Taschen editions tend to be:
- cheap (this one cost me a fiver)
- full of excellent quality colour reproductions (I count 92 illustrations, about 80 in colour)
- translated from the original German – which often makes the prose feel a bit lumpy
Biography
Andrew Warhola was born in 1928 or 1930, in Forest Hill, Pennsylvania son of a Czech immigrant miner and construction worker, who was often away from home and died after a protracted illness in 1942. 1945-9 Andrew studies at Carnegie Institute of Technology Pittsburgh before moving to New York and quickly finding work as a commercial artist for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and other top-end magazines, while also producing commercial art, sales images of shoes and shop window-dressing. First solo exhibition in 1952 and first group exhibition in 1954. 1956 exhibition of Golden Shoes and wins awards for his commercial design. 1957 wins another award for commercial artists. 1960 creates first works based on comic strips and Coca Cola bottles.
1962, after 13 years in New York, he paints his breakthrough paintings of Campbell soup tins, dollar bills, the first silk-screen prints of Hollywood stars, takes part in a pioneering exhibition of Pop art, produces silk prints of car crashes and the electric chair, rents the attic which will later become famous as the Factory. In the next two years he and a cadre of keen young assistants produce over 2,000 works.
In 1963 he starts producing films with Sleep and Empire: he’ll go on to produce 75 experimental and avant-garde movies.
1964 first sculptures of commercial products – Brillo, Heinz and Del Monte packaging. 1965 announces he’s giving up art to focus on film-making and meets the Velvet Underground with whom he’s involved for the next few years.
1969-72 few works, only a handful of commissioned portraits. 1972 series of Mao. 1975 publication of his book, From A to B and Back Again. 1876 The Skulls and Hammer and Sickle series. 1977 Ten athletes. 1980 retrospective exhibition Portraits of the 70s. 1980s develops a TV channel. Publishes POPisms. A series based on famous paintings e.g. Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. 1986 series of Lenin portraits and self-portraits prove to be his last. 1987 dies as a result of surgery.
Work
You can read a book like this or just skip through the pictures. For a start the examples given here of his commercial art or of his early drawings are astonishingly weak.
- Hotdog (1958)
- Judy Garland (1956)
This early part of the book is the most interesting because it describes his struggle to find a voice and style. The art world in the 1950s was dominated by Abstract Expressionism – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko et al. The tone was intensely intellectual and serious, with each spatter of paint symbolising the anguish and agony of the Great Artist struggling with his medium and against his own psychological demons. A few lone voices argued for a lighter view of the world, namely Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg who both, in the mid-1950s, had begun to experiment with using everyday imagery (numbers, targets) or detritus from the streets. Similar ways of thinking are visible in his famous window display at Bonwit Teller department store, 1961.
In the panel on the left the use of fragments of words and letters is reminiscent of Johns; while the large-scale blowing up of a scene from a Superman comic to make the third panel obviously brings to mind Roy Lichtenstein who was to make a career out of blowing up comic illustrations. The book tells us that Warhol was introduced to Lichtenstein, saw his early comic book work, recognised Lichtenstein was doing it better and dropped his on the spot.
Storm Door from 1960 is fascinating because it shows the influence of both Johns, in the use of words and fragmented phrases, with the deliberately loose dripping which characterised Abstract Expressionism. He is so obviously caught between stools. And the same with Peach halves.
- Storm Door
- Peach halves (1962)
Then, suddenly, Bam! Soup tins, dollar bills, Marilyn, electric chair and he has found his brand, a look and feel he would never depart from and – crucially – could be mass produced, turned out in large numbers.
- Campbell’s soup (1962)
- Marilyn
- Product Boxes (1964)
He experimented with a stylised treatment of newspaper front pages but these seem to me very poor.
- Daily News (1962)
What these and the early illustrations of boots and shoes and hamburgers seem to show is that his own drawings were very so-so. But his eye for a photographic image – and then the silk screen printing of them, with variations in colour and contrasting – was nothing less than genius.
- Elvis (1963)
- Jackie (1964)
- Elizabeth Taylor (1965)
- Mao (1972)
- Flowers (1970)
- Mick Jagger (1975)
- Gun (1982)
- Venus (1984)
Warhol and the Portrait
Millions of words have been written about Warhol’s obsession with or deconstruction of glamour, the movies, celebrity culture, sex appeal, consumer capitalism and the rest of it. Honnef makes a simpler more powerful point when he observes that Warhol’s longest lasting and most prolific genre was The Portrait, a genre as old as painting. Consider how he refreshed and altered it, especially by using series with variations, in ways hard to explain.
It would be interesting to get a copy of the book, Portraits by Andy Warhol which features some images, including Elvis, Mao, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Blondie, Mick Jagger, Ginger Rogers, Prince, Grace Kelly, Rudolf Nureyev, even Queen Elisabeth II of the UK. He was described as ‘the court painter of the 70s’ and there is a new shallowness, a cocaine and Studio 53 vapidity about many of the 70s portraits; there’s certainly a ‘late’ feel to the silk screen portraits done after the 60s, just as brilliant but somehow less inspired.
