Abstract
Fame, glamour, luxury, and spectacle were enchanting qualities for Andy Warhol. Warhol, who became a cult hero and perhaps the artist to whom young people best responded, when asked by a friend if he wanted to be a great artist, replied, “No. I’d rather be famous”1 His early portraits of movie stars embody his fascination for their celebrity and their consequent attainment of enchantment. His images of Marilyn, Liz, Elvis, Marlon, and other screen personalities painted in synthetic, often shrill and garish colors, illustrate the ability of the artist as transformer, a concept he denied. Culled from fan magazines and stills for film promotions, these paintings show the magical skills of Warhol: he makes beautiful paintings of beautiful people. As one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war period, it is he who re-presents public icons. His movie star series tells us upon careful reading significant facts about the artist. It is a challenge to explore a number of these paintings and key events in the artist’s own life to see if any revelations can be surmised.
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Notes
Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UM1 Press, 1986), p. 367. The statement is clarified in Victor Bokris, Warhol (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 14. Bokris, a Warhol friend writes that the question was asked by Charles Lisanby, one of Warhol’s closest friends in the 1950s. Andy replied, I “want to be Matisse.” What he meant by that, Charles thought, was that he wanted to be in a position where whatever he did would be important. He also said, “I want to be famous” Bokris further explains, “What interested Andy in Matisse was not so much his work as the fact that Matisse had reached a point where all he had to do was tear out a little piece of paper and glue it to another piece of paper and it was considered very important and valuable. It was the fact that Matisse was recognized as being so world famous and such a celebrity that attracted Andy. This was, I thought, the key to his whole life.”
Bokris, pp. 37–39. See also Bradford Collins, “The Metaphysical Nosejob: The Remaking of Warhola: 1961–1968.” Arts Magazine 62 (Feb. 1988), pp. 47–55. In the vast Warhol literature, this article is the only text which treats Warhol’s art in terms of his core of problems. His study inspired this paper.
Bokris, p. 39.
Bokris, p. 34. The author describes how Warhol as a child went to Saturday morning movies with a little girlfriend. For eleven cents he received an ice-cream bar going in, saw a double feature, and got an eight-by-ten inch signed glossy of the star on the way out.
For Edward Steichen’s famous 1928 photograph of Garbo and Warhol’s imitation of her pose, see Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Kynaston McShine, ed. (New York: The Museum of Modem Art, 1989), p. 404, figs. 14, 15.
Parker Tyler, “Andy Warhol,” Art News 58 (Dec. 1956), p. 59. His exhibition received the following comment in a mini-notice: “Warhol is a very young artist who may be said to be addicted rather than dedicated.” For descriptions of the fantasized extravagant footwear for celebrities, see David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 51, plate 31.
The title was a parody based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries. Warhol collaborated on the humorous cookbook with designer Suzie Frankfurt who provided the recipes. Some of his illustrations were inspired by florid engravings from French nineteenth-century cookbooks. Mrs. Warhola, the artist’s mother, wrote out all the recipes in her curlicue script. See Andy Warhol and Suzie Frankfurt, Wild Raspberries (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1997).
Jean Stein and George Plimpton, eds. Edie: An American Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 192. Walter Hopps commented on a visit to Warhol’s studio: “What really made an impression was that the floor - I may exaggerate a little - was not a foot deep, but certainly covered wall to wall with every sort of pulp movie magazine, fan magazine, and trade sheet, having to do with popular stars from the movies or rock ‘n’ roll. Warhol wallowed in it.”
Smith, p. 119.
For Monroe images cited in this essay, see McShine, pp. 211–220, figs. 199–212. Also for the actual publicity still of Monroe used by Warhol for the series, see p. 72 fig. 15. For Taylor images cited in this essay, see McShine, p. 157 fig. 135, pp. 226–231 figs. 227–231.
