Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

by Gary Indiana

  By 1949, the Abstract Expressionists had coalesced into a men’s club, headquartered at the Cedar Bar, which disparaged all but a handful of female artists, expressed real hatred of homosexuals, bathed in a sea of booze every night, and considered the only place for blacks in the arts a jazz club. What had become, in effect, “the New York art world” was an utterly unwelcoming environment for a figure like Andy Warhol, who prudently put his “high art” ambitions on hold, immersed himself in commercial art, and waited with steel-willed patience for his moment to arrive.

  TWO

  Warhol moved to New York with fellow Carnegie graduate Philip Pearlstein in 1949—just in time for one of the weirdest decades America had ever known. Postwar America was marked by two contradictory preoccupations. Technical advances and financial opportunities seemed limitless, from the Salk polio vaccine to affordable home appliances, from easy mortgages in garden suburbs to reasonably priced cars. At the same time, from the first successful Soviet atomic test in 1949 emerged the very real threat that all life could be vaporized into random particles in minutes or disastrously mutated into bizarre forms by atomic radiation.

  Atomic Armageddon quickly became the metaphorical fodder for hundreds of B movies—Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, It Came from Outer Space, These Are the Damned, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, The Thing, and When Worlds Collide, to name a few. (When the cultural wheel finally turned and perpetual menace reached its inevitable saturation point, apocalypse met its slapstick match in Terry Southern’s script for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.)

  Television provided nightly seizures of constipating terror with thermonuclear disaster narratives in programs like The Outer Limits, Way Out, and The Twilight Zone. Typically, a prudent, wholesome family constructed a basement bomb shelter stocked with ample food, water purification tablets, and air filtration systems (throughout the fifties, American families received fat manila envelopes from Civil Defense stuffed with life-saving goodies in military drab-olive cans and phials), while profligate neighbors, caught mid-martini by an onslaught of incoming ICBMs, attacked the fortified bunker next door with lawn mowers, chainsaws, crowbars, and whatever else they could find in the garage, endangering the survival of all.

  Another fear that suffused this era of unparalleled economic boom was the possibility that Americans were becoming too much alike, ossified into unrewarding conformity. The consumer Nirvana that followed World War II had created a standardized version of “the good life” at conspicuous odds with the country’s mythos of rugged individualism. Suburban uniformity and the fear of standing out in the crowd perplexed sociologists and pop psychologists in books such as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, Philip Wylie’s A Generation of Vipers, J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society , David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man.

  Films dramatized the fear of being “taken over” by emotional blankness and sinister cerebral clarity, promoting unease about “being like everybody else.” Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the most succinct articulation of the country’s nascent anxiety about homogenization. Interplanetary pods begin “replacing” humans, when they fall asleep, with emotionless replicas who carry on the everyday lives of their victims, but without the bothersome differences in temperament and ideas that make for a diverse and difficult world. The pod people can exist free of grief, romantic love, disappointment, joy, and everything else that might be associated with “soul”: Finney’s dystopian fantasia had myriad offshoots in films and fictions about “cold” scientists who viewed a zombielike unanimity as the solution to all human conflict. “Imagine a world without pain, without feeling,” was a standard mad scientist’s enticement in this kind of movie to recalcitrant individualists who resisted being replaced by communitarian duplicates. Finney minted the perfect metaphor for communism and consumerist uniformity.

  Apart from science fiction movies specializing in emotional erasure themes, Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle , Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, and virtually any film by Douglas Sirk dramatized the period’s social, political, and sexual asphyxia, while the Doris Day- Rock Hudson-Tony Randall school of chaste sex comedies pandered to the allure of transgression while squashing it, resolving suspected infidelities, flirtations, criminal intentions, and so on, into celebrations of the sublimated sadomasochism of the ad agency, the wisdom of the patriarchal family, the wholesome ignorance of carnal relations even among married Americans with children.

