Celebrating Early Springtime with Andy: A Colorful March of Warhol

PART FIVE:

IMAGES AT A REMOVE, A GRAVE, MYSTERY BUS!

The Factory

Marilyn

IMAGES AT A REMOVE

The texture of the story of the original Warhol silkscreen painting, currently undergoing appraisal in our office, feels surreal and lovely like, I imagine, the shock of red velvet in a booth made for Andy Warhol and his groupies, in the back room at Max’s Kansas City. The reason that coming to understand the provenance of the piece registers as so unreal, mythical(see blog from two weeks past) is simply that it’s hard to believe the iconic images of and surrounding Warhol have an actual source, a beginning—it’s hard to feel the human heat in these sometimes icy, removed images.

The marriage between the infinite replicas of images surrounding Warhol and his Factory, and the replicas Warhol perpetuated himself in his silkscreen paintings and prints, build a mountainous, somewhat forbidding presence at times—the cultural fall-out of the experiences of the famous and the now dead, repeated infinitely. (A great Late Modern Art history professor I had a few years back related the story of a Warhol retrospective in LA, remarking that rather than showcasing a varied oeuvre, it would have been more effective to show one repeated motif—to just fill the museum with various replicas of the his tireless Marilyn series or his Flowers.

A GRAVE

* * *

“…repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.”

—Marianne Moore, from “A Grave”

Marianne Moore signals the deathlike nature of the sea, the sea as a “collector” of lost items and men—Warhol was this, too—the all-encompassing, non-emotive, powerful collector. Pat Hackett recalls his Time Capsules, simple 10” X 18” X 14” brown cardboard boxes—hundreds of them. The boxes held anything he found interesting “Which to Andy, who was interested in everything, meant literally everything” (Hackett xv).” When a box was filled, it would be taped up, dated, put in storage and immediately replaced with an identical looking box. “Dropped things are bound to sink/” continues Moore in “A Grave,” “if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor/ consciousness” (Moore 49).

“THERE IS NOTHING DEEPER THAN THE SUPERFICIAL”

This maxim seems to apply to Warhol’s desire to be seen simply. In his own words: “If you want to know who Andy Warhol is, just look at my face, or at the surface of my work. It’s all there” (Danto 9). Indeed his own rather pat description of the Marilyns which follows both “flattens” the concept of celebrity, at the same time making all materials democratically available for consternation and aesthetic meditation: “I just see Monroe as another person. As for whether it’s symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it’s beauty, and she’s beautiful and if something’s beautiful, it’s pretty colors, that’s all… this is only the beginning, it’ll get better, and everything will be useful decoration” (Goldsmith 88).

Art critic David Bourdon poetically described the effect of the Marilyn Diptych: “The portraits seemed to fade away to some ethereal place… like the persistence of memory after something is gone, or the anticipation of forgetting something before it is gone” (Goldsmith 9).

Warhol’s use of prolific celebrity images creates a strange paradox—maximum exposure of a superficial image. “Warhol’s painting of Marilyn did not impinge on the private person so constantly sought by the curious…The publicity picture itself—and only this picture—is Warhol’s subject” (Shanes 118, Honnef 59). In the words of Warhol: “I did meet Marilyn Monroe, at a party. I thought she was really great. Her movie image was quite different from her personal image though. She was quite quiet” (Wrenn 18).

Eric Shanes reads the Marilyn Diptych from 1962 (now at the Tate Modern in London) as a commentary about exteriority and interiority—the bold colors representing public personality, the black and whites a more hermetic, tragic atmosphere (Shanes 118). Yet maybe this private/public fissure is related to the artist himself; if, in Andy’s words, “Every painting is the same painting. The subject (be it Taylor, Kennedy or Monroe) is not significant,” perhaps it is Andy’s personal concerns with public affectations and private desires, the motifs perhaps of his psyche, which tend to dominate the image (Wrenn 21).

MYSTERY BUS!

A few Sundays past in Chicago:

I’m on State Street, returning from the Patti Smith reading and singing (awesome and strong, and the inclusion of songs such a lovely surprise!), thinking about life in New York in the late ‘60s for these myriad artists, musicians, poets, photographers. I catch the 147 CTA bus just in the nick of time. Totally empty bus, on the beginning of a new run. I sit down and stare at the window, and mark my words, dear readers, this is entirely true—someone had “written” on the window with their finger: “ANDY”—smudged vertically down the glass—there was the name, right in front of my baffled eyes. I spend the next half hour trying to get the photograph, the street lights all blushy or blueish, shining just so behind “ANDY”:

OUR IN-OFFICE MARILYN

Happy Spring!

Written and Researched by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Works Cited:

Danto, Arthur C. Andy Warhol. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009.

Goldsmith, Kenneth, Ed. I’ll Be Your Mirror:_The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Thirty-Seven Conversations with the Pop Master_. Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York, 2004.

Hackett, Pat. The Andy Warhol Diaries. Warner Books: New York, 1989.
Honnef, Klaus. Andy Warhol:_Commerce into Art_. Taschen: Germany, 1993.
Moore, Marianne. The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore. Penguin Booke: New York, 1977.