A number of scholars in their analyses of the contextual implications of this painting usually attribute his use of gold to placing her in a heavenly sphere as a result of her tragic death and the artist’s intense response to it. David Bourdon, who knew Warhol, found in the conflation of Marilyn in the gold setting connections to Warhol’s religious upbringing. “The tinselling treatment harks back to Warhol’s childhood memories of St. John Chrysostom in Pittsburgh with its many icons of religious figures portrayed against rich gold backgrounds. Though Warhol’s Marilyn is perhaps an unusually florid counterpart to the saints portrayed in ceiling mosaics in eastern Catholic churches, it is nonetheless clear that the artist symbolically canonized her.” In Bourdon, p. 130. For another interpretation in which the gold is regarded for its monetary symbolism, see Smith, p. 119. The author, who records among several readings of the image, states that the Gold Marilyn is a visual pun in that the actress is a “gold mine” to Hollywood studios. Warhol’s paintings of Monroe were only part of the “cult of Marilyn” that developed after her death. See Christin Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), pp. 99–103.
Mamiya, p. 107.
See McShine, pp. 112–115, figs. 55–68. For more information on an early Warhol exhibition and a proposed one in which his drawings of beautiful young men were involved, see Bourdon, pp. 47, 50–51, plate 43.
See McShine for paintings of the following male stars: Troy Donahue, pp. 205–6, figs. 193–94, Warren Beatty, p. 208, fig. 196, Marlon Brando, pp. 232–33, figs 233–34. Brando, whose image Warhol appropriated from his 1954 film The Wild One, is shown in 3/4 view sitting on a motorcycle. Also see McShine for images of Elvis, pp. 207, fig. 195, pp. 246–248, figs. 253–255.
This painting is one of a series of Self-portraits in various color combinations in which Warhol used the same photograph; see McShine, pp. 85–91, figs. 4–10.
Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art?: Interviews with Eight Painters, Part I,” Art News 62 (November 1963), p. 26.
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ‘60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 22. See McShine, p. 71 for six photographs in which Warhol with his assistant Gerard Malanga is involved in sequential stages of silkscreen printing onto canvas.
McShine, p. 50.
Warhol and Hackett, p. 7.
For Dick Tracy, see McShine, p. 145, fig. III. Curiously the text in the cartoon speech balloon is left blurred and unfinished by large strokes of white paint. This omission reiterates the greater importance Warhol attached to capturing the qualities of paint. It is important to note that at this stage in Warhol’s development the narrative of the specific scene plays a secondary role to the overall visual appearance of the canvas with its hand-painted dribbles and strokes.
Warhol and Hackett, p. 16.
For discussion of camp, see Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 275–292.
Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Munoz, eds. Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 24.
Bokris, p. 86.
Bokris, p. 14.
Andy Warhol, exhibition catalogue (Stockholm: Moderna Museet), n.p.
Bokris, p. 52.
Stein and Plimpton, p. 195. “He had a choice of elaborately festooned masks. They covered his eyes and nose like at the bal masqué of the eighteenth century.” See McShine p. 406, figs. 19–20, for three sequential photographs of the artist in which he delineates on his own image the hair and nose he desired to have. See also p. 93, for a color photograph in which his unfortunate facial discoloration is apparent.
Warhol did two paintings and a drawing on this subject, see McShine pp. 120–21, figs. 79–81. The advertisement in the National Enquirer he appropriated still appeared in the tabloid as late as 1968. For this source, see Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Collier Books in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974), p. 107, fig. 94.
Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 72. The artist wrote about the attainment of fame: “The funny thing about getting famous is that it usually never happens to people who go after it. Even today when there are new celebrities by the minute, you still have to be famous for something, and you have to work at the something all the time. Those who spend all their time thinking about press agents and getting coverage and game show guest appearances don’t spend enough time on the something, and they can’t stay famous for long.”
For the variety of celebrities Warhol portrayed, see Bourdon pp. 324–345, 399–400. Also see McShine, pp. 312–313,315,318–325.
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Salus, C. (2000). Behind the Celestial Enchantment: The Private Self and Early Movie Star Portraits of Andy Warhol. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Poetry of Life in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3431-8_14
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