Andy Warhol Documentary Film Part 1 of 2

Andy a Canadian government spokesman

said that your art could not be

described as original sculpture would

you agree with that uh yes why do you

agree well because it's not

original you have just then copied a

common item yes but why have you

bothered to do that why not create

something new uh because it's easier to

do well isn't this sort of a joke then

that you're playing on the public uh no

it gives me something to

do he was the most American of artists

and the most artistic of

Americans so American in fact that he is

virtually invisible to

us we look at him and knowing little of

ourselves learn little of Warhol because

he was us and all our innocence ambition

and

insecurity a hardworking Democrat a

churchgoer and businessman a social

climber Empire Builder and inveterate

consumer in warhall the Simplicity of a

typical American citizen and the

Simplicity of artistic genius are so

intermingled that we cannot distinguish

them nor properly credit either his

americanness or his

genius Dave hickey

[Music]

I think he's a touchdown of the culture

and I mean more than painting and art

history I think he's a touchdown of the

culture we live in a touchdown for the

entire culture of the post-war period I

think he is probably the most important

artist of the second half of the 20th

century maybe the most important artist

of the 20th century

if we needed to find a visual form to

just distill what it's like to have been

alive in the last 50 years the image

would come somewhere from the Corpus of

Andy

[Music]

Warhol there is no way that

anybody who is much younger than I am

can understand how profoundly different

the world before Andy and after Andy

looked you know a supermarket before

Andy looked one way a supermarket after

Andy looked another way he literally

changed the world you know and you

change the world by changing what people

look at the priorities that they place

on it and so he changed the world and

the cultural consequences of that are

really

profound he wanted it so much to be

successful he didn't want to be second

raid or an underling in any way and he

didn't want to be first class or top

rank either he wanted to be a superstar

he wanted to do a big Nova that would o

Eclipse everything that's all he could

settle for if he was going to have any

happen his life and then and it did

happen but the impact overall was what

was important and he would be willing to

live an ordinary life as a person if he

could have the experience of doing this

impact on the culture and it's not

showing everybody that I'm important

type

stuff it's like Zeus throwing a

lightning bolt it's the being able to

throw the lightning

bolt not being Zeus but being someone

who has the power to throw

lightning that was the only thing that

would satisfy Andy and it

happened I think the reason why he has

such staying power and there isn't a

proper understanding of him cuz he was

so complex yet he said he was so simple

but see that was that was another Dodge

to really uh CU he's probably one of the

most complex people I've ever

met I think his greatest gift was

immediacy making you see in an

unmediated way just right there in front

of you with kind of absolute frontal

Clarity I think that he had that he had

a feeling for it and a grasp of it that

was unique

in addition to that curiously enough

despite the sort of a phasic I never had

an idea I'm just Andy world that sort of

numbed out look and claim I would say

that Andy was one of the very impressive

artists of

ideas his art always suggests something

about life that can be formulated in

philosophic

terms and I think he knew that

I think that just as he got the force of

personality by withdrawing into his

shyness and his personality so he got

the force of ideas by withdrawing from

any active assertion of ideas and

letting them happen through the medium

of his art through that Medium of that

immediacy

[Music]

so tell us about the film what's the

film it's called blonde and a bum trip

are there any marel what's it about it's

about

um a naive young

lady who goes to Hollywood to make it

big one narrative would be the Margery

Morning Star narrative I think that

margorie morning star was one of his

early self images he must have signed

certain works Andy morning Stars up it's

basically a girl from nowhere moving to

somewhere the star narrative A Star is

Born I think that's the big Narrative of

Andy's

[Music]

life from the very start he was not who

most people thought he was or what most

people thought an artist should

be born on the eve of the Great

Depression a child of enormous

transformation and change at once

strangely Afflicted and strangely

blessed he would come of age as America

itself finished coming of age in the

decades following the second world war

as one of the greatest transformations

in the history of modern culture took

the World by

storm he was a ethnic polish with a bad

nose and Sai his dance and blotches Etc

who was gay and really really Swift and

had a freaky mother and was bad with

people was probably dyslexic a little

autistic maybe had Asperger syndrome or

whatever one of those things is yeah and

it would be really nice to become Lana

Turner and art let him do

that it's hard to go from further down

to further up in uh contemporary

culture I think the thing about Andy and

a lot of people in America who rise to

the top and become very famous

is that Andy had no idea of bis life

they never saw it he never lived it but

that's I think what he imagined you know

I mean that was the goal was like normal

life never anything normal about Randy

from the first to the last you know he's

in the ghetto he's hanging out with

Liza he's taking nude pictures of drag

queens you know he's being shot by

Valerie

well there's the fact that he was this

poor boy from an immigrant family from a

very deprived immigrant family his

father had died when he was young

working against every disadvantage who

was carried to very considerable success

on the strength of his talent alone

that's in itself very interesting we say

it should happen a lot it doesn't always

happen but it happened to him

once said everyone will be famous for 15

minutes by the 60s he become one of the

most influential artists of his day

described by some as a genius for his

work everything from a charlatan to a

Visionary he was America's high priest

of Pop I mean Andy understood that

democracy and Commercial culture were

inextricable I think I mean Andy's

primary transgression was his primary

gift is that he was okay with Commerce

and by just saying yes there it's what I

do you know World Chang the

world in three astonishing years at the

dawn of the 1960s Andy Warhol would turn

the art world upside down and take

American culture by

storm radically revising the meaning of

Art and our sense of what a painting

could be he would take the idea of Art

in the age of mechanical reproduction to

its logical extreme permanently

breaching the wall dividing Fine Art and

comic

grasping as no one before or since the

function of Fame in a mass Society he

would force us to confront and re

Envision the world we live in

permanently transforming the way we see

the world around

us along the way he would transform

himself rising from the humblest of

backgrounds to become the most famous

and famously controversial artist of his

generation at once fulfilling the

promise of the American dream and at the

same time redefining it Reinventing it

and calling it into

[Music]

question there's no way to really Plum

Andy's instinctive

selfishness in other words Andy did

nothing but try to make the world safe

for Andy but in order to do that he had

to exercise such a profound cultural

paradigm shift that uh you know there's

no end I know there no end of the people

that I know who were empowered and given

permission and socialized you know on on

the occasion of warhol's production you

know you know I mean he issued this sort

of Nationwide permission that uh really

freed America from World War II in my in

my mind I mean he really marks the

beginning of the postwar

period Andy's idea that we all should be

on TV that we all should be famous for

15 minutes all of this is just

outrageous you know what I mean I mean

it is anti-elitist

in the extreme but it's also you know a

new

world you know I mean the PO world was a

new world all of a sudden you could see

the idea that America come together you

know what I mean that there was that

promise there that vision of some kind

of synthesis it's straight people and

queer people and rich people and poor

people and movie people and literary

people and you know I mean and it was

all coming

together I think that warhol's desire to

film everything or to tape everything or

to redact or reduce everything to some

kind of artistic embodiment was a form

of

transubstantiation when I think his

philosophy of Art and of life was to

take a possibly unbearable and chaotic

reality and pass it through the looking

glass of some

medium and ideally subject those data to

as little manipulation as possible maybe

not even be there behind the camera or

not even use one's hand to essentially

silk screen reality and make it

new and I think all of his his search

for different media TV um movies books

paintings sculpture performance was an

attempt to play again and again this

trick of trans substantiating garbage

and making it valuable

it is a fascinating fact that Andy was

one of the visual artists one of the

great visual artists of his period who

dreamt of going to

Hollywood at one point he thought of

renaming The Factory

Hollywood at the same time he was an

artist with among his many talents could

not be found any talent for narrative he

couldn't tell a story didn't know

anything about telling a story so here

is an artist with zero talent for

narrative whose life nonetheless is like

a novel it's completely coherent his

story was one of the things that was

most compelling about him which people

got and understood about him right

away even though his genius was for

immediacy and for absolute refusal to

tell a story just this is it this is it

nothing more nothing before nothing

after not where we're going not where

we've been just right now but at the

same time what happened to the man was a

novel and everything about it had a kind

of strange and Powerful

coherence I think that he was an artist

dealing with medy intensity vividness

power of connection and the threat to

all that that comes with

death and that was a powerful narrative

force in his life he lived it whether he

wanted to or not aese

mov I think the reason is that Andy was

really attuned to some very large issues

despite his famous

superficiality and one of the things is

that immediacy especially in the great

traditions of the Romantic Movement is

always on the edge of death somewhere

cuz we're always losing the moment it's

always

Vanishing you know it's like fa says to

the great moment given to him linger yet

while I aren't so

fair and yet it's

gone and that going endless going was

something that Andy was was really a

genius

about I try to think of what time is and

all I can think

is time

is time

was Andy Warhol

[Music]

