his car up, and even Barnett Newman, who was so elegant, always in a suit and monocle, was tough enough to get into politics when he made a kind of symbolic run for mayor of New York in the thirties. The toughness was part of a tradition, it went with their agonized, anguished art. They were always exploding and having fist fights about their work and their love lives. This went on all through the fifties when I was just new in town, doing what
ever jobs I could get in advertising and spending my nights at home drawing to meet deadlines or going out with a few friends.

  I often asked Larry Rivers, after we got to be friends, what it had really been like down there then. Larry’s painting style was unique—it wasn’t Abstract Expressionist and it wasn’t Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop—he rode around on a motorcycle and he had a sense of humor about himself as well as everybody else. I used to see him mostly at parties. I remember a very crowded opening at the Janis Gallery where we stood wedged in a corner at right angles to each other and I got Larry talking about the Cedar. I’d heard that when he was about to go on “The $64,000 Question” on TV, he passed the word around that if he won, you could find him at the Cedar bar, and if he lost, he’d head straight for the Five-Spot, where he played jazz saxophone. He did win—$49,000—and he went straight to the Cedar and bought drinks for around three hundred people.

  I asked Larry about Jackson Pollock. “Pollock? Socially, he was a real jerk,” Larry said. “Very unpleasant to be around. Very stupid. He was always at the Cedar on Tuesdays—that was the day he came into town to see his analyst—and he always got completely drunk, and he made a point of behaving badly to everyone. I knew him a little from the Hamptons. I used to play saxophone in the taverns out there and he’d drop in occasionally. He was the kind of drunk who’d insist you play ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby’ or some other songs the musicians thought were way beneath them, so you’d have to see if you could play it in some way that you wouldn’t be putting yourself down too much.… He was a star painter all right, but that’s no reason to pretend he was a pleasant person. Some people at the Cedar took him very seriously; they would announce what he was doing every single second—‘There’s Jackson!’ or ‘Jackson just went to the John!’

  “I’ll tell you what kind of guy he was. He would go over to a black person and say, ‘How do you like your skin color?’ or he’d ask a homosexual, ‘Sucked any cocks lately?’ He’d walk over to me and make shooting-up gestures on his arm because he knew I was playing around with heroin then. And he could be really babyish, too. I remember he once went over to Milton Resnick and said, ‘You de Kooning imitator!’ and Resnick said, ‘Step outside.’ Really.” Larry laughed. “You have to have known these people to believe the things they’d fight over.” I could tell from Larry’s smile that he still had a lot of affection for that whole scene.

  “What about the other painters?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “Franz Kline would certainly be at the Cedar every night. He was one of those people who always got there before you did and was still there after you left. While he was talking to you, he had this way of turning to someone else as you were leaving, and you got the feeling of automatic continuity—sort of, ‘So long… So this guy comes over to me and…’ and while you may have flinched at his indiscriminate friendliness, he did have the virtue of smiling and wanting to talk all the time. There were always great discussions going on, and there was always some guy pulling out his poem and reading it to you. It was a very heavy scene.” Larry sighed. “You wouldn’t have liked it at all, Andy.”

  He was right. It was exactly the kind of atmosphere I’d pay to get out of. But it was fascinating to hear about, especially from Larry.

  The crowd at the opening had thinned to the point where we could move out of our corner. “You didn’t go to the Cedar ‘to see the stars,’ though,” Larry added. “Oh, sure, you may have liked being in their aura, but what you came back for night after night was to see your friends… Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery…”

  The art world sure was different in those days. I tried to imagine myself in a bar striding over to, say, Roy Lichtenstein and asking him to “step outside” because I’d heard he’d insulted my soup cans. I mean, how corny. I was glad those slug-it-out routines had been retired—they weren’t my style, let alone my capability.

  Larry had mentioned that Pollock came in from the country every Tuesday. That was part of the big out-of-the-city-and-into-the-country trend that the Abstract Expressionist painters had started in the late fifties when they were beginning to make money and could afford country places. Right in the middle of the twentieth century, artists were still following the tradition of wanting to get out there alone in the woods and do their stuff. Even Larry had moved to Southampton in ’53—and stayed out there for five years. The tradition was really ingrained. But the sixties changed all that back again—from country to city.

