Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

by Gary Indiana

  This new tone, quite different from his Mercury manner: what would later become familiar as the manner of the chat show, but which in 1938 was about puffing. . . . The Welles of The Campbell Playhouse . . . was a significantly different person to the Welles of the Theater of the Air: master of ceremonies, celebrity, leading actor, salesman, he had become appreciably more a product of the image makers. . . . He has, above all, gone commercial, the selling of the sponsor’s product and his own indistinguishable from one another; both indistinguishable from the selling of himself. The tone in which he extolls the beauty of radio as a medium is the same as the one in which he lauds the makers of Campbell Soup.1

  Between segments of Rebecca, Welles gravely extolled the Campbell Soup Company’s public-spirited virtu: “I know the Campbell kitchen, the Campbell soup, the Campbell men: their success is due to the human side of this business, its policy.”

  A notable feature of these commercials is a recurring theme of modernity—the modernity of the Campbell Playhouse’s selection of “the finest of today’s drama,” blended with the modernity of rich, wholesome, possibly better-than-homemade tomato, vegetable, chicken, and other Campbell’s soups whose preparation requires nothing more than a pot and a can opener. What could be more modern than getting dinner from a can?

  Welles’s metamorphosis from artist to celebrity entrepreneur prefigured Warhol’s own. Like Welles, Warhol became as much the product he sold as the art he made. His ambition enlarged exponentially when he realized what unlimited success was available to him. Warhol didn’t have Welles’s hammy baritone eloquence; though far more familiar with “high culture” than he generally let on, Warhol cultivated a repertoire of exactly the opposite methods of self-presentation, starting in his college years. Like Welles, Warhol understood the power of silence, of the clipped riposte—even though his aggressive passivity couldn’t have been further from Welles’s cultivated image as bon vivant and raconteur.

  The two artists also shared a mandarin dexterity in manipulating other people in the service of boundless ambition as well as the ability to set members of their entourages at odds with each other through well-placed gossip. Both also suffered severe late-career slumps they never fully overcame. And of course, Welles and Warhol both had a far from coincidental involvement with Campbell’s soup: the merger of corporatism with art.

  FIVE

  As a child, Warhol exhibited precocious drawing skills and colorist ingenuity, and he had an insatiable appetite for movie magazines. He collected “personalized” autographed photographs of film stars as a child.

  Andy’s brothers Paul and John sold produce from a truck bed in flourishing Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Andy tagged along, pitched in, and earned extra quarters selling dashed-off portraits of the customers. Turning art into cash was an early lesson in capitalism and the power of flattery.

  Warhol’s formal art training began early, at age nine, when he was accepted for Saturday morning classes at the Carnegie Museum. These opened Andy’s perspective to a realm of finer things, brought him in contact with other students from other rungs of the social ladder, and equipped him with the technical skills he would need in his later career.

  After graduating from Shenley High in the Oak-land section of Pittsburgh, Warhol enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Technical Institute, a technical college established to educate the children of steelworkers that eventually became present-day Carnegie Mellon University.

  He was several years younger than the other students, many of whom were veterans attending college on the GI Bill. Nevertheless, by all accounts Andy flourished in his new environment. Andy’s nephew, Jamie Warhola, observed:

  I would think that would be really intimidating to be up against all those GI jocks, yet Andy became comfortable enough amongst his heterosexual peers to outdo them on assignments. In a way, I think it was like boot camp in the artworld for him. He may have had this soft-spoken, quiet awkwardness on the personality side but on the artistic playing field he was aggressive and tough. . . . As for his fellow students, they generally grew to love him and were always looking forward to his solutions because of how great they always were and how he was able to create a little havoc for the teachers.2

  At Carnegie, Warhol adopted the blotted-line technique of wet-pressed drawing, familiar from the work of Ben Shahn, and refined this method to produce multiple versions of the same image—a technique he used throughout his commercial art career.

  Despite his initial shyness and passivity, Andy soon manifested eccentricities and mannerisms that suggested homosexuality. This wasn’t particularly scandalous in art school, and Warhol seems not to have been sexually active at the time, but simply, on occasion, overtly odd in his self-presentation. He once appeared at a party with his hair dyed green. Schoolmate Betty Ash thought “he was trying to look like a woman in a painting by Matisse,” but biographer Victor Bockris astutely thinks it likely that Warhol was imitating the eponymous victim-protagonist of Joseph Losey’s 1948 film The Boy with Green Hair.

  His work at Carnegie was sometimes strangely, defiantly unconventional; Andy produced several dog paintings inspired by instructor Balcolm Green’s Russian wolfhound. One showed a woman nursing a baby dog. It was included in a small student exhibition, but then removed at the insistence of a technical-resources instructor.