  Andy Warhol eventually adopted the blankness and lack of feeling feared by many Americans who felt “taken over” by the consumer lifestyle. This gradual makeover followed years of eager-to-please, obsequious hustling in the world of magazine and fashion illustration, which catered precisely to consumerism and sharpened Warhol’s sense that what people wanted and what people feared were simply facets of the same insecurity.

  THREE

  Andy Warhol flourished in his early career in advertising. He was a favorite of magazine editors, for whom he always produced an array of illustrations to choose from, delivered in paper bags—“Andy Paperbag” was his bedraggled persona of the period.

  Warhol showed his work in galleries as early as 1952, when the Hugo Gallery exhibited his illustrations of Truman Capote’s writings. In 1954 he had two shows at the Loft Gallery on Forty-fifth Street, the first an array of folded-paper sculptures arranged on the floor, the other drawings of dancer John Butler.

  But the principal showcase for Warhol’s work during this phase was a fashionable ice cream parlor and notions store, the Serendipity Café, owned by friends of Warhol’s who helped furnish his first apartment. These little exhibitions were worlds away from “the art world” that Warhol wanted into, the rarefied realm of art dealers like Sidney Janis, Betty Parsons, Tibor de Nagy, and Martha Jackson and artists like Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell; the serious art of the day was heavy, portentous, and generally humorless, a thick imbroglio of polemics and agonic practices that an artist like Warhol, having nothing to offer, could only gaze at with somewhat baffled envy.

  Warhol’s aesthetic sensibilities were unusually frank and unfiltered in his noncommercial drawings and paintings of the 1950s, and this “serious” work kept him at the margins of the “high art” realm, not only because of its obdurately representational bent, but because it depicted, or alluded to, homoeroticism and shared with Warhol’s commercial art certain twee and whimsical qualities redolent of homosexuality and the form of delectation known as “camp.”

  The rarefied stylization of commercial illustration in the 1950s, its “effeminate” delicacy and decorative excess, exuberance of detail and often fetishistic treatment of its subject matter, was by no means controversial, but normative: commercial art was one field where being, or seeming, gay carried no particular stigma and posed no discernible threat to the status quo. Fashion illustration, particularly, was geared to a female clientele; its theatrical ornamentation and jewel-like preciosity were exactly the features most appealing to consumers of the products being advertised, and the editors who commissioned this kind of art were unfazed by the presumed sexual orientation of the artists they hired. Illustration was a safe haven for homosexuals, who, in the 1950s, were pointedly unwelcome in more “serious” professions, including that of the “serious” artist.

  The anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s was intricately linked to social taboos of many kinds. The fear-mongering purveyed by aggressive anticommunism further played upon other societal fears as part of its agenda—the early manifestations of the black civil rights movement were attributed to “Communist agitation,” and the virtually unspeakable realm of homosexuality was often, speakably, linked to “Communist subversion”—homosexuality was widely regarded as a mental disease, a threat to the normative nuclear family, and, in the realms of
government, a secret malady whose sufferers were vulnerable to blackmail and the surrender of state secrets to the nation’s enemies.

  On the artistic front, the U.S. State Department was actively engaged in promoting American art, especially Abstract Expressionism, as evidence of American “free expression”—in reality, a type of artistic expression with no polemical axes to grind and no political agendas; moreover, its avatars, aside from a few token females, were “real men,” two-fisted paint-slingers like Jackson Pollock, to whom any taint of sexual nonconformity was anathema. This dominant fine art establishment, which only began to develop cracks in the middle and late 1950s, had no vectors of entrée for an artist like Andy Warhol. Ironically or not, the two artists whose works most effectively broke up the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, were both gay—but so discreetly gay that their art effectively concealed it, and they shared a disdain for artists like Warhol who exhibited “gay” mannerisms or produced work with any marked homoerotic proclivities.

