WARHOLIANA

Guy Minnebach, the Sherlock Holmes of Warhol vinyl, has made yet another new discovery: A 1958 cover for Archie Bleyer’s Cadence records, commissioned from Warhol via the ad agency Hockaday Associates, for an album by Colombian pianist Al Escobar and his Afro-Cuban orchestra. To prove it's by Warhol (he was working in a shared style), Minnebach can cite several known drawings that pretty clearly relate to the cover. (And a factoid I can contribute: Warhol and especially his mother were close to a Hockaday executive named Joe Giordano, who lived near them; Warhol's commercial success very often involved a social connection.)

As Minnebach explains in his post, Warhol's cover is for one of a series of twelve albums that share a peculiar design conceit: They all feature a kind of full-blown sales-pitch, in big letters under the cover image. But what's most exciting about the discovery, for me, is that it signals a coming failure for Warhol, rather than a current success. Of the twelve covers in the series, all but the ones by Warhol and one other illustrator are built around photos.

“I think no matter how charming, whimsical, elegant, beautiful, whatever the drawing is, it just did not have the impact of a photograph,” recalled an art director from that era. And Warhol remembered the direct effect that had, on him and his ilk: “Commercial art at that time was so hard because photography had really taken over, and all of the illustrators were going out of business really fast.”

It’s my pal Andy’s birthday, today … but it’s also the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, as it was on every one of Andy’s birthdays once he turned 17.

In 1963, as he perfected his “Death and Disaster” series, he seems to have included today’s image of an atomic explosion. (The date is a guess, since there’s zero documentation of the work, which was first exhibited in 1967.)

But in celebration of his birthday, I thought I’d check my files to see what he might have been up to on August 6, in any number of years.

My favorite find is the receipt from 1970 that is my second image: It shows him treating himself to a deluxe pair of boots — for $875, in today’s dollars — in what must have been a dark red (“lambrusco”) color.

Almost a decade earlier, in 1962, his datebook shows him celebrating his birthday with lunch near Wall Street at Kabuki, one of the new Japanese restaurants he favored that dared to serve raw fish, “an interesting experience,” according to Kabuki’s review in the Times. (In the 1950s and ‘60s, Andy was a daring gourmet who only faked a preference for Campbell’s soup.) He splurged to the tune of $25, when a normal lunch there cost one fifth that. For dinner, he went out with his close friend Emile de Antonio, the far-left documentarian, and only spent $16.

In 1968, his birthday mail included something less cheerful: A letter from his health insurance company saying they couldn’t cover his hospital bills until he sent them the paperwork. He’d only been home for a week, and was still recovering from the bullet wound that, two months before, had very nearly killed him.

It must have been one of his worst birthdays.

This is a little-known drawing by Andy Warhol, probably from early in 1962 or late 1961. (It was on display years ago at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.) I think it's THE crucial hinge between the important homoerotic fine art Warhol did in the 1950s (which got reliably ignored or lambasted) and the Pop works that made him famous in the '60s, whose gay references got sublimated into their camp content — a sublimation that Warhol made explicit, for maybe the only time, in this drawing.

I discuss this drawing, and the relationship in general between Warhol's 50s work and his later Pop and Business Art, in my Art Angle podcast for Artnet.com.

This is a frame from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 “Passion of Joan of Arc.” I got my latest look at the film in a gorgeous room-filling projection in “The Madness of Crowds,” yet another brilliant group show at Carriage Trade gallery in New York.

I was more blown away than ever by Dreyer’s film, and especially by his use of almost-static close ups. For a Warholian like me, they immediately made me think of Warhol’s Screen Tests, but I admit that the connection seemed unlikely.

Then I checked my vast Warhol database … and found an obscure text where the owner of Outlines gallery in Pittsburgh, a vital hangout for Warhol in the 1940s, said that she did indeed show the Dreyer, as part of her wildly ambitious program of screenings.