[Music]

and his background like everything else

about him was so odd and so vague I mean

he came from nowhere in so far as there

is nowhere in

Europe the people were incredibly poor

and they had this faith I think again

the faith kept them going and they had

no money they left the area when as soon

as they possibly could because there was

so little work and so much

poverty his parents were from a part of

Central Europe called ruia which is on

the borders of what is now the Ukraine

Poland Slovakia and

Romania when they came to the United

States they lived in the Slavic ghettos

but as one of Andy's Brothers said to me

we didn't really know what we were we

knew we weren't Pollocks we weren't

honkies which is they for hungarians we

spoke this language called slavish they

call

it basically Andy grew up in something

that looked like and felt like and acted

like a central European ghetto

completely surrounded by America you

know I mean that is if you've been in

that neighborhood in Pittsburgh and

you've been in Czechoslovakia you know

physically that's the same place and if

everybody's talking Slovak and everybody

is living in Village ways and then

you're totally surrounded rounded by all

of this iconography and everything

you've got to both see the connections

and see the

differences and I think that Warhol

understood the power of

that he had that sort of romance with

America but just the giant distances you

[Music]

know he was born Andrew warhola on the

6th of August in the summer of 1928 in

the tiny low ceiling bedroom of his

parents house in Pittsburgh the third

and youngest son of Andre and Julia

warhola hardworking immigrants from the

heartland of Central

Europe one of his first childhood homes

in a workingclass slum strung along the

polluted Waters of the mananga Hala was

the worst place I've ever been in my

life he later said two drab rooms on the

second floor of a narrow brick row house

so cramped for space that he and his

brothers Paul and John had to sleep

together in a single

bed and I remember three houses like

that before my dad bought his house on

Dawson Street first thing Andy was 6

years old and he asked me uh is there a

yard because we didn't have no yard

where we lived before we lived like in

two rooms with an outside toilet then he

says is there a bathtub in that house I

say yeah we got a whole bathroom in our

hand he was real happy about it I gave

my dad a lot of credit coming over here

didn't know the langage and he saved up

enough of money he bought that house

cash $3,200 I still remember

[Music]

all through the depression his mother

Julia a strong willed idiosyncratic

deeply loving woman with a knack for

drawing and a beautiful singing voice

helped bring in money any way she could

cleaning houses for a dollar a day and

making floral bouquets from tin cans and

cray paper which she sold door too for a

quarter a

piece nice to remember her when we were

small we didn't have no radio or TV to

keep you quiet and in a winter she tell

us come in the kitchen and she'd say all

right somebody draw a picture of a cow

you know and then the one that draws the

best picture will get a prize so what

she did she bought a the Hershey bars

for nickel real big you

know Andy would always win you know she

she says Andy had the best picture you

know she had a lot of influence on Andy

you know she started him out when he was

small and I guess it it just took off on

him he stuck to his art since he's like

about five or six years

[Music]

all every Saturday night and Sunday

morning Andy and his mother made the

three-mile walk to St John costum a

small Byzantine Catholic Church filled

with incense and lit by candles where

they sat through the long Services

conducted entirely in Old slavonic which

always began with an exorcism of the

devil Andy's a little boy was taken by

his mother to vespers Saturday night

ceremony service and then three masses

on Sunday morning back to back and they

have this icon aasis which is a grid

these screens that cover the Altar and

only opened up during the communion

service so he was 8 hours a week looking

at this iconostasis a little child you

know taking it all in and what he was

seeing was a grid of portraits of the

Saints very two-dimensional with gold

leaf backgrounds and perhaps nine on

either side side maybe 18 altogether I

mean which is so much like his work you

know especially his

portraits they've got this Simplicity

and this sense of color and this iconic

quality that comes right from that sort

of Byzantine Easter right kind of

art ran noticed where he was different

when we picked up sides to play you know

softball and he was out in the field

we'd play like about five or six Innings

then here somebody hit the ball out

where Andy was supposed to

be and Andy wasn't there he was sitting

in front of uh on the steps in front of

the house and he was drawing pictures of

uh like flowers and the butterflies

that's where I noticed he was different

you

know from the very start it was clear to

both Andrea and Julia that there was

something different about their youngest

child

pale- skinned and frail looking bright

witted but High Strung and prone to

accidents and ailments of every kind he

refused to take part in Rough and Tumble

games from an early age clearly

preferred the company of girls and was

so excruciatingly shy that he was often

unable to enter a room where his own

family had gathered curling his hand

around the doorway instead to show off

pictures he was particularly proud

of not long after his eth birthday he

contracted the illness that would

permanently altered the course of his

childhood when an episode of romatic

fever developed into a severe case of s

fius dance a disorder of the central

nervous system characterized by extreme

and often frightening mood swings and by

uncontrollable spasms of the arms and

legs School challenging from the start

now became a nightmare for him the

disease made it difficult to tie his own

shoes or to talk without slurring his

speech when he tried to ride on the

Blackboard his hands shook so violently

that his classmates erupted in Gales of

laughter sending him back to his seat in

tears he eventually had to withdraw from

school entirely and be confined to bed

for

[Music]

months I always had a theory about Andy

and his work and I don't know where it

came from he got this wonderful idea

that there was something remarkable

about staring at something for a long

time which is probably what somebody

does who was awfully lonely in his life

he always said he had 13 nervous

breakdowns before he was 13 years

old and I would think that one of the

things that happens to somebody like

that is a to try to keep yourself sane

you you stare at an object you somehow

concentrate and I've often thought that

you can look at something like that and

bring qualities to it that because it's

such a common object you sort of don't

even think

about the prolonged illness permanently

scarred him inside and out leaving him

with a mysterious albino likee loss of

pigmentation in his skin large reddish

brown splotches all over his face arms

hands and chest an almost crippling

anxiety about his physical appearance

and a lifelong hyper sensitivity to

touch determined to coax him back to

health Julia transformed the warhola

dining room into a 24hour sick room

where for months he convalesced whing

away the long days fing in coloring book

s cutting out paper dolls making

collages out of pictures cut from movie

magazines and listening to the new

family

radio he was this lost little boy in

this house where nobody spoke English he

was sickly he was effeminate you know he

the other kids made fun of him and he

would write away in the fan magazines

for autograph photographs of the movie

stars and he would read these fan

magazines he just somehow absorbed this

this mass culture you know like right at

its root where it really started the

Hollywood promotion machine of the 1920s

and 1930s you know that's where it

really

began awkward and painfully vulnerable

on the outside he became the absolute

master of his own inner World capable of

intense and almost obsessive Feats of

focus and concentration spending hours

at a time pouring over his artwork and

his collection of cherished images

he developed a particular obsession with

Shirley Temple rode away to her fan club

and received in return a glossy

photograph signed personally by the

child star which he venerated with an

intensity that rivaled his mother's

passion for the icons of her

church by hiside much of the time was

Julia herself warmly urging him on

triumphantly rewarding each finished

picture with a bar of chocolate all the

while chattering away in her musical

mixture of rusine and broken English I

talk they were very close they were

children together when he was sick and

stayed home from school she was nearby

and he recognized absolutely that she

was a central figure in his

life it's a Secret Workshop what went on

in Julia's Kitchen Julia warhol's

kitchen I don't know if I have the

answer except that maybe his answer is

turn to the least likely source to get

your art lessons you know imagine that

Warhol learned more about how to be an

artist from Shirley Temple and Lana

Turner and Julia warhola than he learned

from Duchamp Jackson Pollock

Picasso you know his art has the

maternal inscription in

[Music]

it eager to nurture her youngest son's

artistic gifts Julia enrolled him at the

age of n in a series of free art classes

given by the Carnegie Museum of Art

every Saturday morning he would make his

way across the Steep Ravine that

separated the workingclass world of

Dawson Street from the spacious

precincts of Shenley

Park sometimes spending hours at a time

after class was over wandering through

the galleries carefully studying each

painting and

sculpture it was his first exposure to

the world of Fine Art and to a life

beyond the narrow confines of Dawson

Street Andy was short of his 14 birth

and my father

died he was on a job in uh West Virginia

and uh they were moving some heavy

equipment and there was a spring it was

in the summer and all the men drank the

spring water and here it was

contaminated they didn't know it they

all got sick and U he's the only one

that U didn't pull

through for 3 Days his father's body was

laid out in the living room of the tiny

house on Dawson Street

terrified of seeing his father's corpse

Andy hit upstairs under a bed weeping

uncontrollably and refusing to come out

he just didn't want to see Dad his older

brother Paul

remembered my dad 5 days before he

passed away he told me he was going to

go to the hospital and he says that I

just want you to make sure that you pay

the taxes so you don't lose the house

and keep that $1,500 for Andy's tuition

for school he says he's going to go to a

college someday you you'll be proud of

him 2 years later the family was dealt

another crushing blow when Julia was

diagnosed with cancer of the colon and

had to have an emergency operation to

remove her large

intestines did Mama die was all Andy

could say to his older brother John

after the surgery was

over she was in our hospital for about 6

weeks and uh Andy would come from school

I'd make a sandwich and I just opened up

a can of tomato soup so I must have

probably made it just about every day in

a soup and a sandwich for about 6 weeks

when my mother was in a

[Music]

