Warhol Paintings

Warhol Prints

tomgurney — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:44:10 +0000

Warhol prints is a new website which covers the artist’s best prints as well as having plenty of information on the artist himself. We’d recommend checking out that site certainly, and hopefully it will increase in size over time, with more prints added every now and again.

Andy Warhol prints make great additions to any home around the world. You can see a great gallery of them below, with the best available to buy online. For those wishing to learn more about the career of Andy Warhol, you can read more in this blog.

Filmmaker Warhol – Andy Warhol as Fimmaker

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:54:12 +0000

The following article on Andy Warhol first appeared in the May/June 1971 issue of Art in America (vol. 59 no. 3). The author, David Bourdon, would later write Warhol,one of the most respected biographies of the artist. (Unlike many books on Andy Warhol, Bourdon’s book is fully footnoted and indexed, making it particularly useful for academic research.) The original article included stills from the films and the following photo taken by John Chamberlain. (Issues of this magazine are occasionally sold on ebay.) – Taken from WarholStars.Org.

Warhol As Filmmaker by David Bourdon

Far from being a neutral and impassive recorder of daily life, or a cinematic journalist documenting present-day depravity, Andy Warhol has constructed a stylized, extremely interpretive view of contemporary life that, however real it might seem on screen, is closer to fantasy than to any kind of reality with which most of us are familiar.

More talked about than seen, more emulated than admired, Andy Warhol’s films will probably survive as legends rather than as living classics that people will want to see again and again. Currently, there is a fairly broad consensus that he is among the most important, provocative and influential filmmakers of the sixties. To the general public, he is best known as the originator of the marathon motionless movie, whose petrified camera dutifully records an inactive image, and as the purveyor of voyeuristic nudity, obscenity, homosexuality, transvestitism, drugs and various other X-rated activities.

But to art and cinema connoisseurs Warhol has scored many conceptual coups and stylistic innovations: some see him as a “primitive” who has taken cinema “back to its origins, to the days of Lumiere, for a rejuvenation and a cleansing” (Jonas Mekas); others see him as an especially gifted recorder of “the seemingly unimportant details that make up our daily lives” (Samuel Adams Green). A lot has been made of how scrupulously he records ordinary events “as they are,” and of his beneficent inclination to let his performers just “be themselves.” Finally, there has been a great deal of emphasis on his equation of real-time with reel-time – if it takes a man three minutes to eat a banana, that slice of life is filmed and projected for three minutes without cuts. But far from being literal transcriptions of reality, Warhol’s films are more inventive, artificial and art-directed than some of his admirers would like to believe.

Warhol made his debut as a filmmaker with fortuitous timing. Being familiar with avant-garde painting, sculpture, music and dance, he was able to approach film with a broader and more sophisticated outlook than was available to most “underground” filmmakers. Some of his initial experiments in 1963 were with single-frame shooting (photographing one frame at a time with a hand-held camera) a stylistic technique already employed by several independent filmmakers, such as Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos and Taylor Mead. But he soon realized that long takes were the antithesis of what was by then an accepted convention and so he began making “motionless” movies. Bringing movies to a standstill had less to do with investigating the fundamental nature of film than it had to do with the exploration of a then-emerging esthetic – the Minimalist esthetic. He had already experimented with monotony in paintings made up of images identically repeated in regimented rows; and his Minimalist inclinations were reinforced by his awareness of several musical works: John Cage’s notorious “silent” composition, 4′ 33″; La Monte Young’s “eternal” drone music; and the eighteen-hour performance in 1963 of Erik Satie’s Vexations, an eighty-second piano piece repeated 840 times.

The first phase of Warhol’s quasi-fantastic vision was of a spaced-out, slow-motion world in which people really do sleep eight hours, while others devote nearly as much time to such lethargic inactivities as eating a mushroom or smoking a cigar. This is a silent world, rendered in contrasty black-and-white, and stripped of any incidental interest and climax. It is usually inhabited by a single performer, seen frontally and in close-up, whose luxury and torment it is to while away an eternity of time on some simple, relatively meaningless task. The camera is stationary, the image seldom varies within the frame, and any movement, action or facial expression is decelerated to such a sluggish pace that it begins to exert a trancelike effect on the viewer – who, like the person on-screen, feels victimized by torpor. The effect is of a microscopic detail that is senseless in itself but acquires significance through magnification and persistence. Staring at the immobile and inexpressive face on screen, the viewer may think of all the worthwhile things he should be doing instead of sitting here bored out of his mind. Suddenly, the face on screen is charged with melodrama; the performer has uncontrollably blinked or swallowed, and the involuntary action becomes a highly dramatic event, as climactic in context as the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. (Warhol once said his best actor was someone who blinked only three times in ten minutes. Question: Aren’t you confusing blinking with acting? Warhol: Yes.)