Yesterday was the 36th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s passing, at 58, and I thought it right to post this poignant photo by Peter Bellamy, which catches Warhol taking one of his very last limo rides.

One of the 472 prints of sunsets, each in its own colorway, that Warhol used to decorate 472 rooms in Philip Johnson’s groovy new Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis in 1972.

This coming Sunday, Aug. 6, will be the 95th anniversary of his birth, so a little commemoration seems in order — and I thought an obscure image like this might make a better “gift” to the master than trotting out yet another Soup Can or Marilyn. There wasn’t much that Warhol hated more than artistic cliché.

That same date of Aug. 6 marks the 78th anniversary of the destruction by A-bomb of Hiroshima, much in the news right now because of the recent biopic of Oppenheimer, father of that bomb. And I always imagine how Warhol must have felt, in 1945 on the day he turned seventeen, to discover that from then on any birthday celebration would have to compete with talk and images of the worst death and destruction the world had ever seen.

I can’t help but feel that the glowing sunset in this print also hints at the well-known glow of nuclear detonation. If that seems far fetched, it’s worth noting that Warhol’s chipper hotel prints have their roots in a never-finished “religious” film of sunsets he was commissioned to do for a never-built chapel planned by the de Menils as the Vatican pavilion at a Texas world’s fair.

On a recent trip to London, I visited the show of Warhol fabrics and garments at the Fashion and Textile Museum.

The exhibition included this dress, made from a fabric designed by Warhol in the mid-1950s, and it came with a wall-text commenting on how the pattern must have been inspired by displays of mounted butterflies from the 18th or 19th centuries, and how that pattern seems to have been "a particularly happy expression of well-being for Warhol."

But I'd bet anything that the pattern was based on pinned butterflies that Warhol would have seen much more recently, in the 1930s or '40s in Pittsburgh in the Carnegie museum's natural history displays. And I think that pattern may just have had an almost political meaning for him.

The curator of those displays was an eminent White Russian lepidopterist named Andrey Avinoff, who was possibly the most openly gay man in Pittsburgh, caricatured as a "butterfly" in a local newspaper.

So I think Warhol's butterfly pattern invoked that history, and was one of many examples of a gay man taking on mainstream society's homophobic stereotypes and slurs, as a way of resisting them.

I'd love to read a serious study of how mid-century gay culture used feminine signifiers — butterflies, flowers, pastel pinks, curlicued calligraphy — to assert itself in, and against, a society that billed gay men as fluttering pansies. Warhol would have to be Exhibit A.

This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the vitally important Warhol vs. Goldsmith copyright case -- which will affect the entire future of appropriation art, and its past as well if museums are made to take down all Warhols whose images weren’t licensed! I weighed in on the issues a while back in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/arts/design/warhol-copyright-appeals-court.html

And today I live-Tweeted as I listened to the audio from the court.

Here are my dozens of Tweets:

SCOTUS just started hearing the @warholfdn vs. @Goldsmithphoto case, on whether appropriation artists (Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Sturtevant, Koons and their heirs) can invoke fair use … so their art can even exist!

Rep’ing the @warholfdn is Roman Martinez of @lathamwatkins, repping @Goldsmithphoto is Lisa S. Blatt of @ArnoldPorter; then Yaira Dubin of @TheJusticeDept weighing in for US Solicitor General

Martinez for @warholfdn sez that precedent allows TRANSFORMATION as crucial test for fair use.

Martinez  for @warholfdn makes clear that TONS of great art is at stake in the case

A justice does point out that the whole issue of "derivative works" (eg movies licensed fr novels) is vexed -- as it truly is. Should probly be covered by fair use!

This is Andy Warhol himself posing as “The Shadow,” the hero from old radio dramas, for his 1981 print series called “Myths.”