hospital in the end Andre roa's

confidence in his youngest son's gifts

would not prove

unfounded all through high school he

remained a lonely undistinguished

student still hampered by dyslexia

odd-looking and shy and utterly

uninterested in dating girls a

disinclination Julia stubbornly refused

ever to acknowledge or come to terms

with but he astonished his teachers with

the dedication he brought to his courses

in drawing and by his senior year had

become an assured draftsman with a

special gift for

portraiture a more talented person than

Andy Warhol I never knew one teacher

remembered he was magnificently

talented shortly after his 17th birthday

on a August 6th 1945 the day the first

atomic bomb was dropped on Japan he

enrolled as an art student at Carnegie

Tech his way partly paid by the postal

bonds his father had set aside for

him the baby in a class of returning

veterans many four and 5 years his

senior he was remembered by one teacher

as a small thin boy who had a great

talent for avoiding personal

contact threatened with expulsion after

failing to pass a daunting firste course

called thought and express

he worked furiously to redeem himself

over the summer speed sketching Street

scenes in the increasingly fluent style

he had begun to make his

own the remarkable drawings helped

convince The Faculty to reinstate him

and that fall brought him the

institute's coveted lier prize which

carried with it a $40 award the first

money he ever received for a work of

art it was very apparent to all of us

that Andy was extraordinarily talented

there was this marvelous

quality Andy was a very young person he

liked to

laugh he was very naive and left himself

open in a way he was like an angel in

the sky at the beginning of his college

times but only for then that's what

college gets rid of Philip

pearlstein still painfully

self-conscious about his looks and

especially about his prominent acne

blemished nose which had prompted his

brothers to give him the nickname Andy

the red-nosed War hola he confided

mainly in women never spoke about his

sexual interests like most of his peers

was not yet sexually active but was

quietly assumed by most friends to be

homosexual I think Andy had this

indefinable quality of the Holy fool

utterly unlike any other human

being I'm not saying he was in touch

with God or anything but he just was

different as I say very passive things

happened to him he was a witness rather

than a participator in life and this in

a curious way protected him when always

felt that there was some kind of um

Divine protection of Andy I mean he was

delicate fragile vulnerable in lots of

different ways but there was this sort

of curious iron faith that kept him

going I think Carnegie Tech in some some

ways both sharpened warhol's skills but

also gave him something to push

against I mean he really didn't follow

the course at all he wasn't a follower

mostly because he had a very different

idea of what he wanted to do the other

thing that he discovered which was a

really radical invention for him was the

use of what's called a blot at Laine

technique what it is of course is to

take ink and to make a drawing on one

paper and take another piece of paper

and blotted on top it's really a

monoprint essentially and in finding

that technique Warhol found a key to

something first of all he could make

many images from one drawing the

fundamental basis of his career but he

also created something that looked

printed and that's very different than

just the original Line This became a

technique that he experimented with

throughout his

career and the other thing is I think by

going to carnegi he realized that there

was a world Beyond Pittsburgh and that

he had to go to New

York as graduation approached in the

spring of 1949 his thoughts turned

increasingly to New

York his mother did everything she could

to dissuade him from going warning he

would end up dead in the gutter without

a penny in his

pocket but in the end nothing could

dissuade

him say told my mother say you know I'm

going to have to good in New York he

says that's a place where they have a

lot of magazine companies and he had the

right idea you know so I remember I took

him down a station down a train station

I give him $50 he had some money saved

up in the second week of June 1949 he

said goodbye to his mother and brothers

and boarded the overnight train for New

York with his friend Philip

pearlstein the next morning just after

Dawn he emerged into the vast echoing

Hala of Pennsylvania station and stepped

out onto 7th

Avenue he had $200 in his pocket and a

portfolio of drawings under his arm he

was 20 years old behind him lay

Pittsburgh before him the vast sprawling

city of his

dreams for the next four decades it

would be the only place he ever really

felt at home

[Music]

you have to remember that in the art

world the

strength up

until the second world war and for 100

years the strength was in in

France and the Schism that

absolutely broke it was the second world

war we kind of dominated the world after

the second world war and first

generation painting abstract

expressionism spearheaded by Pollock

occurred and it was absolutely the

dominant style and he very well knew

that everybody knew

that I think that he wanted the same

thing that many major artists and many

minor artists and many failed artists

have wanted he wanted to be very famous

it was very important to him being

famous being very successful at what he

did was a mode of

survival I think that Andy would have

seriously considered the possibility

that life without it is not worth

living and he was ready to go all the

way to do it he was really driven in

that way it had to work it had to work

and I don't think he spent an hour of

his life without thinking of how to make

it

work I'm not certainly knew what he

wanted to do he was young he had a

talent he had to make a living I think

that he always had admired what fine

artists were he certainly knew you know

the difference between what a commercial

artist was and a fine artist was when he

arrived in 49 it's of course the moment

that Jackson Pollock is being portrayed

in Life Magazine as the famous Jack the

dripper and it's quite interesting in

that sense that there's almost a notion

of a kind of I don't want to say

Superstar but you know certainly that

was not an insignificant thing and I'm

sure it impressed Warhol in that way he

suddenly saw that maybe an artist could

be as famous as a movie

star but like pearlin he came up in a

generation that didn't believe you could

make a living off of being a fine artist

so you had to do something else and of

course the very first job he gets is to

work for Glamour magazine where he hired

by Tina Fredericks who was the art

director illustrating shoes for an

article prophetically called success as

a job in New

York few people ever Rose more swiftly

in the Cutthroat world of Commercial Art

than 20-year-old Andy warhola from

Pittsburgh in the third week of June

1949 he moved into his first apartment

in Manhattan a grimy roach infested

sixth floor walk up on the Lower East

Side the first of many he would share

with friends over the next 2

years the next morning he made his way

to the headquarters of K Nast

Publications on Madison Avenue where he

presented his portfolio to the art

director of Glamour magazine Tina

Fredericks I Creed a boy with a big

beige blotch on his cheek possibly going

up to the forehead he was all one color

weird there seemed something other

Earthly or offbeat different for sure

elfish from another world he had a

breathy way of talking his voice was

slight unemphatic

whispery covered over with a

smile struck by the quality of her

visitor's drawings Frederick's gave him

a sample of shoes to draw as a test

assignment 2 months later his first

published drawings ran in the September

1949 issue of Glamour

magazine when the typ setter omitted the

final a in his name

he made no effort to correct it and for

the rest of his life called himself

simply Andy

Warhol he was on his way the

extraordinary apprenticeship he would

serve over the next 10 years would lay

the groundwork for everything that came

later throughout the 50s he's earning

his living as a commercial illustrator

and he becomes increasingly successful

although he's successful almost from the

beginning he working for art directors

magazines record companies producing a

whole variety of art really made for

reproduction and he becomes very famous

for a kind of line that he didn't

necessarily invent but certainly becomes

his signature line it's called the

blotted line and this was the technique

he perfected it it led to a sort of

simplified kind of

drawing and that was part of the essence

of the warhole illustrational

style and it had almost a kind of naive

effect so that it had a kind of air of

having not been done with great skill

but almost

awkwardly this line is something that a

lot of the art directors are attracted

to principally because they said it had

a printed feel to

it you know when something's printed it

implies that it's wanted by more than

one person it's in print and you know to

this day we still live in a culture

where we want things in print it becomes

the famous 15 minutes of fame if you

will he had to deal with art directors

who constantly needed to perfect an

image who had to get an image that would

communicate to not just one person or 10

people but tens and hundreds of

thousands of people so he saw something

perhaps more than his other illustrator

contemporaries did about what makes an

image

communicate throughout his career Warhol

understands scale he understands texture

understands movement of the eye he

understands how to make a composition

but he also understands something that I

think makes him probably one of the most

extraordinary figures since matis and

that's how to use

color his sense of color is just unbel

[Music]

believable and then on aesthetic level I

think Warhol had a great capacity for

finding permutations within the same a

great capacity which is evident

throughout the 50s and of course is the

Hallmark of his later work to find a

single image a single theme if you will

and to endlessly endlessly change it to

mine a territory that was very narrow to

some extent and then push it as far as

you could was something that print

making made absolutely

possible to find the difference to

really find the difference what happens

if you make it red if you make it yellow

if you make it Pink if you make it

blue the capacity of his mind seems

without boundary in that kind of

[Music]

