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SAINT ANDREW
Unsigned
"Terrific!" said the smiling young man, backed up against the wall by a mounting crush of people. The young man was artist Andy Warhol, and the crush was a tidal wave of guests at a party given to celebrate the opening of his latest show in New York last week. The wave grew to fantastic proportions. The dancing guests, jammed together in the big West Side apartment, frugged in place, like a mob of bears back-scratching against the trees of a thick forest. A New York Times photographer retrieved the wrong coat from a gigantic pile of overwear. The pile grew so surrealistically high that Norman Mailer, who arrived late, was led solicitously aside by the host to park his vestments in private. Such is success in New York's Babel of art.
There in the midst of the Beatle-rocking bedlam was the 32-year-old artist, listening to the twanging anthems of triumph with his elfin smile, dancing only with his pale blue eyes, looking, with his mysterious white hair and happy nose, like the offspring of a union between Peter Pan and W C. Fields.
Warhol is in truth the Peter Pan of the current art scene. He is already a legend of pop art with his world-famous paintings of Campbell's Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, tabloid front pages and American ways of dying. He paints the gamy glamour of mass society with the lobotomized glee that characterizes the cooled-off generation. Now his theme is flowers, but the garish, neon-colored flowers of cafeteria window boxes - Broadway blooms for Broadway glooms.
Before his opening at the Leo Castelli Gallery last week, Warhol looked happily at the fields of painted flora in his vast studio, a glittering arena covered entirely in aluminum foil and silver paint. "I waited till after the election," he said. "I was going to make the show all Goldwater if he won, because then everything would go, art would go ... But now it's going to be flowers - they're the fashion this year. They look like a cheap awning. They're terrific! "
And flowers it was, done in Warhol's new system in which he has a blown-up photograph converted into a silk screen. Warhol then forces varying thicknesses of paint through the screens onto canvas and adds color. This process produces a series of images that are the same but different, like the inky smudges of newspaper photos rubbed by millions of hands that carry them around the city.
Henry Geldzahler, the brilliant young assistant curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum, calls Warhol "a sensibility as sweet and tough, as childish and commercial, as innocent and chic, as anything in our culture." He is the true primitive of pop art, possessing the kind of traumatized naiveté that seems to be the closest thing to innocence our hip age can provide. He lives in a three-story house on Lexington Avenue, a house crammed with the eccentrically elegant artifacts of a bizarre civilization - old carrousel horses, a carnival punching-bag machine, a giant wooden Coke bottle, a crushed-car sculpture by John Chamberlain.
"Everything is art," says Warhol. "You go to a museum, and they say this is art and the little squares are hanging on the wall. But everything is art, and nothing is art. Because I think everything is beautiful - if it's right." For Warhol, "right" means "not faking it" being what you are, and the difference between right and not right is "style." "Style - like in de Kooning or Kline. It comes out in their brush stroke - the energy, the character, not just a painting technique."
But the intensely personal style that is the mark of a de Kooning or Kline is not for Warhol. He is the most blatant of the new personalities of pop - the " anti- sensibility" man who reacts in a euphoric monotone that is half ecstasy, half hibernation. That is why he turned to the mass-production techniques of silk screen. "I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should be like everybody. That seems to be what is happening now."
So Warhol's weapon against the loneliness of differentiation is a kind of happy regression, back to the undifferentiated childhood world of giant images and soothing repetition. But, because he is a man, not a child, the big image and the repeating image are a sort of fetish, just like the huge Carmen Miranda wedgie he has on a table at home, or like the giant shoe ad which won him the Art Director's Club Medal in 1957, when he was still a commercial artist.
From the fetishes of commercial art to the super-fetishes of painting was a logical step for Warhol. Like all pop artists, he saw the pathos and charm of the obsolescent images of mass culture, from a comic strip to an overwhelmingly unattainable movie beauty. Like all artists, the content of his life dictated the obsessions of his art. "I used to have the same soup lunch every day for twenty years. So I painted soup cans." But it is the final fillip of an absurd elegance that makes pop art, and Warhol adds: "I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a sandwich."