Tomorrow, Aug. 6, is my hero’s birthday—he’d have been 94—so what better way to celebrate him than by showing what I think is his greatest self-portrait. It stands for so much that’s great about his art: obscurity paired with the evident; self-display and withdrawal; nostalgia and the fiercely contemporary.

But when I saw it last week in “The Double,” the new thematic show at the National Gallery that I’ve been asked to review for next weekend’s New York Times, I realized that the self-portrait might also stand for Warhol’s fierce intelligence and art-historical savvy, such as is too rarely recognized.

In an endlessly repeated tale, Pliny the Elder dated the origin of art to the early days of ancient Greece, when a Corinthian woman traced the shadow of a departing lover onto her wall so as to keep him present after he left.

Could Warhol have known the tale, or one of the endless Old Master paintings and prints that illustrated it? Could he not, and make that self-portrait?

If he did, it means that, with his usual well-concealed hubris, he was claiming art’s origins, or at least its rebirth, for himself.

This is Warhol’s 1964 “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn.” There's been wall-to-wall coverage of the upcoming "$200M" Christie's sale of the canvas — but did ANYONE mention that it's just a retread of the '62 original? That makes it Warhol's comment on originality, not an example of it! Or it's his early, "original" example of business art. Before long, he'd left object-making behind for unsalable underground film.

And has any reporter at all mentioned that by 1966 Warhol was calling these later retreads of his first Pop works "dead paintings"? He knew they didn't hold up as traditional examples of innovation and originality -- he meant for them to do a different kind of conceptual work, which in part involved questioning those very concepts.

(As it happens, this  image — in an early Warhol poster — lived on the wall of my childhood bathroom, which means that I spent considerable time sitting and looking at it. I was obsessed with figuring out the darker green shape on the right side of Marilyn's neck, which I now know was part of her collar in the original photo.)

Thisis the kind of “Happy Bug Day” print that Andy Warhol showed — and sold — in Aspen sometime around Christmas of 1957, at the Four Seasons Club in Aspen that turns out to have hosted Warhol’s very first exhibition outside of New York, long before the 1962 Ferus show in L.A. that usually gets boasting rights for that.

In my Warhol bio, I had assumed that Warhol got the show, organized by Aspen clothes-and-antiques dealer Patricia Moore, because of the coverage his camp illustrations had got in Life magazine in late January of 1957. Recent digging by Aspen writer Andrew Travers shows that in fact the exhibition was already open by December of 1956.

“Happy Bug Day” was the only work that sold, according to a sheepish letter from Moore to Warhol, but it sold to Aspen doyenne Elizabeth Paepcke, whose husband Walter, head of the Container Corporation of American, was famous for supporting contemporary artists and for involving them in his ad campaigns. And sure enough, by 1964, Warhol was doing an ad for him in the new Pop Art style.

This image shows Warhol’s 1978 portfolio of portraits of Muhammad Ali, which I was looking at recently in the (free) show of Warhol prints, from the Bank of America Collection, that’s up for another week at the venerable National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York.

A lot of Warhol’s athlete portraits are pretty predictable and thin, but Ali’s strike me as much more subtle. Rather than portraying the boxer as a bruiser or a clown — both personas the media had often dressed him in — Warhol portrays him, accurately, as smart and sensitive, even as vulnerable. One image almost depicts him as The Thinker; the close-up on Ali’s hand makes its gesture seem more shy and guarded than threatening.

Fab 5 Freddy once told me that, as a Black artist, he identified with the outsider status that his friend Warhol had as a gay man. I think Warhol himself recognized that both he and Ali had always hidden behind goofy personas that they used to conceal their true talent and brains. And their pains.

This a 1980 Polaroid from the show of Andy Warhol photos at Fotografiska in New York, from the collection of Jim Hedges and Jack Shainman, which I visited again this week – and noticed something new. (That happens, with Warhol…)

The copyright symbol embossed at the bottom edge of this Polaroid turns his first name into “Candy” — as he was already signing himself soon after arriving in New York. (See my other image, from the illustration for an August 1950 feature in Seventeen.)