way throughout the

1950s warhol's aesthetic activity was

primarily in drawing and that

technically remains at the core of his

aesthetic at

gifts he was a brilliant draftsman

utterly brilliant and highly developed

draftsman and became better and better

at it we think over the course of the

50s we haven't cataloged or counted them

yet but there must be thousands of

drawings and I don't even know how to

say at this point whether when we say

thousands of drawings we mean his

commercial work or the work that he

didn't do for commercial purposes or how

we begin to distinguish those purposes

or not

there's always a parallel in Warhol he's

got the work that he makes for really a

public realm if you will which is in

advertising and then in the private

realm he's doing

books principally promotional books that

he sent out to his clients all the

people that he worked for in the ad

industry in the bottom of my

garden various books where he's actually

already beginning to mimic what is the

basics of silk screen

design I think that the work he did as a

fine artist in the 50s when he was also

doing commercial work is some of his

most arresting stuff it's the nudes he

did a lot of freehand drawings from live

models and they're really

amazing if you look at the boy drawings

for instance they're all about touch

there's this contour line that almost

seems never broken as if he never lifted

his eyes from the subject and his hand

kept moving constantly oh over the

Contours of a young man's

body touch becomes almost alive animated

in the drawings through not just the

hand not just the fingers this is not

some insipid notion of touch this is a

touch that totally electrifies the

entire

body by 1951 he had begun to make enough

money to move into an apartment on his

own a tiny basement flat on East 75 fth

Street he had also cemented a reputation

not only for the freshness and quality

of his work but for his odd personal

style his unfashionably thick glasses

battered Sports coats and caved in shoes

and for his oddly endearing habit of

presenting his work not in crisp

portfolios but in brown paper

bags up and down Madison Avenue art

directors took to calling him Raggedy

Andy and Andy paper

bag yeah I mean I think Andy probably

was a genius I know that he had a just

just an incredible tactical sense of

what went you know I mean he liked to

make it beautiful and he knew he could I

mean he's a professional illustrator and

he could make it beautiful and he could

make it look good and like make it edgy

and he could do it every time and he

liked doing it every time and he could

do it without even doing very much you

know he could come in afterward and do

that that made it

okay from when right the confidence and

the arrogance and the enthusiasm I mean

you know I me he felt like he could do

it all day long every day I felt if he

wasn't doing it he was wasting time uh

he liked to do it you know it terrified

people you know I mean he was a

genius and yet from the start the

success that came so easily in his work

would prove painfully elusive in his

private

life he was over 25 in 1953 when he had

his first 10 tenative sexual encounter

with a picture clerk he had met at the

New York Public Library named Carl

Willers though the attraction was Mutual

warhol's paralyzing anxiety about his

physical appearance doomed the affair

from the start he was acutely

self-conscious Willers remembered he

thought he was totally unattractive Too

Short too pudgy grotesque a conviction

so crippling he could barely bring

himself to risk the intimacy sex

required and according to Willers almost

never did preferring the role of the

Observer to that of the

participant desperate to transform

himself while still in his 20s he had

his nose reconstructed and his skin

surgically sanded without much

success there was even less he could do

about his greatest source of distress

his rapidly thinning hair he had already

purchased a realistic light brown wig

when for reasons he would never quite

explain he chose to replace it with a

dubious looking gray one the first of

hundreds he would come to possess in the

years to come ranging from light silver

to blinding

white inside he was a very beautiful

person that's what I really liked about

him but he had an enormous inferiority

complex he told me he was from another

planet he said he didn't know how he got

here Andy wanted so much to be beautiful

but he wore that terrible wig which

didn't fit and only looked

awful Charles wasn't be

even stronger than his craving to

transform himself physically was the

obsession that had haunted him since

childhood his hunger for fame and dream

of becoming a

star not long after moving to New York

his obsession found a new object to

attach itself

to in 1948 truma Capo's first novel was

published called other voices other

rooms and the photograph of capot on the

dust Jack became utterly Tor is Warhol

was so taken with this Photograph that

he began to write fan letters to him and

then when he moved to New York he began

to telephone him write more and

essentially stalk him he wanted

everything that trim capot had blonde

looks ubiquity Fame verbal Powers

precocity trm capot was the literary

cheely Temple really the child star and

so Andy sort of wanted to be trumman

capot in fact there are stories of him

trying to actually be mistaken for capot

believing that somehow he looked like

capot or could begin to look like

capot I remember the stories about him

and and Truman He hung around Truman's

front door so to speak and wrote little

notes to him happy Wednesday happy happy

Thursday Happy

Friday I think Truman was sort of put

off by this after a while capot for his

part simply ignored the mounting pile of

mail from his obsessed admirer whom he

dismissed he later said as one of those

hopeless people you know nothing's ever

going to happen to just a hopeless born

loser as far as I knew he added he was a

window

decorator Warhol was stung to the quick

by the rejection but turned the

humiliating episode into the occasional

of his first Art Exhibit in New York

which opened on June 16th 1952 under the

title 15 drawings based on the writings

of Truman capot none of the pieces

sold his fascination with a Truman capot

is a medium for him is a kind of conduit

for him for becoming an artist becoming

a certain kind of artist and he pursues

that relentlessly throughout his life it

could be Ed Cedric or could be Trum and

capot but they're really not the objects

of his desire so much as the medium of

his desire Central to all of it was his

art was how you create yourself how you

transform yourself whatever you are deep

down it's how you become what you

become he was still recovering from the

capot disaster in the spring of

1952 when the doorbell rang one evening

in in his second floor apartment on East

75th

Street down on the steps below he found

his mother Julia carrying two heavy

suitcases an armload of shopping bags

and the news that she had sold the

family house back on Dawson Street and

come to New York to live with her

youngest son at least until he found a

nice girl she said settled down and

started a

family worried about how his mother

would fit into his new way of life

Warhol reluctantly agreed to let her

stay just until he got a burglar alarm

he said

in the end the two would live together

for the next 20 years until just before

her death in

1972 during that time though he would

keep her largely screened from public

View and never fully outgrow the

embarrassment he felt about her broken

English and Old World ways he would come

to depend on her both for her

housekeeping skills and her artistic

sensibility often pressing her into

service coloring in and hand lettering

his commercial prints as well as the

private drawings handmade booklets he

sometimes gave out to clients she won an

award for a record cover design as Andy

warhol's mother she copied in her

wonderful handwriting Pros text about a

street artist named moond dog for

Prestige album cover and on the album

cover it said Andy warhol's

mother almost immediately the advantages

of the arrangement became patently clear

with Julia around to manage the

household and help out with his art he

was free to work even longer hours

increase the number of assignments he

took on and bring in more money than

ever and he was doing illustrations at

that time but very successfully working

for a very famous Ad Agency making

really quite a lot of money and he was

celebrated as a graphic artist but

enormously interested in the art world

you cannot be famous as a commercial a

you're known in the field right no

matter how success

and

he hungered for

[Music]

fame eager to find a larger audience for

his distinctive private drawings he took

his portfolio to dozens of galleries

around the city but no one would take

his work I was well known as a

commercial artist he recalled but if you

wanted to be considered a serious artist

you weren't supposed to have anything to

do with Commercial

Art and he had given a group of

paintings to Philip pearlstein to take

to the taninger gallery which was a

Cooperative gallery that all the abex

painters were involved with a series of

paintings of boys kissing boys and

Philip pearlstein I must say as a good

friend brought them there and of course

they you know thought this was just

absurd everything about his work its

figural style commercial Providence and

homoerotic Edge doomed it in the world

of Fine Art which had been dominated

since the end of the war by the sternly

anti- figural precept steps of abstract

expressionism by the ' 50s abstract

expressionist painting was very much the

house style it was very much the

national style it was very much the

international style and it rested of

course on three things perhaps its

abstractness its absence of a knowable

or recognizable image on its visual

painterliness but most important on its

revelation of the interiority the soul

the spirit of the

artist great art was supposed to be like

that was supposed to be about that

warhol's art was quite visibly not about

any of those things although I think

it's very much about the Artist as

well I think there was a sense the myth

whether it was true or not the myth was

that the abstract expressionist were a

set of tough hard drinking heterosexuals

and here was Andy this shy Fay

homosexual and the whole rhetoric of

abstract expressionist was all about the

struggle of to express yourself in this

effeminate commercial culture you

see in the end the only places willing

to show his work were a fashionable ice

cream parlor on the Upper East Side

called Serendipity that also served as a

meeting place for gay men and a little

known Gallery right next door called the

bodley

when in the winter of 1956 a sample of

his boy book drawings went on display

without attracting a single

customer oh my God Warhol lamented

bombed

again his love life meanwhile was

fairing no

better in the summer of 1956 on a

two-month trip to the Far East with a

handsome set designer named Charles

lizenby his infatuated attempts to

consummate the relationship were

pointedly rejected in a hotel room in

honol

ULU on their return to New York

heartbroken and humiliated by The

Experience Warhol picked up his bags at

the airport and walked off without

saying goodbye or once looking back he

had gone around the world with a boy he

later told a friend and not even

received one

kiss I was walking in

Bali and I saw a bunch of people in a

clearing having a ball because somebody

they really liked had just died and I

realized that everything was just how

you decided to think about

it sometimes people let the same

problems make them miserable for years

when they should just say so

what that's one of my favorite things to

say so

what I don't know how I made it through

all the years before I learned to do

that

trick it took a long time for me to

learn it but once you did do you never

forget well people say that Andy stopped

caring after that um seems a little bit

like a

myth it meant that he gave up his

sentimental strategies of the 50s in

favor of a colder more mechanical style

in the'

