POPism Read online

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  I asked Ivan for ideas, too, and at a certain point he said, “You know, people want to see you. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination.” That’s how I came to do the first Self-Portraits. Another time he said, “Why don’t you paint some cows, they’re so wonderfully pastoral and such a durable image in the history of the arts.” (Ivan talked like this.) I don’t know how “pastoral” he expected me to make them, but when he saw the huge cow heads—bright pink on a bright yellow background—that I was going to have made into rolls of wallpaper, he was shocked. But after a moment he exploded with: “They’re super-pastoral! They’re ridiculous! They’re blazingly bright and vulgar!” I mean, he loved those cows, and for my next show we papered all the walls in the gallery with them.

  It was on one of those evenings when I’d asked around ten or fifteen people for suggestions that finally one lady friend of mine asked me the right question: “Well, what do you love most?” That’s how I started painting money.

  There were times, though, when I didn’t follow advice—like when I told Henry I was going to quit painting comic strips and he didn’t think I should. Ivan had just shown me Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots and I thought, “Oh, why couldn’t I have thought of that?” Right then I decided that since Roy was doing comics so well, that I would just stop comics altogether and go in other directions where I could come out first—like quantity and repetition. Henry said to me, “Oh, but your comics are fabulous—they’re not ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than Roy’s—the world can use them both, they’re both very different.” Later on, though, Henry realized, “From the point of view of strategy and military installation, you were of course correct. That territory had been preempted.”

  Ivan got a bunch of us hooked on going out to the Fox Theater in Brooklyn to see Murray the K’s rock-and-roll shows—Martha and the Vandellas, Dion, Little Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, the Ronettes, Marvin Gaye, the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and everybody else you could imagine. Each group did their hit song of the week, only the headliner did more than one or two numbers. But even he was only on for about fifteen minutes. I can’t remember if there was a band or if they all lip-synced to their own records, which was actually the way the kids liked it best, with every sound exactly the way it was on the records—like if they were seeing, say, the Crystals, they’d expect to hear every little rattle in the Phil Spector production.

  The audience was mixed, black and white, but the black acts got most of the applause. Murray the K would be up on stage screaming his “Ahhh-vey!’s” and talking about the “submarine races” and doing all his radio routines with the “Dancing Girls” and the Murray the K dancers. The kids would be going crazy all around us and Ivan would be screaming along with them one minute and the next minute saying things like “It’s so naive! It’s full of spirit and high rhythm! All the messages are basic love and alienation! There’s no complex worldly wisdom! It’s just good straightforward stuff with tremendous force and conviction!” (As I said, that was the way he really talked.)

  We’d see the acts over and over. The Fox was a real movie palace, all velvet ropes and brass and marble fountains and purple and amber lights—sort of Moorish, with its high, dark lobby, always so cool in the summer—thousands of kids walking around, drinking sodas and smoking cigarettes. Ivan said to me years later, “Those days were very meaningful for me because I loved the music so much.”

  (Of course, like everybody else in the fall of ’61, we were also running down to the Peppermint Lounge on 45th Street. As Variety headlined, “NEW ‘TWIST’ IN CAFE SOCIETY—ADULTS NOW DIG JUVES’ NEW BEAT.”)

  “I’ve lost a fortune over the years, thanks to my lack of objectivity about you,” David Bourdon complained to me once. What he meant was that we were such good friends that he didn’t ever know what to think of my art, so he passed up the chance to buy a lot of my paintings in the early days when they were selling very cheap. David wasn’t one of the people who’d laughed at my work in the beginning. But on the other hand, he wasn’t one of the people who’d told me it was great, either.

  We’d met in the fifties through a mutual friend who did the Bonwit Teller windows. David wrote art criticism (this was before he worked for the Village Voice and long before he worked for Life), and we both collected art. Soon we were going around to galleries together.

  At the end of the fifties there was a year or so when I didn’t see him at all, and then one day he called up and said, “I just picked up a magazine and read that a new artist named Andy Warhol is painting soup cans. Is that you?” I asked him if he wanted to come over and see for himself if that was me. He got right on the subway in Brooklyn Heights, where he lived, and was at my house in less than an hour. I showed him my work and waited for him to say something, but he just stood there looking puzzled. Finally he said, “Well, put yourself in my position: I’ve only known you as a commercial artist, and now you’ve become a painter, and yet you’re still painting commercial art subjects. Frankly, I don’t know what to think.”

  At least he hadn’t laughed. I realized that I could always learn from David’s reactions how people in the art world who were sympathetic to my work but at the same time a little leery of it would react. I suppose it’s always good to have at least one intelligent skeptic for a friend—you can’t have only supporters around you, no matter how much you happen to agree with them.

  I’d call David excitedly every time I saw my name in some art column as if to say, “Now will you admit Pop is legitimate?” And he’d say, “Well, I still don’t know….” It was sort of a game, a regular routine.

  (David tells me that I used to be generally much friendlier, more open and ingenuous—right through to ’64. “You didn’t have that cool, eyeball-through-the-wall, spaced look that you developed later on.” But I didn’t need it then like I would later on.)

