Andy Warhol Read Free Page A

cultural icon Andy Warhol was not simply a biographical transition, in which a successful commercial artist became a serious avant-garde artist. It was a social transition, in that certain individuals of great importance in keeping track of the frontiers of art recognized that Warhol had done something of significance as far as the shape ofthat frontier was concerned. Artistic change has to be recognized and accepted as such by what we shall designate (to follow usage) as “the
art world
” of that time—certain curators, dealers, critics, collectors, and, of course, other artists. That art world was in this respect prepared for Andy Warhol. He entered an ongoing discourse, and contributed to the direction this discourse took over the next years. By itself, that did not suffice, of course, to make him an icon. For that, a culture far wider than the art world of the very early 1960s was required, and Warhol himself had to be perceived in ways that went far beyond questions of the frontiers of art. Certainly, his being an artist was central in his becoming an icon—but how many artists, after all, go on to become icons? Very few. Only Warhol, for example, in the Pop art movement, who collectively changed the face of art in the mid-1960s, in fact rose to iconic stature. Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, and James Rosenquist were the chief Pop artists, and none of them really became icons save within some sector of the art world, if even there. They were each wonderful artists. But Warhol was to become
the
artist of the second half of the twentieth century. He became an artist for people who knew very little about art. He represented an ideal form of life that touched his world from many sides. He embodied a concept of life that embraced the values of an era that we are still living in. In certain ways he created an iconic image of what life was all about. No other artist came close to doing that.
    The change from artist to icon happened fairly rapidly. By1965, for example, the transformation was complete. In October of that year, Andy and his “Superstar,” Edie Sedgwick, attended his first American retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. There was a crowd of at least two thousand rapturous persons, most of them students. No one had expected a crowd that large, and the curator, Sam Green, to be prudent, removed most of the paintings from the walls, leaving the gallery all but bare. But the crowd had not come so much to look at the art as to see Warhol and his consort. Chants of “Andy and Edie! Andy and Edie!” went up. People were jostled and trampled. It became a problem of crowd control much like what was happening at rock concerts. Andy, Edie, and their party found safety on an iron staircase, where, like demagogues on balconies, they waved at the crowds below. Finally a hole was axed in the ceiling, and the celebrities were able to escape to the floor above. Crowd behavior like that was almost standard with certain dreamboat musicians, like the Beatles, or Frank Sinatra before them. But it was unheard of at art events, where the institutional atmosphere of the museum enjoined quiet and respect. The change did not escape Warhol’s notice. “To think of it happening at an art opening,” he said. “Even a Pop Art opening. But then, we weren’t just at the art exhibit—we
were
the exhibit” (Bourdon, 213–14).
    The history of Modernist art was a history of anger and resentment. As far back as the Salon des Refusés of 1863, on the instruction of Louis Napoleon, paintings rejected by the selectioncommittee were hung in a separate gallery, where viewers could make up their own minds. Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
was the target of jeers and shouts of derision. There were riots in Paris when Alfred Jarry’s
Ubu Roi
was first presented, or