60s I think he realized that he could

Master the World by seeming not to wish

to master it I mean he conquered a

paradox by stopping to

care as the 1950s came to a close

warhol's career seemed to have reached a

kind of impass personally and

artistically by 1959 after 10 years in

New York he was without question the

most well-known highly paid then sought

after a commercial artist in the city

before the year was out he would

purchase an entire four-story townhouse

on Lexington Avenue on the Upper East

Side installing his mother in the

basement and filling the upstairs rooms

with his burgeoning collection of fine

prints and paintings including works by

Picasso mgre moo clay and

Brock Ken by then however a crucial

transformation had begun to take place

in his own work as an artist the

harbinger of far more radical changes

that would soon begin to sweep across

the landscape of American culture in the

1960s that the torch has been passed to

a new generation of Americans there's

going to be a new movement and a new

kind of person he repeatedly told his

friends and you could be that

person they always say that time changes

things he added but you actually have to

change them

yourself in the months and years to come

as one of the most dramatic and eventful

decades in the history of American

culture got underway the force of those

changes would catapult warhold to the

very center of the art World

dramatically transform the meaning and

practice of Art in America and alter

forever the way people grasp the world

around

them these things happen periodically in

the culture you know culture is human

culture and planetary culture is organic

it goes through refreshing periods

refreshening periods then it gets stale

so what you call like a revolutionary

thing is really just a new Fresh growing

up you know and pushing the other aside

and the coming together in the' 60s of

the Stars New York as the center of the

art World a new generation of American

artists who were really brilliant and

Geniuses and

ingenious all

struck I think that's one of the things

that people forget Is that real Paradigm

shifts in the art World completely redo

it just as the world of the abstract

expressionist

destroyed all the previous galleries

destroyed all the previous dealers

marginalized all the culture as it exist

and put themselves in power so the world

of pop and minimalism did the same thing

it wasn't just new artists it was new

dealers New collectors new

everything Andy understood that you you

don't change the art you change the

society you know and it's what art does

I mean part of the function of art I

think is to change society but it can

only do that by changing art Society

the first distant Rumblings had come in

the winter of 1958 when a 28-year-old

painter named Jasper Johns sent shock

waves Rippling through the art world

with his first one-man show at Leo

Castelli's gallery on East 77th

Street featuring hand painted images of

everyday objects the show was an instant

sensation and sold out almost

overnight 2 months later Jasper John's

close friend and lover Robert renberg

had his own oneman show at the Castell

Gallery featuring images drawn from

newspapers magazines street signs and

advertisements at a stroke The Fortress

of abstraction had started to

crumble Jasper Johnson Bob renberg were

kind of the the

bridge

figures out of first generation abstract

expressionism into the pop style I mean

when you consider those little

sculptures of jpos that he did in the

middle 50s early on a savron coffee can

with paintbrushes the two ale cans the

route from those sculptures into the

soup can becomes more

obvious sometime probably as early as

1958 Warhol had decided that he was

going to become not just a painter but

he was going to become an Avon guard

painter he was going to become a painter

like Jasper Johns like Robert rasenberg

like Frank

still to warhol's dismay however Johns

and renberg would have nothing to do

with with him in part because of his

Commercial background which they shared

but openly disdained and in part because

of his sexuality which they also shared

but which to protect their careers they

kept carefully screened from public

view after repeated attempts to approach

the new stars ended in Failure Warhol

turned to a close mutual friend Emil de

Antonio in

despair why don't they like me he asked

why can't I see them why can't I be a

painter because you're a commercial

artist Antonio replied and because

you're too Swish and

campy there was nothing I could say to

that it was all too true I decided I

just wasn't going to care because those

were all things that I didn't want to

change that I didn't think I should want

to

change D was the only person I knew then

who could see past those old social

distinctions to the art

itself very clearly from the beginning

of his painting career he goes to a

subject matter that's

vernacular he goes to images that appear

in the press and by early 61 warhold was

creating the first paintings that we

would come to think of as as Pop

paintings but it's a very decisive

moment in his

career in the winter of 1961 on the

second floor of his townhouse on

Lexington Avenue he set to work

beginning as John's and renberg had with

pre-existing images and vernacular

subjects from the very start he showed a

willingness to go much farther than his

predecessors seeking out the cheapest

and most bluntly graphic images he could

find crudely drawn black and white ads

for nose jobs wigs television sets

refrigerators storm doors and foot

medications clipped from tabloid

newspapers and down Market magazines and

from the back pages of comic

books the popular fantasy is that the

artist is this Promethean inventor who

out of nothing invents and

creates and and he was the exact reverse

of that he was pure

receptivity he's receptive to everything

and then something happens he

chooses he's the reverse of an

expressionist paint he's reverse of

somebody who imposes himself his pattern

his vision his energy whatever it is on

things as I say he's a recording machine

and I think that's what's different I

think that he he he's a mirror he

reflects life rather than sort of

projecting

life how he begins to make paintings is

very interesting because technically in

many ways it's of a piece with how he

made

drawings he always works from a found

image initially he uses illustrations a

line illustration there's no tone

there's no Shadow there's Stark black

and white line cut images usually taken

from

advertisements and he enlarges the image

in an opaque projector projects the

image on the wall and he would literally

trace the projected image on the wall

Sometimes using pencil but initially

painting freehand over the projected

image I mean I think he was steeped in

film culture and the culture of products

and consumption and he was populist

enough or common enough or grounded

enough to take that realm Ultra

seriously I think it's because he had a

terrific eye was in some sense an art

director or a window dresser or a

manager of environments before he was a

fine artist and so he knew all about the

hook the seduction the subliminal ploy

to draw somebody in and he had done a

lot of research in American looking

American

desire during this time that world's

making these Works he's not he hasn't

given up his day job I mean he's still

doing commercial design he's still doing

window design he worked for bonwit

teller department store and did a number

of

Windows every year the commercial artist

would be given a show if they wanted of

the work they were doing in their

serious time so warhall did a selection

of these handp painted images little

King an advertisement painting made

their first appearance fittingly one

could say in Bon W teller's

store he had been working in a vacuum

for nearly a year unsold and all but

unexit when he was introduced to two men

destined to play a crucial role in the

pop art

movement Ivan karp a Dapper fast talking

assistant to the art dealer Leo costelli

who tried without success to convince

his employer to take Warhol on and Henry

Galer a brilliant 29-year-old curator at

the Metropolitan Museum of Art who had

become one of Pop Art's most Ardent

Champions when I saw Warhol lonstein

oldenberg and wesselman within a 4-month

period I had a sitting up in bed kind of

feeling thinking something very strange

was going on in the art World Ivan

karp from the start it was clear to both

karp and Galer that Warhol had the

talent and temperament to go much

farther than any of the others the

radical thing that takes place is he

makes a series of pictures in which he

eliminates the drip the brush work and

this is the thing that he's most

uncertain about and he even said but can

a painting be a painting if it doesn't

have drips so he invites four people to

his Studio Emil de Antonio Irving Blum

Ivan karp and Henry giler and he shows

them the messy version and the tight

version and every one of them prefers

the tighter version in looking at a

pristine version of the Coca-Cola

painting de Antonio remarks Andy it's

naked it's brutal it's who we are you

know this is something that looks more

like his Commercial Art than it does

what he thought High art should be about

and this is radical for him

by 1962 he's virtually expunged all

brush marks from his painting they

become increasingly non painterly they

also become increasingly flat in the

sense that color is applied without any

medium tones they're applied in pure

Hues there's no shade there's no space

in the paintings there's no space for

our eye to move through it like a

traditional painting or even like an

abstract painting and there there's no

place for our spiritual eye to penetrate

it we're just thrown back on the

surface it's impossible for us to

imagine how radical and how risky it

must have been at that time to make

these kind of works to you know slap an

image of a comic strip or a Coca-Cola

bottle on a canvas is is a very radical

and in-your-face

act from the start the response of most

members of the art world to warhol's

work was almost uniformly

hostile I thought the paintings were

terrible one Gallery owner said I

thought they were

ridiculous Warhol himself another dealer

observed looked like something that had

crawled out from under a rock he was the

most colossal creep I had ever seen in

my life despite carp and galer's zealous

efforts on his behalf no dealers were

willing to exhibit his

work there are still artists and still

people in the art world who feel that

everything he did was a to art that it

killed the spirit in

art there was the flatness of the