  When Ivan brought Leo Castelli up to my studio, the place was a mess, with the big canvases strewn around the living room—painting was a lot messier than drawing. Leo looked my stuff over, the Dick Tracys and the Nose Jobs in particular, and then said, “Well, it’s unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide.”

  Ivan had warned me that Leo was going to tell me, “The two of you in the same gallery…” so I can’t say I wasn’t prepared, but still I was really disappointed. They bought some small paintings to ease the blow and promised that even though they weren’t taking me on, they’d do everything they could to get me shown someplace else, and that seemed so nice it made me want to be with them even more.

  To be successful as an artist, you have to have your work shown in a good gallery for the same reason that, say, Dior never sold his originals from a counter in Woolworth’s. It’s a matter of marketing, among other things. If a guy has, say, a few thousand dollars to spend on a painting, he doesn’t wander along the street till he sees something lying around that “amuses” him. He wants to buy something that’s going to go up and up in value, and the only way that can happen is with a good gallery, one that looks out for the artist, promotes him, and sees to it that his work is shown in the right way to the right people. Because if the artist were to fade away, so would this guy’s investment. As usual, De put it better than anybody else: “Think of all those third-rate works in the basements of museums that you never see, and of all the works that were destroyed, sometimes by the artists themselves. What survives is what the taste of the ruling class of the period decrees should survive, and this usually turns out to be the most effective work done within the canons and terms of that class. Go back as far as the time before Giotto, the time of Cimabue, there were hundreds and hundreds of Italian painters around, but today most of us only recognize the names of a handful. People who care about painting may be able to name five, and scholars may know as many as fifteen, but the rest are all painters whose paintings are as dead as they are
.”

  So you need a good gallery so the “ruling class” will notice you and spread enough confidence in your future so collectors will buy you, whether for five hundred dollars or fifty thousand. No matter how good you are, if you’re not promoted right, you won’t be one of those remembered names.

  But there was more than that involved in why I wanted Castelli to take me on; it wasn’t only the business side of it. I was like a college kid wanting to get into a certain fraternity or a musician wanting to get on the same record label as his idol. Being part of Castelli’s stable was just something that I knew would make me happy, and even though he’d turned me down, I still had hope that he’d take me on later.

  Meanwhile, Ivan was doing a lot for me. He took slides and photographs of my paintings and sometimes he even carried the paintings over personally to other dealers. It was unusual for a dealer to be pushing a painter like this to other dealers, since they could always think, “If he’s so good, why don’t you take him?” Ivan would leave my paintings with them on a “trial basis”; the galleries would look at my things and say, “Crass! Outrageous!” and mean exactly that; then Ivan would come back and tell me kindly, “I’m afraid they don’t perceive the larger element in your work.”

  Henry Geldzahler was also pounding the pavements for me. He offered me to Sidney Janis, who refused. He begged Robert Elkon. (“I’m sure I’m making a big mistake,” he told Henry, “but I just can’t.”) He approached Eleanor Ward, who seemed interested but said she didn’t have room. Nobody, but nobody, would take me. Henry and I would talk every day on the phone about the progress he was making. This dragged out for over a year. He’d tell me, “They’re only resisting you because you’re such a natural. They’re afraid of you because the continuity between your commercial work and your fine art work is so obvious.” Still…

  I had the Green Stamps and the Campbell’s Soup Cans scattered in galleries all around New York, but my first show was out in Los Angeles, at Irving Blum’s gallery in 1962. (I didn’t go out for that first one but I went out for the one there the next year.) Irving was one of the first people Ivan had brought to my studio, and when he saw my Superman, he’d laughed. But it was different the next year; after he saw that Castelli had taken on Lichtenstein, he came back and offered me a show.

  In August ’62 I started doing silkscreens. The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect.

  With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face—the first Marilyns.

  Henry phoned one afternoon and said, “Rauschenberg just called to ask me about silkscreening, and I told him, ‘Why ask me—ask Andy.’ I said I’d arrange for him to come up to your place and have a look around.”

  Henry came up with Rauschenberg that same evening. The gallery owners Ileana and Michael Sonnabend were there, and David Bourdon, and a young Swedish artist was with them.

  Nothing to do with the art world was ever lost on David, who later recalled the scene for me in detail: “You got out the Marilyns, and then, because Rauschenberg hadn’t ever been to see your things, you showed him some of the early works, including the wide painting of green Coke bottles repeated hundreds of times across the canvas. It wasn’t even stretched, you didn’t have the room to stretch the big ones and usually you kept them rolled up. You showed him the repeated Coke bottles and told him you were going to crop the picture to make the bottles go right to the edge of the frame. He offered that the alternative was to leave a bare strip of canvas at the edge—if what you wanted was to show people that you meant exactly that many Coke bottles and not an infinite number.” Over the years I came to realize more and more that Rauschenberg was one of the few artists who were generous about new artists’ work. David went on, “He was very interested in the silkscreens and asked where you got them. Up to then he’d been transferring images by putting lighter fluid on magazine and newspaper illustrations and then rubbing it onto the paper—a very painstaking process. He was impressed when he saw that with a silkscreen you could get an image larger than life and use it over and over again.”