One of Andy Warhol’s “Nosepicker” paintings, finished in 1949, just before he graduated from college, paired with one of his “Oxidations” from 1978, just when he was fishing around for a new way forward in his “personal” art making. 
I want to share something pointed out to me by Kye Benjamin Stone, a student in Bruce Jenkins’s Warhol class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stone noticed that the Nosepickers, from the very start of Warhol’s career, are already preoccupied with the bodily “products” – secretions – that he explores again late in his career when he urinates and masturbates onto canvases to make his “Oxidation” and “Cum” paintings. And I’ll add that he explored the same territory around 1962, in less colorful pissed-on canvases that have only barely survived. (Luckily?)
It looks as though Warhol resorts to his body for “art supplies” at all three of these crucial junctures in his career, when he’s making a special effort to establish or renew his avant-garde bona fides. 
As a gay man who came of age in the homophobic 1940s, his body, and what he does with it, has special status for him as a marker of cultural transgression.
(Note the girlish mary janes that he’s wearing in the nude self-portrait — more shocking to his classmates, I’d bet, than the finger up his nose. Note also the nod to Abstract Expressonism in both the early and late paintings, as though he’s recognizing that Jackson Pollock is also interested in the stuff that drips from his … brush.) (Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.) For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

WARHOL CONTEMPLATES HIS OWN PRICE TAGS

This is my favorite image from the September show of Warhol photos at Fotografiska in New York.

Warhol is so (in)famous for his skills as an artist-entrepreneur (or maker of Business Art?) that critics often neglect his discomfort with the art market, or at least his awareness of the problems the avant-garde had always seen in art sales.

“I guess I’m a commercial artist. I guess that’s the score,” he mourned, on contemplating the fact that he’d been paid to turn out the Last Suppers that were his final works.

But even Warhol’s earliest Pop pieces pushed back against the market: Some of his shows barely sold, and the paintings were mostly not made to sell — or might even have been made not to sell. Were there really that many buyers for diptychs combining car-crash photos and radical monochromes? In ‘66, he gets a show at Castelli, New York’s most prestigious marketplace for high art, and what does he give his dealer to sell?: Mylar balloons and wallpaper.

The signage that he caught in this photo, which reads "Prices as marked,” clearly applies to the image itself — to all Warhol’s images — as much as to the clothes captured in it. And maybe more than in any of his other “sewn photos,” the sewing in this one relates closely to the content. Warhol links the stitched, reproduced and reproducible commodities of his four photographic prints to the stitched and mass-produced clothes that get further multiplied in his repeating imagery.

It’s up to the viewer to decide whether the clothes or the photos are more likely to deliver the goods.

Warhol hated when people called him a social climber, so today, on his 93rd birthday, I’ll treat him to a favorite quote of mine, by his (mostly) good friend Henry Geldzahler:

HUGO GELLERT’S SILKSCREENS REVEAL ANDY WARHOL’S ROOTS

My image shows two pages from Hugo Gellert’s illustrated book of speeches by Henry Wallace, a far-left Democrat who was VP of the United States in the 1940s. I’m not actually showing it in praise of Gellert — although he’s a very interesting artist — but for what it tells us about Andy Warhol, and the silkscreening he made famous later.

Gellert’s silkscreened illustrations, from 1943 — not long before Warhol went to art school — demonstrate how silkscreening had a political flavor once the art world took it over from industry. It was meant to speak to the Common Man, as (sort of) was Warhol’s Pop Art two decades later.

In 1948, when he was in college, Warhol signed a petition in favor of Wallace’s presidential bid as head of the Progressive Party, which supported such radical ideas as desegregated schools, equality for women and blacks and government health insurance.

I believe Warhol’s silkscreens always kept a whiff of such politics. The image below shows that they even rhyme, at least a touch, with Gellert’s style.

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.