technique fact that it was not paintly

and most people saw that as a kind of

blasphemy many people who were involved

in making art felt that this was

basically

anti-art even sympathetic visitors like

Irving Blom a gallery owner from Los

Angeles were baffled by what they

saw and I went to see him he was doing

these big unfinished cartoon paintings

there was a pile of them and I couldn't

make head or tail out of them I remember

very distinctly I was confused and not

engaged not engaged however engaged by

the guy at the beginning at that time in

his life uh nothing if not completely

accessible by the end of 1961 Warhol was

the only member of the pop art movement

whose Works remained unshown

One Night in early December he outlined

a situation to two close friends Ted

Cary and Muriel lto and asked them what

to

do it's too late for cartoons he said

I've got to do something that will have

a lot of impact that will be different

from lonstein and rosenquist that will

be very personal that won't look like

I'm doing exactly what they're doing

Muriel You've Got Fabulous ideas can you

give me

one without missing a beat L replied you

like money she said simply you should

paint pictures of money then added

almost as an afterthought you should

paint something that everybody sees

every day that everybody

recognizes like a can of

soup for the first time that evening

Warhol

smiled the next morning dispatching

Julia to thep with orders to bring back

all 32 varieties of soup the Campbell

Soup company made he began to experiment

with a variety of approaches

focusing in the end on what struck him

as the simplest strategy 32 separate

single can paintings each showing a

different variety of soup painstakingly

rendered in the style he had been

perfecting for nearly a

year he would return to the subject

again and again over the next few

months the idea that the way you are

induced to look at something is as much

about making it art as what it

is that is to say if the artist can make

you look at anything as if it were art

it to some degree becomes art if you

contemplate a telephone a glass of water

a light fixture in the context of the

highlighted uselessness of art it will

change its nature to your perception

that in other words perception is what

makes art as much as whatever is

inherent in the object you're looking at

he was still working on the series one

morning in early May 1962 when Irving

Blum called to say that he was back in

town he said come over I'd love to see

you Irving and I walked in through the

door and in the Carter with several soup

campaigns lined up on the floor and I

looked at them and said what are these

and he said my new work it's what I'm

doing now it's what I've been doing for

a short

while and I said what happened to the

cartoons and he said you know where I

went to Leo's gallery and Ivan K showed

me some transparencies and there's a guy

doing these cartoons in a much more

finished way than I was doing these

cartoons of mine in any case he said I

had the idea for these soups and it's

what I'm working on now he said there

are 32 varieties of Campell soup chili

beef chicken

consum whatever and he said I'm going to

do 32 then figure out what I'm going to

do

next and we continued to talk and

somehow I became engaged by them and I

said to Andy would you be willing to

show them in California he said yes

let's do it and that was how that

happened

[Music]

The Soup cans would prove to be the

turning point of Andy warhol's career

providing him with the unmistakable

artistic signature he had been looking

for that month as he prepared for his

exhibit at the ferris Gallery in July

Time Magazine ran a full- page article

about the popart style ridiculing the

movement but featuring a photograph of

Warhol himself standing in front of one

of his paintings pretending to sip

Campbell soup from a can

over the next 3 months as the fame he

had longed for all his life began to

build and grow he would make the most

important artistic breakthrough of his

career one that would permanently fuse

the form and content of his art and give

it permanent lasting

power there's something that almost

never varies in warhol's work from

August of 62 until the day he dies and

that's the use of the photograph and the

silk screen technique it's consistent

throughout the 60s into the 70s and

Beyond of course he had always been

intimately involved with the world of

reproduced

images and certainly by 62 he's very

involved with this notion of

repetition with the image repeating

again and again within the painting we

call it seriality there's the frame of

the painting and then there's the

repeating image of

it he goes through a series of carved

stamps which he uses to make the SNH

green stamp paintings various stamp

paintings and then he begins to move to

hand cut stencils where he actually

would draw an image and then cut the

stencil out so it still isn't quite

photographic now it's still handdrawn in

this way but it's moving in that

[Music]

direction following the suggestion of

his assistant Nathan Gluck he began

sending out his drawings to be photoch

mechanically silk screened a commercial

technique that involved transferring an

image onto a fine meshed Screen through

which ink could be pressed to produce an

infinite number of

copies you get the same image slightly

different each time he remembered it was

also simple quick and chany I was

thrilled by

it the first silk screen paintings

probably come from as early as April of

1962 these silk screens were from

Illustrated material he wasn't using

photographs he was using an illustration

of a Coca-Cola bottle and of dollar

bills and he had to draw the dollar bill

he sent that to a silk screen maker and

with these silk screens he made his

first silk screen

paintings by the summer of 62 the

technique evolves it evolves from

drawing to the photograph he learns that

he can actually have a photograph

reproduced photo mechanically onto a Sil

screen as best as we can Warhol says's

first photo silk screen paintings a

painting called baseball and then the

movie star paintings followed shortly

afterwards the paintings of Troy donghu

teen stars uh Warren Bey Natalie

Wood that is the radical departure once

he wed that silk screen with the

painting once photography became

embedded within painting in a way it had

never been before he never goes back to

using those other techniques again and

this sets up a completely different way

for him to operate and in a sense makes

evident The Source materials that he's

been using all

along and this is fundamental he marries

form and content in a way that's

inextricable you cannot pull them apart

by the time you get to the silk screen

image and you actually look at something

that exists in the culture through

reproduction exists in his painting as

reproduction you cannot tear it apart

and of course that's that's the thing

that really makes for great art he

pushed the language

forward that's the thing we want from

great artists and Warhol did

that on July 9th 1962 warhall soup can

show his first major exhibit as a fine

artist opened at the ferris Gallery in

West Hollywood to scanty sales and at

first a deafening Silence from the

critics

of zero zero there was no critical

response I mean the most entertaining

critical response uh came from a guy

called David Stewart who had a gallery

three do away from where my gallery was

and he went to the local Safeway store

bought 20 Campell soup cats put them in

the window and said buy them more

cheaply

here in other words

27 but people were mystified

or dismissive or

dismissive but because the gallery was

serious people thought about them but

having more to do I promise you more to

do with me and my reputation than with

the paintings themselves that was the

mistake that was

made in the end something about the

provocative paintings seemed to touch a

deep and Powerful cord here was an image

Henry gz declared that became the

overnight rallying point for the

sympathetic and the pane of the Hostile

Warhol captured the imagination of the

media and the public as no other artist

of his generation Andy was pop and pop

was

Andy most critics dismissed the

paintings as a vulgar joke but a young

writer named John Copelands founder of a

new Journal called Art Forum praised

them as the greatest breakthrough in art

since the readymades of Marcel duchant

half a century

earlier the power of the cans first of

all in a hundred years you won't buy

soup and cans I mean this defines a time

it tells you about marketing it tells

you about advertising it tells you about

food

distribution and I always found them as

I sat looking at them from time to time

for lack of anything else to

do

complicated in their

implication complicated and I find them

to this day

complicated in their

implication that was his

genius that was his genius I think and

they really more than any other image

more than any other symbol Define the

pop style and 60s activity they have a

cerebral aspect they have a literal

aspect like any great work of art that

complex after 10 days or 2 weeks into

the exhibition I called Andy and I said

the experience of living with the work

has been so powerful to me for reasons I

can't even tell you I'm just struck by

the paintings ending

in a way that I I couldn't imagine at

the beginning but I can tell you that I

think they're really powerful and I

think they're terribly

important and I'd like to keep the set

intact he said Irving they were

conceived as a group and he said I'd

love it if you could do it and I said I

can promise you this Andy I can promise

you I will never break them up I will

keep them intact and I can also promise

you I don't know how probably going to

do this but I can promise you that one

day they'll go to a great

museum I said what will I have to pay

you for the group and he said

$11,000 for the 32

paintings and over a 10-month period I

sent him $100 a month until I got to the

end of

it well I can tell you exactly what

they're worth now I sold them 6 years

ago for $15 million

intact to the Museum of Modern Art and

they have them intact just as I

promised in addition to the 32 paintings

which I showed in California Andy did

four or five one of them was auctioned

off two nights ago at Christie's the

single painting for $2,200,000

so uh when you consider I had

32 time 2 million plus the fact that

they're intact has a value my guess and

I don't think I exaggerate would be uh a

value

of I think $100

million in other words I think they're

invaluable they're invaluable they're

irreplaceable and invaluable

[Music]