  For the 1949 exhibition of the Pittsburgh Associated Artists, Andy submitted a controversial canvas informally dubbed Nosepicker but actually entitled The Broad Gave Me My Face, but I Can Pick My Own Nose. The painting, reminiscent of works by George Grosz, depicts a boy with a finger jammed up one nostril; the exhibition jury, which happened to include Grosz, was divided about whether the work was “important” or dreadful. The picture was finally rejected, but earned Andy notoriety—it was, according to Bockris, “Andy’s first succès de scandale.”

  chapter two

  LEAP OF FATE

  ONE

  IN THE MONTHS BEFORE GRADUATION FROM CARNEGIE IN 1949, Warhol equivocated about his future plans. He considered becoming a high school art teacher and even applied unsuccessfully for such a job at an art school in Indiana; he was hesitant to move to New York, but was finally prodded to do so by his friend and collaborator Philip Pearlstein’s determination to go there. They both faced daunting odds in the city they’d visited a year earlier, though Warhol had been gutsy enough on that occasion to show his portfolio to Tina Fredericks, the art director of Glamour; she had promised him work. Earlier Carnegie alumni already settled in New York offered contacts in the commercial art world. But there was a considerable gap between magazine illustration and the world of “fine art” that both Pearlstein’s and Warhol’s ambitions would have to breach.

  From scattered beginnings in the 1930s, New York- based “modernist” art gained heft and traction during and after World War II. Like many art movements in Europe throughout the first half of the century, it initially roused interest, pro and con, within an art-centered elite, gradually became known to a wider public, and then became the subject of mass publicity. “The New York School,” “Abstract Expressionism,” or “Action Painting,” as it would variously be known, finally received the institutional embrace of the people whose business it was to shape public perception and bestow financial value on works of art.

  In the contemporary understanding of the term, there was no “art world” in the United States before 1945. The first decades of the twentieth century produced outstanding American artists influenced by European modernism, among them Florine Stettheimer, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley. The work of these artists received limited exposure, negligible in comparison with the reception given to the bucolic realism of Norman Rockwell and similar celebrants of insular, basically rural and small-town visions of America. The latter, which didn’t represent any “movement,” were painted in a nonstyle of illustrational kitsch in which “ordinary people” recognized the platitudes and ide
als of an agrarian country, its moral homilies, its wholesome and ever-renewed innocence.

  The country had no lack of imaginative, formally inventive artists in the 1920s and ’30s, but they had no viable art system for marketing their work. Many artists survived the Depression years by working in Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), painting murals and executing other public art for the government, but the war effort dried up funding for this resource. Artists whom the WPA had enabled to hone their talents found themselves with studios full of unsaleable art.

  This situation changed for a fraction of formerly WPA-supported artists—the majority eventually filled the art departments of colleges or went into other employment—as America emerged from the Depression and the last years of the war brought an unprecedented economic boom. A mere 40 galleries existed in New York at the beginning of the war, mostly specializing in French painting. By 1946, there were 150 galleries, and much of the art they offered was domestically produced.

  Institutional support for American art came hand-in-glove with corporate patronage and patriotic exhortations to “buy American.” You had to buy American if you were going to buy anything, since the Second World War had curtailed the supply of available French painting. MoMA, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, and corporate buyers all engaged in nativist cultural boosterism during the war years; auction houses and private dealers, by 1944, were selling prodigious quantities of American art. Auction houses hit all-time record sales in 1945; “galleries reported a 37 percent increase in sales over the previous record year,” Alice Goldfarb Marquis reports in Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg. “Average volume per gallery rose from 125 pictures to 160; prices were also higher, with about 20 percent of sales above $1,000.”1

  The American art being sold represented a narrow range of approaches to painting or sculpture: signature styles, though diverse, were all contained within defined boundaries that reflected a consensus of taste arrived at by what art historian Serge Guilbaut calls “the inner circle”: Peggy Guggenheim, Alfred Barr, James Thrall Soby, James Johnson Sweeney, and Clement Greenberg.

  Sweeney was the art critic for Partisan Review and also worked for Peggy Guggenheim; Barr was the founding director of MoMA; Soby and Sweeney both held important museum jobs while publishing art criticism; Greenberg had become the country’s most powerful art critic after throwing down the gauntlet, in 1939, against popular culture in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” a rather grim defense of “standards” published in Partisan Review.

  Among other pronouncements, Greenberg had declared, “The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs—our ruling class.” Our ruling class sat up and took notice of Greenberg’s decree.

  “Taste” had an ideological job to do, inseparable from the co-optation of “museum-quality” modernism into a cultural extension of the Cold War. American art needed a bold, innovative audacity to contrast with the drab, polemical realism advanced by the Soviet Union and its satellite nations. In contrast to a blatantly ideological, proletarian-populist Socialist Realism, American art would reflect the extreme outer boundaries of “artistic freedom” championed by its elitist inner circles—in Greenberg’s words, its “ruling class.” The quintessence of this unbridled freedom was located in the work of its most chaotic avatar: Jackson Pollock.

  At the end of the 1940s, Life magazine featured an elaborate spread on new American artists that included photos of Jackson Pollock frenetically splashing paint on canvases on his studio floor. Was he, the magazine rhetorically asked, “the greatest living painter in America?” While it’s been argued that Life obviously didn’t think so and offered Pollock and other abstract artists up for ridicule, Henry Luce’s Time-Life-Fortune media empire had an unfailing grasp of the prime tenet of public relations: ink is ink. Alfred Barr had convinced Luce that nothing reflected America’s unique democratic freedom better than these wild and crazy abstract artists the cognoscenti were going ape over.

