Andy Warhol in 1980. Photo: Susan Greenwood/Getty Images
Andy Warhol is arguably the most renowned artist of the Western world, yet numerous misconceptions about him persist, and much of his story remains untold. We have asked Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik to provide us with 10 little-known facts that help elucidate who Warhol truly was and what he actually did. —The Editors
The story, as commonly recounted, goes like this: In the summer of 1949, when Andrew Warhola arrived in New York from Pittsburgh, one of his first actions was to drop the “a” from his last name to make it less ethnic. This marked the beginning of his self-reinvention, a significant aspect of his artistic career . . . except that wasn’t. He had already removed that “a” he signed a self-portrait he painted around the age of, approximately five years earlier.
Warhol’s play with his public persona seems to have begun almost as soon as he had one. In college, another self-portrait shows him with white fingernail polish and the limpest of wrists, wearing a pink corduroy suit. In yet another painting, he portrayed himself as a nude little boy with Mary Jane shoes and his finger stuck up his nose.
Warhol’s finest art emerged directly from the conceptual experiments of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, which started to dominate the New York avant-garde in the late 1950s. Remarkably, Warhol had already been exposed to both artists when he was barely in his teens, in the early 1940s, at the notable Outlines gallery in Pittsburgh.
Outlines invited Cage to lecture on multiple occasions and displayed Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise, an anthology of Duchamp’s earlier works in miniature. (The founder of Outlines owned a deluxe Boîte are even suggestions that the teenage Warhol stole one of the miniatures, only to return it later.
An installation view of ‘Becoming Andy Warhol’ at UCCA Edge, Shanghai. Courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Despite the tales of Warhol eating Campbell’s soup daily, he actually had gourmet tastes. One Thanksgiving in the 1950s, he cooked “pheasant under glass” instead of turkey. He was a regular at one of New York’s first Japanese restaurants (the receipts survive) at a time when most Americans still considered sushi a bizarre barbarity, and he consumed c the spoonful when he could.
Warhol was never truly a participant in popular culture, despite the subjects he chose for his art. He always approached the popular from the perspective of the West’s “high” culture—in art and in all things gustatory.
Andy Warhol, often recognized for his slight frame and distinctive blond wig, was in fact quite physically active as early as the 1950s, well before weight training became popular. He had a penchant for arm wrestling, and even after sustaining a gunshot wound to the abdomen, he was capable of performing 42 push-ups as evidenced by video footage. Lou Reed, a younger rocker, once remarked on Warhol’s incredible strength, recalling how Warhol had overpowered him during playful roughhousing.
In 2019, the Belgian collector Guy Minnebach discovered a vinyl album of jazz great Paul Desmond, saxophonist for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, whose cover is a portrait of Desmond photo-silkscreened by Warhol in April of 1962. That means Warhol’s Pop Art depended on—appropriated, really—a method he first developed in the commercial commissions he was doing his best to hide from the art world at the time.
Eighteen months before Warhol had done any portraits at all, his very first works of Pop Art, based on comics and ads, had started life as lowly props for a store window. Warhol only turned them into “art” afterward, the way Duchamp’s urinal became the sculpture called Fountain.
Warhol’s four-minute filmed portraits, known as his “Screen Tests,” are among his finest works and some of the greatest portraits ever created. They would have achieved their pinnacle in a project that might have been Warhol’s last work of “underground” film, had it ever been completed. Early in 1968, he and Duchamp agreed to create a 24-hour portrait of the Frenchman (details to be determined). However, on June 3, before the project could commence, Warhol was shot and spent the next two months in the hospital. On October 2, as he was back home and beginning to regain his strength, Duchamp delayed the project further by passing away.
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn). Photo: Courtesy of Christie’s
Warhol is often considered a “great colorist,” yet he frequently relied on others to select the colors for his works. In 1967, his friend David Whitney chose the colors for his first print portfolio, which featured ten identical Marilyn faces, distinguished only by their color variations. At his best, Warhol was not particularly interested in the traditional “aesthetic” virtues that some people—especially and buyers—attempt to discern in his work. By allowing others to choose his colors, he was embracing the-based methods of Cage and other conceptualists. In Duchampian terms, Warhol presented the anti-retinal masquerading in retinal guise.
For something like 45 minutes in November 1985, keen eyes might have noticed a certain celebrity artist on a New York street corner, wearing Santa gear and ringing bells for the Salvation Army. It’s a nice, homey image that goes against the vampiric reputation that Warhol still has in some quarters.
On the other hand, it’s easy to read too much into the “good works” that Warhol, the “good Catholic,” is supposed to have turned to in his final years. It added up to no more than a handful of sessions as a soup-kitchen volunteer, as suggested and then arranged by people in his retinue. Statements like “I believe in death after death” and “When it’s over, it’s over” probably give a more accurate window into Warhol’s (un-)holy side.
Warhol, the great counterculturalist, was actually wedded to pretty traditional notions of romance and the domestic—even if, as a gay man in an intensely homophobic world, he was mostly kept away from conventional family life.
In the 1970s, when he was at home with Jed Johnson, his partner for 12 years, he liked to entertain in the cozy, old-fashioned kitchen he had installed in the basement of his grand house. A couple of times, he talked about adopting a child, and he was always great with kids.
In April 1988, at Warhol’s estate auction, everyone noticed the eccentric items he had collected: cookie jars, piggy banks, and Bakelite housewares. What received much less attention, because almost none of it was included in the auction, was the serious avant-garde art he had also amassed. According to surviving gallery receipts, purchased an early “prop piece” by Richard Serra, a “relic” from a performance by Chris Burden, and a radio by Keith Sonnier. This art was the best companion for his own, was never truly the Pop-y, audience-friendly work it was often portrayed as.
×