The notion of introducing stillness to movies was a radical idea. No one had to see Sleep to be provoked by the very concept of such a movie. The fact that Warhol’s early films are still talked about more than they are seen can be interpreted as their strength, demonstrating the power of the idea, or as their defect, suggesting they do not transcend the idea. However, anyone who has actually sat through the films knows how words fail to convey the experience. Consequently it would be wrong to say that Warhol’s films are so conceptual that they can be adequately described or experienced in words.

After the outraged reception of Sleep, Warhol deliberately set about filming movies of exaggerated length. In most movies, time is compressed so that lengthy activities appear of much shorter duration; but in a Warhol movie, inconsequential activities are prolonged so that the minutes seem to drag like days. To begin, with, the duration of the filmed action was totally artificial. Who in his right mind spends forty-five minutes eating a mushroom? Warhol instructed his performers to remain as motionless as possible, and to prolong their actions as long as possible. To stretch out the time even further, Warhol frequently films the scene at sound speed (twenty-four frames per second), then projected it at silent speed (sixteen frames per second), so that whatever movement the image might be capable of was shown in protracted slow motion. “When nothing happens, you have a chance to think about everything,” Warhol explained.

The second phase of Warhol’s vision began in 1963, when he started experimenting with sound, color, camera movement, action, narrative and editing. In this phase, the performers became interesting as personalities. Warhol presented a highly selective gallery of gorgeously gaunt, stylishly garbed and imaginatively barbered young men and women who languorously display themselves, but seem reluctant to put their often appealing bodies to any constructive or even self-satisfying use; they spout tedious monologues, as if unwinding from some pent-up paranoia that can be dispelled, or maintained, only through the recital of all their problems, past and present. These sometimes droll, sometimes pathetic monologists seem quagmired in unsatisfactory roles or situations, and apparently the only way they can sustain their gossamer fantasies is by trying to convince us of their veracity. But their self-image is askew and, like some manic individual striving to keep a grip on reality, they maintain an obsessive stranglehold on their only audience – the camera. Their whole world threatens to slide into oblivion at any moment, and even the riveting gaze of the camera cannot seem to secure it.

The manufactured chitchat and confessional soliloquies seem endless. During the screening of Sleep, members of the audience sometimes ran up to the screen and yelled in the slumbering man’s ear: “Wake Up!” The interminable chatter in the later movies makes people want to scream: “Shut up!” But suddenly, the interminable story trails out in mid-sentence, just a few words before the possible punch line, as the over exposed and lank end of the reel passes through the projector. We are left wanting to know the conclusion of the monologue we could not bring ourselves to listen to. We are made to feel the regrettable transience of what had seemed an excruciating boring scene. Those ridiculous people with their tiresome sagas emerge in retrospect as poignant creatures who deserved more of our sympathy and attention.

The feeling of impermanence is one of the strongest impressions left by Warhol’s films. No matter how static the image, no matter how lengthy the monologue, no matter how tedious and unendurable the movies seem while we watch them, we are left with a sense of their brevity.

Even the physical record of Warhol’s cinematic achievement is beginning to look impermanent. From 1964 through 1967, Warhol’s film production was prodigious. Scores of movies were shot, but entire reels and projects were abandoned, and only what was felt to be successful was publicly shown. No authoritative record was ever kept of titles, dates, number of reels, cast and collaborators. Reconstructing the data now is largely a matter of guesswork, although a few attempts have been made to catalogue the oeuvre. The studio film library presently consists of miscellaneous cans of prints randomly stacked in steel cabinets at the rear of the Factory. (Warhol has put the original films in storage, where they are probably in even greater disorder.) Nevertheless, many of the films have been damaged, or have totally vanished; even the original print of Sleep is missing. In other cases, such as the twenty-five-hour-long **** (Four Stars), cans of films are present, but nobody has any idea in what sequence they were originally shown. The casual attitude toward shooting the movies carried over into their projection. Even in regular screenings at commercial theaters, the reels were inexplicably jumbled, or one reel was deleted from one showing but not the next, leading to such wholesale variations that some reviewers began citing the date and hour of the performance they had attended. It is unlikely that very many of the films will ever be accurately reconstructed as they were originally screened – which is symptomatic of the “benign neglect” with which Warhol treats all of his work.