  Until Warhol commenced his bid for “fine art” attention, Andy the Dandy, Andy Paperbag, Raggedy Andy worked in a field where his homosexuality was undoubtedly assumed and posed no threat to his employment prospects. Andy Warhola, whose last name, legendarily, was accidentally abbreviated in a magazine credit and stayed that way (a nice story, but he’d often dropped the “a” at the end of his name in college), could assume the honorary, protective coloration of one of “nature’s bachelors,” as homosexuals were sometimes slyly referred to at the time. At the tail end of the 1950s, Warhol recognized a paradigm shift in the world of “high art” and started pushing in earnest, with every workaholic sinew, to find his way into it. His efforts got no initial support from Johns and Rauschenberg.

  In 1958, Emile de Antonio, a filmmaker who also acted as a kind of artists’ agent, was brutally frank when Warhol asked him why Rauschenberg and Johns didn’t like him: they thought he was “too swish,” and somewhat inexplicably, they faulted him for collecting works by other artists (including a drawing by Johns)—a practice with long historical precedents, though according to them, it just wasn’t done. (At the time, Warhol’s little collection included small works by Braque, Magritte, Miró, and Klee.) Rauschenberg and Johns decorated windows for Bonwit’s, just as Andy did. Using a made-up, composite name, “Matson Jones,” they dressed windows to survive, but Andy was famous for it. And so on.

  At least one critic has suggested that Warhol’s “collecting,” for Johns and Rauschenberg, marked Warhol as a consumer rather than a producer, and that “consumption,” in this context, was connected to the “feminine” activity of shopping. (Perhaps this was true, though Warhol’s peers-to-be couldn’t possibly have envisioned the fantastic scope and promiscuity of Warhol’s “collecting,” which included every conceivable kind of collectable object, from cookie jars to gemstones, in a hoard of jaw-dropping magnitude that filled Warhol’s successive townhouses and, after his death, would result in a ten-day-long auction at Christie’s.) But certainly they were more directly alarmed by Andy’s flaunting of gay mannerisms. In the ’50s, a flaming queen in the room was a psychological threat to any closeted gays in his vicinity, as if their own “unmanly” traits might be betrayed by sheer proximity.

  FOUR

  While modern art was lampooned in the tabloids, detested by most of the public that took any notice of it, and greeted with trite epithets of charlatanism and fraud by traditionalist artists and educators, its most clamorous enemies in the late 1940s and early ’50s could be found among the Great Apes of the United States Congress, who were eager to capitalize on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against domestic subversion wherever it could be imagined to exist. During their European honeymoon, McCarthy’s aides Roy Cohn and David Schine even cleansed U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and armed forces libraries abroad of books containing un-American themes and stories. Some thirty thousand all told, the list included books by Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia, Sherwood Anderson, Pearl S. Buck, Erskine Caldwell, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, Arthur Miller, Mickey Spillane, Edgar Snow, Norman Mailer, Georges Simenon, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Theodore Dreiser. Also expunged from U.S.-sponsored cultural events abroad were works of composers such as Aaron Copland and exhibitions of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

  The political crusade against modernist painting was triggered by a State Department plan that began in the late 1940s: to send “advanced” American art abroad in a series of government-sponsored exhibitions as part of a wide-reaching propaganda effort on behalf of “the American way of life.”

  Not everyone saw a flowering of free expression in modernism, and many intent on bringing free expression to “enslaved” countries didn’t much believe in allowing free expression in America. A Missouri congressman named George Dondero led a charge by legislators by declaring that “all modern art is Communistic,” citing the specific wiles and devious methods by which Cubism, Futurism, Dada, “Expressionism,” and “Abstractionism” sought to demoralize and mentally unbalance Americans and ultimately—tools of the Kremlin that these artists all were—destroy Americanism, an increasingly ill-defined and ever-diminishing quality, or quantity.