  What I remember about that visit was Bob’s leaving, saying he had to meet someone for dinner, and a little while later Henry and I decided to go to Saito, a Japanese restaurant on West 55th Street. When we walked in, who should be there but Bob, sitting with Jasper Johns. It was one of those awkward coincidences, seeing someone right after you’ve just said all your good-byes.

  Not too long after that, Henry brought Jasper by to see me. Jasper was very quiet. I showed him my things and that was that. Of course, I thought it was terrific that Rauschenberg and Johns had both come up; I admired them so much. After Jasper had gone, David Bourdon said, “Well, Henry was trying to be the helpful connection, but Jasper didn’t look too thrilled to be here.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Did you see his face when you dragged out your pictures? All anguish.”

  “Was it really?” I couldn’t tell. And anyway, you never know—sometimes people are just thinking about their own problems. But certainly, compared to Rauschenberg, who was generally so enthusiastic, Jasper seemed like a moody type of person.

  It was De who finally got Eleanor Ward to give me my first New York show, at her Stable Gallery. It was off Madison Avenue by then, but it had once occupied the most beautiful space in New York—on Seventh Avenue and 58th Street, right off Central Park South. It had been an actual stable where rich people kept their horses, and in the spring when the wetness was in the air, you could still smell the horse piss, because that’s a smell that never goes away. For stairs there was a ramp where the horses used to walk. To use a real stable space and call it the Stable Gallery was a very modern idea for the fifties, which generally was a time when people put on airs: usually they remodeled and redecorated, and things like the high school gym at prom time were “made over,” to camouflage what they basically were. But in the sixties, you’d go and play up what a thing really was, you’d leave it “as is.”

  Like, in ’67 when we helped open a discotheque called the Gymnasium; we called it that because it was in what had been a real gym, so we just left all the work-out equipment—the mats and barbells and things—lying around the dance floor. (And then, in ’68 when somebody else opened a discotheque called the Church in an old building on the West Side, they left all the religious fixtures exactly the way they were: even the confessional booths stayed—they just installed pay phones in them.) Playing up what things really were was very Pop, very sixties.

  Anyway, De arranged to meet Eleanor at my studio one evening in ’62. We sat around talking for an hour or so, having a few drinks, until De said bluntly, “Well, come on, Eleanor. The point of all this, after all, is are you going to give Andy a show or not, because he’s very good and he should have one.” She took out her wallet and looked through the bill compartment. Then she held up a two-dollar bill and said, “Andy, if you paint me this, I’ll give you a show.”

  After Eleanor had gone, De warned me to be careful of her because of how she’d treated Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. All he meant was that she hadn’t given them a whole lot of attention, not like she had her big guns like Noguchi. At the time when she was showing Rauschenberg’s work, he was actually the janitor at the gallery—she had him sweeping around with a broom!

  I was thrilled to finally have a show of my own in New York. Eleanor was an absolutely beautiful, aristocratic woman. She could easily have been a model or a movie star—she resembled Joan Crawford—but she loved art so much, she
just lived for it. She felt every artist with her gallery was one of her babies, and she called me her Andy Candy.

  My first New York show—in the fall of ’62—had the large Campbell’s Soup Cans, the painting of a hundred Coke bottles, some Do-It-Yourself paint-by-numbers paintings, the Red Elvis, the single Marilyns, and the large gold Marilyn.

  By the beginning of ’63 my work area at home was a total mess. The canvases were spread out all over the living room and the ink from the silkscreens was getting on everything. I knew I had to rent a studio to paint in. A friend named Don Schrader had come across an old firehouse on East 87th Street, a hook and ladder company that some guy had leased from the City of New York for about a hundred dollars a year, and the guy offered to sublet part of it to me. As soon as I moved my stuff over there, I began to look around for an assistant. I started asking friends if they knew of any art school-type kids who needed work.

  I’d met the surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford at a party that his sister Ruth Ford, the actress, who was married to Zachary Scott, gave at her apartment in the Dakota on Central Park West and 72nd Street, and Charles Henri and I began going around together to some of the underground movie screenings. He took me to a party that Marie Menken and her husband Willard Maas, underground filmmakers and poets, gave at their place in Brooklyn Heights at the foot of Montague Street.

  Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them “scholarly drunks”) and were involved with all the modern poets. Marie was one of the first to do a film with stop-time. She filmed lots of short movies, some with Willard, and she even did one on a day in my life.

  The Maases were warm and demonstrative and everybody loved to visit them. They lived at the very top of one of those nice, old, turreted apartment buildings. Their place had a big dining room where Willard and Marie would set out tons of food, and off that was a living room which everybody loved because it was in one of the round turrets. Then there was a rooftop garden, and behind that was a little cottage that they’d built as Marie’s own place; she and the dogs would hide away there, it was sort of her private domain.