he just did it and he didn't know how to

do it he had the drive the desire the

need to be beyond

anything he had to be at least as great

as

marily he knew that's where power of

life was The Burning

Flame because for so many years he was

so plain and fascinated with beauty

himself and he knew that beauty has that

magnetism that attracts people and he

didn't have that so he developed another

kind of magnetism the

stardom because there is real life power

in Fame and

stardom so that that that movie star in

the spotlight being a star and not

wanting to go beyond that and he he

eventually eclipsed the fame of his work

with the fame of his individual nature

what artist of any sort has had more to

say about the nature of Fame in the 20th

century than Andy Warhol it was one of

his leading themes it was one of his

subjects in the most profound way he

thought about it with a depth and an

originality and an insight and showed it

in his

work with a kind of striking inescapable

Force that's beyond that of any

competitor I can think

of in addition he was constantly

focusing on what struck him as

beautiful he was an aesthete he was

somebody who was interested in what was

beautiful and what was beautiful shown

for him to shine like a star was to be

beautiful so Beauty and fame went

together in his mind I think in addition

it was a kind of immortality a way of

keeping going of keeping the moment so

it wouldn't vanish on you and disappear

and be

lost over the next 18 months as his own

career took off with a speed and

intensity unparalleled in the anals of

contemporary culture Andy Warhol would

finish defining the major themes and

subjects that would absorb the rest of

his career in one of the most

astonishing bursts of artistic creat ity

in the 20th

century so many of the paintings that we

think of as the great paintings of

course of the' 60s from The Soup cans to

the death paintings the Maryland

paintings were made before the factory

in the period

6163 there's a tremendous outpouring of

work this is sort of the efflorescence

of the first moment of celebrity culture

you know I mean the first moment in

which we really let celebrities stand

for

[Music]

us you know I can date it exactly went

to Andy's great year

1962 for 40 years Norman Rockwell have

been painting pictures of everyday

Americans 1962 Andy starts painting

pictures of presidents and heroes and

movie

[Music]

stars on August 4th 1962 the same day

the soup can show closed in West

Hollywood news flashed across the

country that the actress Marilyn Monroe

had committed suicide in her Brentwood

home just 3 mil away in Hollywood

history is

dead Warhol acting on a suggestion of

Henry Galer immediately decided to make

the doomed star the subject of his next

series of silk screens to her glamorous

career as a comic talent I think that

Andy had what Henry James called the

imagination of disaster and Henry Geller

saw it Andy was always about listening

to suggestions he was always saying I'm

tabul laasa please fill me with

something tell me something well Henry

fed him

ideas he fed him ideas about Maryland

that is to say why is timing everything

he set out in the Maryland series the

day Maryland

died using a still from her 1953 film

Niagara he added a new twist to the silk

screening technique painting grounds of

vivid color in the location of her head

lips and shoulders then silk screening

the black and white photograph over

it what commentators have noticed is

that the color comes first the

background color comes first and the

drawing comes second it's just complete

reversal of what the usual order of

things in painting there's underd

drawing and then you paint on top of it

not warhole warhole painted first used

color first painted by hand in fact

first and then screened on top of it

all through August and on into September

he painted one maryn after another 23 in

all from a small single image canvas

known as gold maryn to an immense dip

tick with 100 images half in color half

black and white arrayed across a canvas

nearly 12T

wide as with his blotted line technique

before random imperfections often crept

into the work marring the surface of

each canvas background colors often fail

to register with the photographic image

and through repeated use the silk

screens became clogged with paint giving

the doomed movie star a slightly

different expression in each

portrait when Nathan Gluck pointed out

the discrepancies Warhol dismissed him I

like it that way he said it's part of

the

art guess what Andy's genius was that he

had a way of making everything mean

every detail means something every Mark

or splatter or sign of accident or lack

of the hand or of intention in warhol's

symbolic Universe has a meaning and he

was enough of a minimalist to leave

objects alone so that they could speak

their double or triple

meanings what Andy understood is the

painting of Marilyn Monroe doesn't

necessarily just represent maryn it

represents

you take the Lifesaver Maryland there's

a mint one there's a green one there's

an orange one you know all these

different flavors what this implies is

we all want maryn she's the object of

our desire we cannot have maryn but we

can have the picture of maryn that suits

our taste so in a sense We Are All One

in our desire for what we can't have we

individuate ourselves in what color we

want our desire to come in and I think

that was pretty much Andy's Andy's view

of the thing we all want Campbell some

of us want the bean you know what I mean

that's a pretty consistent language of

imagery and warhole in other words not

that we get what we want it's that

everybody understands that we're wanting

creatures and that we're one in that

particular

theat in the end Marilyn was only the

first of warhol's extraordinary

meditations on the function of Fame in a

mass

Society grasping that stars were never

truer to the themselves than when the

Brilliance that sustained them began to

fade away he turned to his portraits of

Elizabeth Taylor and the aftermath of

her disastrous turn as Cleopatra as her

health deteriorated and her love life

came apart and her career began to

implode I started those he later said

when she was so sick and everybody

thought she was going to die now I'm

doing them all over putting bright

colors on her lips and

[Music]

eyes he understood all of the paradoxes

of stardom and he was the greatest

philosopher of stardom that has ever

lived Andy warh was Andy understood

intuitively the implosives

of one identity being made that big it's

the stuff of

nightmares I've often thought what a

nightmare to be Liz in a way and wake up

one morning and go oh my God I'm known

over the whole world which is Andy's

dream but that's a kind of Imperial

Conquest that decimates the world and

also decimates the individual who is

thus made

available one painting that I can think

of quite vividly is blue Liz as

Cleopatra and it's the way the image

seems to be a film strip or just a strip

of Celluloid that can be read as

continuous action if it were projected

but that's not being projected so it's

somehow discarded image and a discarded

image of a human being in motion and

desired objectified beautiful famous

human being in motion turned into a

series of still portraits and then

discarded it's outtake footage it's

mangled and ripped it's censored footage

it's the stuff on The Cutting Room floor

it's literally in the dust Heap so

Warhol takes Liz and he dyes her blue

and understanding that Liz is on the

verge of becoming garbage he's going to

rescue her rescue this strip and render

it as a

painting and essentially his sensibility

is entirely mourning and Melancholy that

Liz is lost she's already lost and she

will never be found she will never be

there as summer turned to fall his

energies exploded Unleashed by the

possibilities of the silk screen

technique and by the Dem of preparing

for not one but two major exhibitions

later that

fall in 3 months he completed more than

100

paintings his Studio One Man later said

looked and smelled as if it had been hit

by a paint

bomb I feel very much a part of my times

of my culture Warhol told a newspaper

reporter in late

September as much a part of it as

Rockets or

[Music]

television that's phrase I am a camera

applied more to Andy than to anybody

else it wasn't just a camera I mean I am

a recording machine I am the mirrorer to

the world and any kind of recording of

this incredibly dramatic period in our

lives is enormously important and I

think Andy got it more graphically more

real than anybody else that although

there is this sort of mysterious sort of

flimsiness to his work there is a kind

of reality he got itas he got it by

accepting it and by letting it impress

itself on him on his work on everything

about him and who else has done

that he wanted to steal as much reality

as possible he was veracious and

inquisitive toward reality cuz at every

moment good art is happening to our

right and left and we're missing

it on October 31st

1962 the first group show of the pop art

movement opened at the Janice

Gallery 1 week later on November 6th

1962 warhol's first oneman show in New

York opened at the stable gallery on

West 58th Street and took the World by

storm Gathering Together 18 of his best

paintings to date it established him

almost overnight as first among equals

in the pop art movement and is one of

the most important figures in

Contemporary American

art Henry Galler Ivan harp and Emil de

Antonio were all there Vindicated in

their tenacious belief in his

talent Leo castelli stood in a corner

his eyes narrowed acknowledging that he

had been profoundly mistaken about

warhol's

prospects alone amidst the rry and High

Spirits Warhol himself seemed distant

and

withdrawn remaining in a corner of the

gallery for most of the evening his face

unusually

blank his eyes were soft expressive they

were the eyes of a fragile night

creature who has discovered himself

living in the blaze of an alien but

fascinating

world even critics skeptical of his

earlier work now began to acknowledge

the sheer pictorial power of the new

images warhol's paintings the writer Ron

sukenik declared represented America's

first real break with European

ideals the images of Marilyn he added

were about as sentimental as Fords

coming off the assembly line each one a

different color but each one the same as

every

other we were seeing the future and we

knew it for sure we saw people walking

around in it without knowing it because

they were still thinking in the past in

the reference of the

past but all you had to do was know you

were in the future and that's what put

you there the mystery was gone but the

amazement was just starting

I think Andy wanted to be remembered by

history he wanted to be the most

important artist of his time he wanted

to be Picasso he was kind of obsessed

with competing with Picasso on many

levels I think his motivation was part

superficial and part frivolous personal

and part very Noble in a way you know he

really wanted to record the times he

really wanted to figure it out he really

wanted to leave something

with his artwork in demand as never

before Warhol resolved to step up

production in January 1963 he moved his

Studio from The Parlor of his townhouse

no longer large enough to accommodate

his larger paintings to the third floor

of an abandoned red brick Firehouse a

few blocks away on East 87th Street

in June to increase production still

further he took on a new assistant a

20-year-old college student from the

Bronx named Gerard manga who had learned

how to silk screen a few years before

while working for a neckti

manufacturer the more you look at

warhol's work the more you look at

warhole the more you see a mind

constantly engaged in the

studio we see him making a series of

decisions in the studio how one paint

painting leads to another painting how

one series leads to another painting

there are a series of insights and you

get a sort of logic almost that unfolds

in the studio that's of an intensely

committed and engaged sophisticated and

thoughtful

artist a series of images follow that

are a series of action images narrative

images the paintings that we've come to

call the death paintings it's probably

not long after Maryland suicide in

August of 62 when he begins to do his

first paintings of car crashes and he

comments in a very famous interview that

he turns on the radio it's a holiday and

he hears about death

everywhere mundane death as a highway

fatality Henry G Cel fed him the idea of

the disaster series these horrible

photographs that used to appear in the

Tabloid newspapers of New York of these

grot horrible accidents transformed into

this arresting Unforgettable

series now where does that come from I

mean I can talk about where it comes

from philosophically but it also was

always there someone who was that tuned

to the immediate moment timing is

everything what makes him act a

suggestion about death you should do

these pictures Andy probably hry G or is

that it him 200 times but that one

worked I wanted Andy to get serious

Henry Galler recalled I said it's enough

life it's time for a little

death I thought that people should think

about them

sometime the girl who jumped off the

Empire State

Building or the ladies who ate the

poison tuna fish and the people getting

killed in car crashes

it's not that I feel sorry for them it's

just that people go by and it doesn't

really matter to them that someone

unknown was

killed so I thought it'd be nice for

these unknown people to be remembered by

those who ordinarily wouldn't think of

[Music]