  A lunatic, obviously. Like many lunatics, Dondero enjoyed enthusiastic support from other lunatics. One of Dondero’s posse revealed that “modern art is actually a means of espionage . . . if you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in U.S. fortifications, and such crucial structures as Boulder Dam.”2 This must have come as startling news to artists who had little familiarity with Boulder Dam and other crucial structures or fortifications. The idea of Communist spies meticulously scanning reproductions of Pollock’s Blue Poles with magnifying glasses and decoder rings really was McCarthyism in a nutshell. Whether or not the artist carried some memory of this legislator’s paranoid fantasy in mind, one of Warhol’s last paintings, a crude black-and-white map indicating known Soviet missile sites, carries a rich irony indeed. (A further irony: Warhol’s father had worked on the construction of Boulder Dam.)

  Dondero and company caused endless trouble for the State Department, which endorsed Eisenhower’s strategically liberal view of modernist art. The artist should be free to realize his or her autonomous vision without state interference. “As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be a healthy controversy and progress in art,” Eisenhower declared in an address on freedom in the arts in 1954. “How different it is in a tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.”3 Socialist Realism, the approved art of the Communist world, restricted the artist to oversaturated realist paintings of joyful workers driving tractors and their beaming comrades operating industrial machinery. (Of course, such works were not terribly different from the kind of thing most Americans recognized as art, most typically in the form of Norman Rockwell’s cover paintings for the Saturday Evening Post.)

  The more shrouded enclaves of American government also embraced the clear propaganda value of showing the new art abroad. As they habitually did and still do, they resorted to covert means of achieving their goal rather than attempting to seek funding through legislation. The CIA, using agent Tom Braden as its point man, laundered the money for overseas exhibitions through a network of private foundations and institutions (primarily the Museum of Modern Art). Known as the Planning Coordination Group and presided over by Nelson Rockefeller, this company “oversaw all National Security Council decisions, including CIA covert operations.”4 The Rockefeller brothers’ bank, Chase Manhattan, was among the first to decorate its interiors with abstract paintings.

  Numerous MoMA trustees had close ties to the company. Jock Whitney had belonged to the CIA’s forerunner, the OSS (Office of Strategic Service
s), and after the war he established J. H. Whitney & Company, “a partnership dedicated to the propagation of the free-enterprise system.”

  One partner in Whitney’s venture, William H. Jackson, was the CIA’s deputy director. William Burden, appointed chairman of MoMA’s advisory committee in 1940, had been president of the CIA’s Fairfield Foundation.

  It would take an entire chapter to cite the names and résumés of MoMA trustees, consultants, committee chairmen, and others employed by the museum while engaged in propaganda and intelligence work for the CIA and clandestine funding of anticommunist left publications such as Encounter.

  Questions inevitably arise when “unpolitical art” is used for political ends, or when the success or failure of artists depends on their complicity with propaganda. Many Abstract Expressionists and other artists chosen for deluxe exposure in lavish foreign exhibitions during the 1950s had been intensely involved in the politics of the 1930s, whether as Communists, fellow-travelers, Trotskyites, Stalinists, socialists, or anticommunist leftists. It’s improbable that none of them suspected the purpose for which they were being used; it is also revealing that nobody rejected the blandishments of celebrity, however questionable its vectors.

  Personal success trumped political conviction, probably for many reasons. Unlike artists in the Communist world, American artists weren’t being asked to inject any state-dictated content into what they were doing or to introduce ideology into their paintings—which, in the case of Abstract Expressionism, would hardly have been possible anyway. Artists want their work to be seen and shown as widely as possible, a perfectly natural desire. Moreover, one of Abstract Expressionism’s goals was to raise American art from its provincial status to parity with, if not dominance over, its European “betters.”

  In effect, the agenda of the State Department was no different than the agendas of the artists themselves; if they understood that they were being used to “fight communism” on the cultural front, the battleground wasn’t in Russia or its satellite states, but in Western Europe, the art of which had long been held up as superior to anything produced by Americans.