The elegance of his soup cans, his silk-screened serried ranks of Marilyn pouts or Troy Donahue smirks - even the elegance of his stark, silvery electric chairs and joltingly smudged car crashes, all have brought Warhol success (his bigger pictures sell for about $5,000) and easy entry to that new hip world of blurred genders and sharp characters, the polyestered successors to Scott Fitzgerald's golden youth. These violently groomed, perversely beautiful people want art, fun, ease, and unimpeded momentum in every conceivable direction. Pop art is their art.
Warhol has recently turned to filmmaking. After only a year behind the camera he has already been called by one critic "the most important experimental filmmaker now working." He is a star of the Film-Makers' Co-operative and several of his short films were shown as a kind of added attraction at the recent New York Film Festival. Warhol's films are the logical extension, one might say the reductio ad absurdum, of his deadpan celebrations of everyday phenomena. His first film, "Sleep," was six hours of a camera watching a sleeping man. The movie's only action was the twitches, tics, and heavings of his Morphean movements.
Other Warhol films are called "Eat," a study of a masticating countenance, "Kiss," a close look at nonstop osculation, and "Empire," an eight-hour zoological study of the Empire State Building. "It's terrific! " says Warhol of "Empire." "It's blurry because the building moves in the wind. You see the lights come on, and the stars - it's fantastic, beautiful."
Jonas Mekas, the guiding force in the Film-Makers' Co-op, calls Warhol's films "meditations on life ... almost religious ... a looking at daily activities like sleeping or eating. It's a saying Yes to life." Last week Warhol was saying Yes in his latest opus. It is his contribution to the current Jean Harlow craze, except that Harlow is played by a man Mario Montez, a leading "superstar" in the "underground" movies. On a couch in his studio the dark Montez, transformed into a chalky-white "Gene" Harlow, delicately chomped a banana next to a real blonde superstarlet, Carol Koshinskie, while a superloud record of "Swan Lake" blasted away in the background.
The next night Warhol was back, this time in front of another Co-op director's camera. Gregory Markopoulos was making a mythological epic in which Warhol played the Greek god Oceanus. Dressed in black jeans, skindiver's black tunic, streamers of silver paper, and a sea-shell codpiece, Warhol pedaled majestically on an Exercycle for fifteen minutes. "He's a happy person," said Markopoulos. "The kind of character Aeschylus had in mind for the god of the sea." The next night Warhol, togged out in soup and fish the same black jeans, plus white shirt and tuxedo jacket - attended a movie-watching party at the home of Jane Holzer, the Vogue cover girl. "Baby Jane," called by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland "the most contemporary girl I know," is a Warhol superstar. With her mane of blond hair, her hyperthyroid drive and buckshot hedonism, she epitomizes the pants-wearing young set who feed on the hybrid world of pop, flick, and hip.
At the party, Jane as usual ate nothing but candy. Warhol circulated among young wraiths from the worlds of fashion and frolic. Jane's real-estate-broker husband watched impassively, like a character in a Mailer story, while on the screen Babyjane's face in gigantic close-up chewed gum and brushed her teeth. A hypnotic pop tension built up, broken by Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel's wife shouting, "We're all turned on to you, baby."
Such are the orgiastic climaxes of Warhol's world. It is a strange world; a chaos stylized against chaos. "Andy's so nice," says Jane Holzer. "There's no hang-up or anything; he makes you feel good." In an age structured for spectators, Warhol is the supreme accepting spectator. "He's been called a voyeur," says writer-art dealer Ivan Karp. "While the other pop artists depict common things, Andy is in a sense a victim of common things: he genuinely admires them. How can you describe him - he's like a saint - Saint Andrew."
At his studio last week, Warhol was finishing a series of silk screens of Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination - the only non-flower picture in his show. He kneeled on the floor in green rubber gloves spreading paint through the screen with a wooden bar - a craftsman absorbed in his work. "That picture of her at the swearing in of President Johnson was so good," he said. "Maybe I should have made the whole show just Jackie. It's terrific."
Newsweek, December 7, 1964: 100-104
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