them harsh and unnerving based on

photographs taken from news agencies

police files and tabloid newspapers the

so-called death and disaster paintings

were not immediately popular most

Gallery owners simply refused to exhibit

them most of warhol's work has a very

grim and terrible side he never hit it

he never claimed anything other than

that but he himself seemed touched with

magic he had found a way to overcome

these tremendous obvious

liabilities and flourish in this culture

and be someone who seemed like he had

put himself into the realm of the

blessed and yes I think because that was

connected to him the Grim message of a

lot of his art was ignored in favor of

the sort of with it perfect on top of it

all look

[Music]

Andy's attitude toward women was very

complicated he admired them he wanted to

be one he wanted to be involved in their

creation Ethel skull 36 times was the

most successful portrait of the

1960s it was a new kind of look at a

single human being from 36 different

points of view obviously influenced by

Cinema and

television he was creating an image of a

Superstar out of a woman who could have

been any one of a series of women Henry

Galer in the summer of 1963 he embarked

on his first commissioned work A

Portrait of the art collector Ethel

skull based on a series of photographs

he had made of her wearing outfits by

Def I had great visions of going to

Richard avadan having magnificent

pictures of me Tak and then he would do

a good portrait so he came up for me

that day and he's all right we're we're

off and I said where are we going he

says down to 42nd Street and Broadway I

said what are we going to do there he

says I'm going to take pictures of you I

said for what he said for the portrait I

said in those things I said my G I'll

look terrible he said don't worry and he

took out he had coins about $100 worth

of silver coin he said we'll take the

high key and the low key and I'll push

you inside and you watch the little red

light and I

froze now start smiling and talking rhal

told his willing client as he began

dropping quarters into the

machine this is costing me

money so Andy would come and un poke me

and make me do all kinds of things we

were running from one booth to the other

and he took all these pictures and they

were drying all over the place and at

the end of the thing he said now you

want to see them and they were so

Sensational that you didn't need Richard

abon you

say from the 300 images he took that day

he initially selected 5 enlarging silk

screening and individually inking each

image then adding one more to make an

even

36 the finished work was so big a friend

remembered it had to be assembled in

place on the skull's living room

wall but what I liked about it mostly

was that it was a portrait of being

alive and not like those candy box

things which I detest you say I never

ever wanted a portrait of myself and he

was very clever because he knows I'm

nearsighted I wear sunglasses and he

said let's have them with the glasses

and without the glasses and he directed

me I tell you in those days he should

have already been in the movies you know

or doing

movies by probably the middle of 63

there's another Insight that starts

happening and it changes the whole way

he begins to think about the cereal or

repetitive nature of the image which is

to say rather than producing a single

large painting which the image repeats

again and again he begins to create

single images that are smaller and

assemble them together in series it

gives him a lot more flexibility and in

fact he can create many more paintings

and in fact he can totally undermine any

idea of composition there is no

composition in advance there is just the

Montage just how you put the units

together

increasingly now his interests were

moving towards

film in July he bought a secondhand blex

and convinced a friend to let him film

him while he

[Music]

slept that fall Irving Blum asked him to

put on a second show in Los

Angeles he said for the 63 show why

don't we ring the gallery with

Elvis's and he said you have a space

behind the gallery

we can show Liz tayor portraits which

I'm doing now back there so it would be

a kind of a dialogue between these two

people and he said uh I think it might

work very well and I I told him I

thought it would be

brilliant and at a moment a big coffin

like crate arrived and it was an

unbroken roll of Elvis

images and I called Andy and I said how

do I handle this and he said you cut

them I've sent you another create of

stretcher bars and he said I've printed

it so that there are single images

double images and triple images of Elvis

and he said Irving cut them and I said

cut them he said yes cut them he said

cut them on the ground he said don't cut

the image and I said right and that's

exactly what I

did and hung them chick by JW around the

gallery

people hated it they hated

it and I had the Liz Taylor's 10

identical paintings on a silver ground

black hair flesh colored face all

screened however each one subtly

different and Incredibly powerful and

really amazing to

see while he was in Hollywood he shot

footage for a silent film called Tarzan

and Jane featuring Dennis Hopper and the

under underground film star Taylor

meat Hopper himself threw a glamorous

star studded party for him with a guest

list that included Sal Mino and Troy

donu it was the most exciting thing that

had ever happened to him Warhol later

said and he returned to New York more

Starstruck than ever being a star was an

absolute dream of his a friend recalled

but he didn't want to just be a movie

star he wanted to be the head of the

studio I think he was inspired by the

underground film scene in New York which

he was very tuned into he understood

that film was had entered the hands of

artists um and was available to him and

as he began to tap film imagery in his

paintings and as he began to one could

say get in touch with his inner star and

began to realize his own dream of stard

and probably became piercingly clear

that he needed to make movies as a way

of being the movies so it seems to me

unsurprising that he would wish to make

films

[Music]

[Music]

himself on the afternoon of November

22nd

1963 Warhol was walking through Grand

Central Station when news flashed across

the country that that President Kennedy

had been shot an hour before while on a

political tour of

Dallas rushing Uptown he sat stunned on

a couch watching the live television

coverage unfold in real time unable to

hold back

tears I don't know what it means one

friend remembered him saying over and

over

[Music]

again in the months to come selecting

eight grainy images of the president's

Widow just before and after her

husband's murder he would create an

extended series of single and multiple

image

paintings one 16 panel composition in

particular would capture as perhaps no

other artwork of the time the profound

cultural and psychic rupture jnf

Kennedy's assassination

represented he understood

instantaneously the second Liz turned

into Liz which was with her tracheotomy

and her sexual scandals in the early 60s

and with Jackie the second JFK which

just to understand that instantly they

were

incomprehensible spectacles that would

make one speechless to contemplate and

he got that

[Music]

immediately he was able to grasp via

something like the Jaclyn Kennedy

portrait that America lives in terms of

images right and that woman you know in

mour the famous one of her with the head

down that she held the nation together

for three terrifying days when it was

very vulnerable by her image in mour

right he understood this and he captured

it and reproduced

it for two more years Warhol would

continue working at the top of his form

as a pop painter and continue producing

masterpieces on canvas to the end of his

life and yet already by the end of 1963

the focus of his interests had begun to

shift in the months in years to come as

the centrifugal energies of the 1960s

began to pick up speed he would begin to

move into the deeper dimensionality of

sculpture and into the deeper

temporality of

film as he did the setting in which he

produced his art would shift as well

from the semi-isolation of the firehouse

Studio to the dizzyingly complex social

Universe of a new kind of workplace the

factory which would become not only the

setting in which his art was created but

itself the most radical ambiguous and

troubling work of art he ever made well

whatever had comes along and like

somebody called up yesterday a girl and

she said I a script called up your

ass and I thought the title was so great

and and I was so friendly I just told to

come up but she still you know we

haven't seen her yet so I don't know

again she thought that would be just the

thing for I'm not sure yeah I don't

know people think of you as the U the

the perfect pop artist Without Really

knowing what that means or I think

really knowing what your work is about

i' like to try to talk some more about

the PS and the things you did earlier uh

because there's something that I think

needs to be explained

for the public which has at this point a

certain

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

next time on American Masters Andy

Warhol steers pop culture as filmmaker

Reinventing Cinema star maker Andy

became famous by making other people

famous and ring Master till it all go

bad and to use these people for his art

Andy Warhol a documentary film directed

by Rick Burns continues next time on

American

Masters to learn more about Andy Warhol

visit

pbs.org Andy Warhol is available on DVD

for

$24.99 a CD soundtrack is available for

1698 plus shipping to order call 1 1800

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screen and

uh things like things like uh