  Millions who would never have heard of Pollock otherwise (in 1949 Life’s circulation was roughly 5.3 million) were drawn into excited arguments over Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the New York School—essentially different names for the same roster of artworks and artists. From Pollock’s new celebrity followed the ascendancy of other careers and reputations, based on art that, in one way or another, embodied a consistent image that the institutional arbiters of American art wanted to disseminate.

  Many alleged innovations of the new American art—biomorphic forms, symbolically titled abstractions, bizarre juxtapositions of imaginary objects, mythically evocative, nonrealist tableaux—were adapted, dissembled, or grabbed outright from the work of wartime Surrealist exiles. But the homemade American product arrived Handi-Wrapped in star-spangled clichés of cowboy individualism, the churning inner torment of the artist to “express” himself (it was all but exclusively “him”), and alcohol-ravaged, self-immolating struggles to achieve pure painting as its own raison d’être, painting without reference to a world beyond the canvas.

  Despite the non-objective and hermetic bent of “the New Painting”—whether one called it Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism, or an exemplar of the New York School (to simplify matters, these terms can be collapsed into Abstract Expressionism, or simply “the New Art”)—its inherent notions of heroicism, of evoking spiritual vastness, of wrestling with the ineffable and taming it into iconography, had deep roots in the eulogistic Noble Savagery and primal wilderness themes of sublimity found in earlier American painters like Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Homer Dodge Martin; it shared something of the same provincialism and the same conflation of white male heterosexual subjectivity with “universal” values and emotions.

  The canvas was the arena of inner struggle made palpable, the archaeology of its own protean creation. The combative romanticism of Jackson Pollock, the garrulous self-involvement of Barnett Newman, the misogynist brio of Willem de Kooning, and the bipolar quest for the Absolute of Mark Rothko, among other pathologies enacted on canvas (every artist, in every medium, inscribes his or her pathology in the work of art), received inexhaustible, authoritative cheerleading from powerful critics like Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, former Trotskyites who had ditched the idea that art should have any social or political content.

  The inner torment of the Abstract Expressionists, according to their supporters, resulted in visual graphs of anxiety that mirrored the collective unconscious. These artists excavated the very bowels of the human soul; their art sprang from the same timeless archetypes and symbols found in aboriginal carvings, cave paintings, and other residua of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, a notion squeezed from Jungian psychology like lemon juice and one that implicitly defined artmaking as a male activity. Particularly in the work of de Kooning, the canvas played the role of the passive female surface to the virile manipulations of the male painter.

  It’s startling today to realize how much power art critics exercised in the heyday of Greenberg and Rosenberg. They had little detailed knowledge of art history, but knew important art when they saw it. The two critics became mortal enemies after a brief friendship; though they were advocates for the same artists, each could prove that the other liked the same thing for the wrong reasons. They trafficked in the jargon of “greatness,” of “major” and “minor,” “important,” “groundbreaking,” and so on, the broad-brush vocabulary of subjective opinion marshaling a quorum. This language of consensus-building, of gathering a claque around a proper name, carried weight at a time when few Americans were familiar with any sort of art, and the sheer assertiveness of these critics attracted attention for the New Art in larger media venues than the small magazines that published their writings.

  But for all of the publicity surrounding Abstract Expressionism, the public reaction to it was overwhelmingly negative. The hype, in the short run,
did little for the sales and income of the artists, who remained a hard sell. Instead, over time, it enriched the small, elite group of collectors whose purchases were gradually ratified by institutional acquisition of the same artists. “Buy low, sell high” is the enduring principle of the art world as well as the stock market. In time, the artists too would materially benefit, but then, as now, they pushed the caboose on the gravy train.

  Although the New Art initially garnered more publicity than actual sales, what Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists devised, avant la lettre, was the phenomenon of “personal branding”: the assertion of individualism by marketing a distinctively packaged brand of the same product, brought to you by a distinct and vivid personality. It was this, rather than a preoccupation with what the artist had “inside,” that would carry over into Pop Art and all the art movements that followed after it.

  The artists themselves didn’t necessarily view themselves as members of any movement or school; each had his or her quiddities and ideas, individual techniques, formal goals. Many thought Greenberg ridiculous, Rosenberg overly florid, and both critics deleterious presences in the art world, yet their support was crucial to an artist’s inclusion in a congealing historical canon.

  The Abstract Expressionist painters were violently antipathetic toward younger artists doing different kinds of work. Proto-Pop foreigners like Arman and Eduardo Paolozzi, domestic anomalies like Wallace Berman and Peter Blake, crypto-realists like Richard Lindner, Ray Johnson, Peter Blake, and Ed Kienholz, were beyond the pale of acceptability, while such older figurative painters as Philip Evergood, Robert Vickrey, George Tooker, Jack Levine, Alton Pickens, and Paul Cadmus were considered leftovers from another era.