He also did quite a few self-portraits, particularly in the 80s.
Do Warhol’s portraits say anything about the sitter? Or do the pencil and paint additions to the basic photographic likeness, the mad multiplicities of gaudy colourings, do they reinforce, undermine or empty the images of all feeling? Are good photos transformed into semi-divine icons?
Just on this one issue of portraits, the book (not the author, his selection of images) makes crystal clear that when Warhol strays away from the human subject his work – even when still using striking images and the silk screen technique and multiple iterations with colour variants etc – by and large gets pretty dull. Sort of OK, a bit interesting, but…
- Car crash (1963)
- Electric chair (1963)
- Still lifes
In the 1980s he returned to actually drawing things – coloured and printed in sets like the photos but still, images he himself drew in the endearingly amateurish style of the 1950s.
- Parrot (1983)
- Dollar signs (1982)
Yes, nice enough in their way, and once coloured and printed in sets then, yes, attractive. But fundamentally, Andy was a people person.
Five types of repetition
Does repetition empty of meaning or fill with meaning? Or both.
Honnef quotes a comment by the German art historian Werner Spies that some of the repetitions capture ‘the desolation of repetition’. More precisely, ‘the destruction of feeling by overexposure and of enjoyment by overconsumption’ (quoted page 68). These are two distinct things:
1. The destruction of feeling is something Warhol apparently celebrated in his own life, carefully cultivating a completely affectless persona, studiedly indifferent even to the creation of his own artworks, leaving – for example – the colour combinations of many of the Marilyn prints to his assistants. On this interpretation Pop aims at complete cool, not just deadpan presentation of hyper-familiar artifacts but actual emotional deadness. Emptiness but not with negative connotations. Just nothing being there.
‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me. There’s nothing behind it.’
2. The second phrase comes from a different register, suggesting the repetitions re-enact the destruction of sensory enjoyment in a culture which is overwhelmed with too much of everything: the obsessively repeated images of glamour and stardom and iconic figures become a visual form for the other sense which are over-stimulated in affluent America: fast food leading to obesity; drugs leading to 50,000 overdoses every year. They amount to an overdose of imagery; they embody the excess of overweight American culture.
Well, they’re possibilities, just two of the several hundred which can be teased out of Warhol’s work.
3. Repetition with variation also strongly suggests music: the classical tradition is full of composers who took simple themes and showed off their dazzling skills by putting them through all sorts of musical hoops and distortions, from the listenable works of Bach and Mozart through to the fiendishly mathematical structures of the post-war serialist composers. Theme and variations is a basic genre of classical music and a common task set all aspiring composers.
4. Towards the end of the 1960s, the New York composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich rejected the stifling complexities of serial composition and began experimenting with the fundamental building blocks of music, the repetition of very basic motifs, with very slight changes in tempo and co-ordination which turned out to create strange hunting blurred effects.
These composers came to be called Minimalists and became famous in the early 1970s at the same time as the Minimalist artists – but the fascination with the aesthetic, psychological and semantic meaning of repetition which they explore, is already a key aspect of Warhol’s style a decade earlier.
- Atomic bomb (1962)
5. But Warhol is quoted elsewhere as saying Repetition amounts to reputation and, delving into this phrase, it turns out to be a commonplace of marketing and brand management i.e. the dependable repetition of service, a delivery, a purchase, underpins a brand’s reputation. Warhol seemed to be using it in a slightly tangential way to indicate that repetition of an image imprints it on the viewer’s brain. This can be taken on at least three levels:
a) As a basic tenet of advertising and brand management – get your product in front of the consumer as often as possible – hence the proliferation of Warhol’s own prints helped to make them well-known and created a virtuous circle, creating his brand, which led to more art in series and multiples, which then boosted the brand. Until we find ourselves in a situation where works by Warhol are now among the most expensive in art history so that Eight Elvises recently sold for $100 million and Car Crash for $105 million.
b) On a psychological level, if we see something enough times it becomes part of our mental furniture and an emotionally and psychologically reassuring presence. Is that how we feel about the Mona Lisa or a picture of Churchill? Does it explain how and why photos of movie stars (and latterly, pop stars) seem so reassuring – simply because we are saturation bombed with them from billboards, hoardings, TV ads, all over the internet, the front of magazines and newspapers? Is that what ‘screen icon’ means, a look which either taps into archetypal longings in our animal minds, or creates a profound sense of familiarity and reassurance by virtue of its repetition?
Which comes first, the brilliance of the photographic image which Warhol selects – or his artistic treatment of it, his proliferation of it into sets of paintings and prints? Or do both conspire in a potentially unlimited virtuous circle until part of the great Vortex of Images which all sighted people inhabit, the so-called Mediasphere, becomes permanently Warhol.
Related links
- Warhol by Klaus Honnef on Amazon
- Andy Warhol Wikipedia article
- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Related reviews
- The American Dream: pop to the present @ the British Museum (May 2017)
- Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
- The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
- Pop Art Design @ Barbican (February 2014)
- Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Books & Boots 