Shanes, Eeric. Warhol: The Life and Masterworks. Arkstone Press Ltd: New York, 2004.

Wrenn, Mike. Andy Warhol: In His Own Words. Omnibus Press: London, 1991.

Celebrating Early Springtime with Andy: A Colorful March of Warhol

PART TWO:

WARHOL’S DEVOTION TO THE REPEATED FRAME

REITERATION

If we begin to dramatically repeat an image, does the image begin to feel like it always has been? Is repetition life-giving or essentially violent? Do we torture an image through repetition; do we torture the subject through endless representation? Warhol commented, “The more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away. And the better and emptier you feel” (Wrenn 16).

In the ‘60s, John Cage “declared repetition a fundamental principle of twentieth century art,” and Warhol thought repetition to be at the center of the life principle, philosophizing: “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” (Bockris 112, PBS, part 1). Warhol’s oeuvre is like a magnet for further repetition—in response to his images, the culture heaps more repeated ideas, more repeated notions about Warhol and more analysis concerning repetition itself. (But someone probably has already said that, and many times!)

Warhol, as a cultural cataloguer, instigates an infinite body of our own assessments and catalogues—of the celebrities of the ‘60s and ‘70s, of our own philosophies about what the Pop movement meant or made way for. Perhaps because his art is so accessible, so many of us have turned to it with our own desires and analyses, breeding more heated repetition. Many of my own excited thoughts that arose while researching the Marilyns I would soon discover have mostly been addressed, and with fervor: Warhol’s work is wrought with the Freudian concept of repetition compulsion (already been voiced and repeated many times!), his democratic approach to fame is particularly American (taken!), his near-religious adoration of the stars is set in the medium of the iconography of his early religious life (noted and expressed in many, many books!), the sense of the restorative in his use of repetition (taken! And stated oh so eloquently by the brilliant Wayne Koestenbaum: “maximum redemption of lost material”) (PBS, part 1). Is it possible to state something unique about Warhol’s sensibilities? A fitting problem, perhaps, for those of us who seek to speak with individual flair about the Pop Art icon who, in the words of Peter Krapp, “originally debunked originality” (Krapp 72).

This morning I thought, “Wow, what would Andy Warhol have made of the Internet—the ultimate democratic realm of highbrow and lowbrow, the repetition of language and image, the co-opting of images. Can you imagine what Warhol’s relationship with the Internet would have been? He was kind of like a living Internet before it existed—with all of its fragmentation, repetition, openness and democratic acceptance of every piece of information. Of course, when I typed this into Google, millions of people had already wondered about this very thing—an article in the Washington Post questioned some of his cohorts about this very matter— Bob Colacello: “With no exaggeration, the Internet would have suited his voice very well, but I don't think he would have been a blogger -- first of all, he couldn't even type, and he evaded opinions. He wasn't a person who was going to sit around a dinner table and say why he was for Obama's health-care program. His idea of an opinion was 'she's a beauty,' 'he's a beauty’” (Dry Washington Post).

Allen Midgette

A rather funny note: repetition became “personal/impersonal” when Warhol’s own double, Allen Midgette, posed as Warhol when Warhol’s own schedule could not permit travel. In a hilarious article entitled “Andy Warhol or Someone Gives a Non-Lecture Tour,” (writer Dan Bishoff) Warhol commented on Midgette’s “performance,” asserting, “He was better than I am. He was what the people expected” (PBS, part 2).

REPETITION MAKES FOR A GREAT UNIFORM, REPETITION MAKES FOR A MEDITATION

What does it mean when iconic images become washed in our own repetitive sensing of them? How to feel in our blood that in the ‘60s, Warhol’s approach exemplified a totally radical approach to working with imagery?

Marilyn Diptych

To really look at Marilyn’s widow’s peak, the gaze itself, and the beauty mark, doubled with Warhol’s own pink mark. To witness the Marilyns as utterances of repeated prayers. “Garish” is the word that seems to come to so many of us when we witness the Marilyns—diamond-studded moles, strange and beautiful colors like twenty-six layers of paint on the wall of a New York apartment. In the extra strokes of color Warhol asserts upon her face off-set, diagonal makeup; perhaps he is saying, This is my creation, I have decorated this person, she’s my own (or our own) now. Only her face, not her body—only the “mask”, as some have identified it. While his work such as Before and After

Before and After

speaks as a narrative, linear arrangement, his Marilyns and Lizzes are perched in a liminal state. The unaligned look that occurs in these images repeated upon countless canvases makes it seem as if the real spirit of the person might be in motion, yet “between” the frames of the repeated image.

Arthur Danto beautifully describes the “transformative” repetition in his work and the repetition as evocative of “recurrent memory” (Danto 39-41). Indeed the violence of the repetitive image, the repetition compulsion, created a strange marriage of art and life in the instance of the Shot Marilyns, the event marking a distilled meditation on the artist as a deconstructionist/violent presence, the audience as artist-participant, and the boundary-free notion of performance art.