  One of the first people Ivan brought by to see me that July was a new young “curatorial-assistant-with-no-specific-duties” at the Met. Henry Geldzahler had grown up in Manhattan, gone to Yale and then to grad school at Harvard. Before coming back to New York from Cambridge, he’d gone to see Ivan, who had a gallery that summer in Provincetown. “I’m about to go back to New York,” he announced, “and I want you to tell me who I should meet, what I should do, what I should say, how I should act, speak, dress, think, carry on…” Ivan gave him a thirty-minute rundown and once they were both back in New York, they started going around together to all the artists’ studios. They were both avid to pick up new art before it got to the galleries—they’d drop by artists’ studios and lofts to catch a look at works before they were even finished. Just days after Ivan came up to my place for the first time, he discovered Jim Rosenquist, and Henry had taken him down to see Tom Wesselmann.

  When Henry and Ivan came in, I could see Henry doing an instant appraisal of every single thing in the room. He scanned all the things I collected—from the American folk pieces to the Carmen Miranda platform shoe (four inches long with a five-inch heel) that I’d bought at an auction of her effects. Almost as quickly as a computer could put the information together, he said, “We have paintings by Florine Stettheimer in storage at the Met. If you want to come over there tomorrow, I’ll show them to you.” I was thrilled. Anyone who’d know just from glancing around that one room of mine that I loved Florine Stettheimer had to be brilliant. I could see that Henry was going to be a lot of fun. (Florine Stettheimer was a wealthy primitive painter, a friend of Marcel Duchamp’s, who’d had a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, and her sister Carrie had made some fabulous dollhouses that I loved at the Museum of the City of New York.)

  Henry was a scholar who understood the past, but he also understood how to use the past to look at the future. Right away we became five-hours-a-day-on-the-phone-see-you-for-lunch-quick-turn-on-the-“Tonight-Show” friends.

  Of course, it’s easy for a young person to support new ideas. He comes onto the scene fresh. He doesn’t have any positions to defend or modify, no big time or money invested. He can be a brat, say whatever he pleases, support whatever and whoever he wants to without having to think, “Will they ever invite me to dinner again?” or “Will this conflict with that letter I wrote to Art Forum three years ago?” In the last half of ’60 Henry and I were both, in our very different ways, coming fresh into and up against the intrigues and strategies of the New York art scene, so that was good for at least four hours a day on the phone right there.

  Henry liked all the rock and roll I kept playing while I painted. He told me once, “I picked up a new attitude toward the media from you—not being selective, just letting everything in at once.” And over the years I picked up a lot from Henry; I often asked him for advice. He liked to compare our relationship to ones between the Renaissance painters and the scholars of mythology or antiquity or Christian history who doled out the ideas for their subjects.

  I was never embarrassed about asking someone, literally, “What should I paint?” because Pop comes from the outside, and how is asking someone for ideas any different from looking for them in a magazine? Henry understood that, but some people had contempt for you when you asked their advice—they didn’t want to know anything about how you worked, they wanted you to keep your mystique so they could adore you without being embarrassed by specifics.

>   Take my commercial drawings. By the time Ivan introduced me to Henry, I was keeping them absolutely buried in another part of the house because one of the people Ivan had brought by before had remembered me from my commercial art days and asked to see some drawings. As soon as I showed them to him, his whole attitude toward me changed. I could actually see him changing his mind about my paintings, so from then on I decided to have a firm no-show policy about the drawings. Even with Henry, it was a couple of months before I was secure enough about his mentality to show them to him. Henry knew that the only thing that counted was what showed up on canvas—not where the idea came from or what you were doing before you painted it. He understood my style, he had a Pop attitude himself. So I was especially never embarrassed about asking him for ideas. (That kind of thing would go on for weeks whenever I started a new project—asking everyone I was with what they thought I should do. I still do it. That’s one thing that has never changed; I hear one word, or maybe misunderstand somebody, and that puts me on to a good idea of my own. The object is just to keep people talking, because sooner or later a word gets dropped that throws me on a different train of thought.)

  It was Henry who gave me the idea to start the Death and Disaster series. We were having lunch one day in the summer at Serendipity on East 60th Street and he laid the Daily News out on the table. The headline was “129 DIE IN JET.” And that’s what started me on the death series—the Car Crashes, the Disasters, the Electric Chairs….

  (Whenever I look back at that front page, I’m struck by the date—June 4, 1962. Six years—to the date—later, my own disaster was the front-page headline: “ARTIST SHOT.”)