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 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.

Celebrating Early Springtime with Andy: A Colorful March of Warhol

PART TWO:

AN EXCITING STORY FROM A MIR CLIENT, OWNER OF AN ORIGINAL WARHOL!

Once, as art appraisers, we begin to dig into the layers of any cultural material and matter, the roots of things we see on a deeper level often times come enmeshed in a lovely way. So it is with focusing one’s attention on a particular era or a particular artist. (Jonathan Richman, who began my March on my headphones, played a show with Patti Smith once in California, I learned at her reading that I mentioned in part 1.) Beyond witnessing tiny coincidences, I delight in the stories of the 1960s and 1970s artists in New York, and read about their fruitful gatherings in important arenas such as Max’s Kansas City. I also learned that our dear client with the Warhol silkscreen print actually worked there himself, and worked up what would become a dazzling provenance for his own future Warhol piece, pictured above. In fact, the original photographic image used in the Marilyn silkscreen series is a publicity shot for the film Niagra.

MAX’S KANSAS CITY

Pat Hackett relates the scene at Max’s Kansas City: “Every night, celebrities of the art, fashion, music and ‘underground’ filmmaking crowds jammed themselves into favorite corners of the back room at Max’s and monitored each other’s clothes, makeup, wit, and love interests while they received ‘exchange’ celebrities from out of town—directors and producers from Europe or Hollywood—and waited to be taken away from ‘all this’ (New York notoriety) and put into ‘all that’ (global fame). Andy’s art hung on the wall” (Hackett ix).

Max’s Kansas city in the words of Warhol himself: “In September [1966] we started going regularly to a two-story bar/restaurant on Park Avenue South off Union Square that Mickey Ruskin had opened in late ’65. It was called Max’s Kansas City and it became the ultimate hangout…Max’s Kansas City was the exact place where Pop Art and pop life came together in New York in the sixties—teeny boppers and sculptors, rock stars and poets from St. Mark’s Place, Hollywood actors checking out what the underground actors were all about, boutique owners and models, modern dancers and go-go dancers—everybody went to Max’s and everything got homogenized there” (Warhol 186).

OUR CLIENT’S STORY

Our client’s friendship with Roy Lichtenstein helped to land him a job as Mickey’s full time assistant/accountant/financial manager (at times, 14 hours per day, seven days a week). He became intimate with the scene there, witnessing such notable artists and regulars as Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, and Larry Rivers. Our client even suggested Mickey install the coveted VIP backroom, where Warhol and his entourage could glitter. Warhol rarely paid any bills in cash, and Mickey frequently accepted artwork as payment for enormous outstanding bills from regulars (at one point, Warhol had an outstanding bill of $15,000, and would trade art or even send Nico up on stage to sing as payment).

The Velvet Underground and Nico

In 1968, Warhol traded 3 Marilyn silkscreen prints to pay down some of his debt; Mickey was short on money to make the payroll, and offered our client one of the Marilyns in lieu of a paycheck—he got to choose the one with the colors he liked best (many of the substantial works of art by various artists in the Max’s scene went up in what started as a kitchen fire, yet our client’s Marilyn had been removed and was safe, unscathed).

For the next 42 years, the original Warhol silkscreen print has remained in his sole ownership.

OUR CONSIDERATION OF THE PIECE

We at MIR feel honored to be the witnesses and protectors of countless stunning cultural artifacts that arrive at our door. When the owner of this Warhol contacted us, we were struck by the power of the remarkable provenance of the piece. Although the print wasn’t signed (Andy Warhol many times gave away unsigned silkscreen prints—extras from a run), we wanted to research the piece, make friends with it, come to understand it in its proper cultural context of the 1960s and today.

Our client sent us images and eventually the print itself from the east coast. While some appraisal companies might shy away from working with an unsigned piece, we love a challenge, and we adore the rich texture of anecdotal detail. We feel lucky to hear the stories that surround our clients’ treasures.

Please visit our blog site again soon! Next week, I will talk a bit about the evolution of Pop artist Andy Warhol.

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

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

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