Shot Blue

Dorothy Podber is reported to have asked Warhol for permission to “shoot” the Marilyns; rather than using a camera, she removed her gloves, pulled a revolver from her purse, and shot a stack of Marilyns through the forehead (Danto 99-100).

OUR TEMPORARY IN-OFFICE MARILYN

We are honored to serve as appraiser for this original Warhol masterpiece. For the time being, the striking, original Warhol silkscreen painting will remain in our client’s private collection.

Please visit our blog site again soon! Next week, I will reveal a little mystical event on the 147Bus…

Written and Researched by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Works Cited

Bockris, Victor. The Life and Death of Andy Warhol. Bantam Books: New York, 1989.

Burns, Ric. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film. PBS, 2006.

Danto, Arthur C. Andy Warhol. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009.

Dry, Rachel. “What Would Warhol Blog?” Washington Post. Sunday Aug 16 2009
Koestenbaum, Wayne. Andy Warhol. Viking: New York, 2001.

Krapp, Peter. Deja vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory. Universty of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2004.
Wrenn, Mike. Andy Warhol: In His Own Words. Omnibus Press: London, 1991.

Celebrating Early Springtime with Andy: A Colorful March of Warhol

PART THREE:

AN ASPECT OF WARHOL’S EVOLUTION: AN UNDOING

I sense the backwards spiraling in the work of Warhol—a sort of undoing. He begins as a solo, meticulous draughtsman,

using the blotted line method as a way of evoking the sense that the works already belong to the world of published, printed images—granting the initially private works the illusion of an established public acceptance and presence (PBS, part 1).

In the end he abandons for the most part his detailed drawing in favor of photography/silkscreening, and filmmaking, becoming an open, “objective” mirror for the culture. “What was he impressed with, then? Fame—old, new, or faded. Beauty. Classical talent. Innovative talent. Anyone who did anything first. A certain kind of outrageous nerve. Good talkers. Money—especially big, old, American brand-name money…” recalls Pat Hackett (Hackett x).

In his own words, “I was never embarrassed about asking someone, ‘What should I paint?’—because pop comes from the outside…” (Wrenn 19). Indeed, some of his most famous works, including the soup cans, the silkscreened money imagery, and the Death and Disaster series, all began as suggestions and ideas of cohorts (PBS, part 1).

Warhol at first celebrates the celebrities,

and then later in the ‘70s and ‘80s, begins to elevate everyone to the stature of celebrity (though of course he held court in these later stages of his life with countless famous personalities.)

As artist Ronnie Cutrone puts it, “Pop Art was over, and there was a bunch of new movements… Pop celebrity portraits in the sixties—the Marilyns, Lizzes, Elvises, Marlons, etc.—it was a natural evolution to do portraits of private—or at least non-show business—people, therefore making them equal, in some sense, to the legends” (xiv). (I think it interesting, too, how the titles transform the individual star into pluralities in Cutrone’s description.) Even Warhol’s silkscreening process itself, beginning with the application of color, and ending with the application of the image, feels beautifully backwards, intuitive—perhaps even slightly abstract.

WARHOL’S SILKSCREEN PAINTING PROCESS

A negative of a Warhol-selected photographed image (originally from a newspaper, magazine, etc.) would be produced in a shop. Andy first placed paint on the canvas—the last step was to screen the image on top of the colors. Warhol on the silkscreening process: “With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across so that the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That was the way you got the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy.

I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beaty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face—the first Marilyns.” (Warhol 220).

As Wayne Koestenbaum relates, “Silkscreening required a historically new variety of visual intelligence—a designer’s, or a director’s, perhaps rather than a conventional painter’s” (Koestenbaum 61).

“From these first beginnings, Pop was not involved with either a simple copying of commercial sources or a simple rejection of the look of abstract art; instead, Warhol set up more or less obviously parodic situations of uncomfortable similarity between the two” (Varnedoe 338).

THE WARHOL CURRENTLY IN-OFFICE

To encounter not only an original Andy Warhol, but also a masterwork with a fascinating provenance, makes for a near-personal encounter with several iconic figures and cultural institutions of the 1960s. Perhaps Warhol returns to us our cultural property, and to encounter this original Warhol, on loan temporarily as we execute the appraisal and research process, gives us the sense that some of the fabric of this pop culture belongs to each of us—in this temporary arrangement, for this brief witnessing, the iconic Marilyn Monroe is visiting another “individual non-individual” for a moment.

Please visit our blog site again! Next week, I will consider Warhol’s use of artful and intriguing repetition.

Written and Researched by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Works Cited

Burns, Ric. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film. PBS, 2006.

Hackett, Pat. The Andy Warhol Diaries. Warner Books: New York, 1989.

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Andy Warhol. Viking: New York, 2001.

Krapp, Peter. Deja vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory. Universty of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2004.

Warhol, Andy and Hackett, Pat. POPism: The Warhol Sixties. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York, 1980.

Varnedoe, Kirk, and Gopnik, Adam. High and Low:Modern Art, Popular Culture. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: New York, 1991.