Andy Warhol Read Free

knowledge I may have of the devious Valerie Solanas, my sensitivity to the deep issues of feminism—and I cherish the truth that the master painter Sean Scully has never allowed his uncertainty regarding this book’s subject in any way to stand in the way of acknowledging the certainty of his friendship with its author. Finally this book and many of its peers owe their existence to Georges and Anne Borchardt, and their acumen, literary and practical. And for the beauty of her soul, her marvelous sense of comedy, her keen eye and her good sense and the gift of her love, I have been blessed—
blessed!
—by my marriage with Barbara Westman.

A Note on Notes
    The format is simple. Parenthetical references in the text are to the books listed in the bibliography. I have placed a word that refers to a title, together with page numbers. I have sought a readable text, in enjoyable language, and have kept references to a minimum.

Andy Warhol

ONE
The Window at Bonwit’s
    In Victor Bockris’s biography
Warhol
, there is a chapter titled “The Birth of Andy Warhol: 1959–61.” This obviously does not refer to Andy Warhol’s birth as a baby, which took place in 1928, in Pittsburgh, to immigrant Ruthenian parents. It refers, rather, to a set of changes in Warhol’s identity—the breakthrough, in effect, through which he became an icon. One of the works that helps visualize the breakthrough is a painting done in 1961, which consists in a greatly enlarged version of a simple black-and-white advertisement of the kind that appears in side columns and back pages of cheap newspapers. It advertised the services of a plastic surgeon, and showed two profiles of the same woman, before and after an operation on her nose. The left profile shows her with a large, witchlike nose, the right one with a cute turned-up nose, like a cheerleader’s or a starlet’s—the kind of nose that readerswith beaky noses dream of having. Since we read from left to right, there is a relationship of before and after between the two images, and indeed Warhol titled his work
Before and After
, of which he painted several versions. As such, it was the embodiment of the kind of dream that haunts people concerned with changing their looks in order to be, they think, more attractive. Replacing
before
with
after
is the path to beauty as they conceive it, and to happiness.
    The years 1959 and 1961 constitute a zone of biographical change between two stages of Warhol’s life, a zone of transfiguration. He was transformed from a highly successful commercial artist into a member of the New York avant-garde—something he lusted after with all the passion of Miss Big Nose yearning for the look of Miss Tiny Turned-up Nose. It was a transformation underscored by the imagery of
Before and After
as art. Before Warhol,
Before and After
would have been a piece of boilerplate commercial art, whose maker would be long forgotten. By 1961, greatly enlarged, it became a work of high art. Reproductions of
Before and After
before and after this transformation took place look exactly alike. The difference, one might say, is invisible. Part of what made Warhol the icon he became has to do with the fact that initially almost nobody would have acknowledged a difference between the two images. Warhol did not simply replicate a grungy piece of commercial art. He made the distinction between a piece of grungy art and a piece of high art at once invisible and momentous. But that meant that he changed not so much the way we look at art but the way art was understood. That meant that between 1959 and 1961, the seeds of a visual and indeed a cultural revolution were planted.

    Before and After:
American Iconic Dream. Andy Warhol,
Before and After
, 1960. Synthetic polymer paint and silk screen ink on canvas, 54 × 70 in. © Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY
    What happened when Andy Warhol became the