From the beginning, Warhol was a shrewd and canny photographer who knowingly got the effects he wanted. He expended considerable thought and effort on the proper lighting, angle and setup. In the early movies, he favored strong sidelighting with harsh shadows, and most often concentrated on the frontal image (the most informative and iconic angle), which he centered and tightly framed. Once he had a satisfactory setup, he could turn on the camera’s motor and walk away. Later he experimented with zooms and pans. “His zooms are perhaps the first anti-zooms in film history,” according to to Andrew Sarris, for whom “Warhol’s zooms swoop on inessential details with unerring inaccuracy.” They seldom correspond to any ostensible narrative or presumed story-line, and seem deliberately inattentive to the on-screen action, often missing significant moments. During the shooting of one scene of Lonesome Cowboys in Old Tucson, Viva was nearly urinated upon by her antagonist’s horse and then, losing her footing in the mud and falling against the hind legs of her own horse, nearly trampled upon. Warhol missed both events because he was zooming in on a storefront sign across the street.

The sound in Warhol movies, though steadily improving, is still below professional standards. Warhol claims that the bad sound was at first done deliberately, because clear sound was too expensive. More likely, good sound was never really considered a desirable virtue. When Sleep was first shown, the accompanying sound was provided by two transistor radios on stage, tuned to different rock stations. When Warhol was invited to show four films at the 1964 New York Film Festival, he commissioned La Monte Young to compose a taped soundtrack that could be used for all four – the droning sound of a bow being played over a brass mortar. Now that Warhol turns the camera off and on during a sequence, he does it without regard for what the performers are saying, so that dialogue is arbitrarily punctuated and blipped without concern for content.

At first, Warhol refused to do any editing. Entire reels might be deleted, but there were no internal cuts within a reel. All the reels were spliced together, end-to-end, including the blank film leader, so that the image was interrupted every three minutes or so by over-exposed reel ends, and then flashes of clear light, which became a kind of dynamic interlude between sections of the static image, giving a sense of structural rhythm to the film. Later, he began turning the camera off and on during a sequence to make the film look cut and also, he says, “to give it texture.” Purists, who admire the unedited reality of early Warhol, are distressed that he now stops the camera. “Since everyone says I never stop the camera,” Warhol said, “I stop it now, start and stop, and that makes it look cut.” To make certain it looks cut, he does not splice out the frames of blank film between scenes that a professional filmmaker would delete. Consequently, when the movie is shown, there are intermittent white flashes, accompanied by a screech on the soundtrack. The strobelike effect has been dubbed the Warhol “strobecut,” although technically it is not a cut at all. Like the zooms, the strobecuts do not necessarily relate to anything at all on-screen, but they often make us suspect something has been deliberately eliminated or censored. For the past few years, real editing has been performed on Warhol films in a attempt to make the movies faster-paced and more entertaining.

Over the years, scores of people have contributed their ideas and services to Warhol’s movies. In addition to being unusually receptive to other people’s suggestions and talents, Warhol has always demonstrated an unstinting willingness to let others collaborate with him. The most enduring and therefore most important collaborator is Paul Morrissey, an independent filmmaker until he joined forces with Warhol in 1965. Morrissey served as executive producer, scriptwriter, editor, one-man crew and business manager, and in 1968 began making his own movies under the aegis of Andy Warhol Films, Inc. Morrissey’s influence on Warhol productions has been stabilizing and conventionalizing. Under his guidance, there has been a greater emphasis upon narrative (erotic stories with “redeeming social value”), technically competent camera work and sound, better-paced editing – and more routine ambitions. Morrissey’s own films, Flesh and Trash, are slick, formularized versions of Warhol’s films – but more professional, and more entertaining. Both Flesh and Trash have achieved commercial success.

“My influence was that I was a movie person, not an art person,” says Morrissey. “An art person would have encouraged Andy to stay with the fixed camera and the rigid structure. Andy’s form was extremely stylized, and people though the content was very frivolous. My notion was that the content is what is said by the people and how they look. The emphasis now is less or very minimally on the form and all on the content. And of course modern art is completely concerned with form and the elimination of content. In that sense, Andy is completely against the grain of modern art, and more in the tradition of reactionary folk art. You can only be a child so long and be revolutionary, and Andy served his apprenticeship as a revolutionary in the art world and in the movie world. But it’s pathetic to see a person not develop and not grow.”

Although schematic plot outlines are usually decided upon in advance, Warhol’s performers are expected to improvise their own dialogue. “Professional actors and actresses are all wrong for my movies,” says Warhol. “They have something in mind.” According to Morrissey, it is television that has eliminated the necessity of speaking written lines in front of the camera. He marvels that movie actors are able to speak freely on television talk shows, yet freeze before a movie camera because they are unaccustomed to working without a script. There is complete unanimity in the Warhol company that performers should be capable of making up their own lines. “How can people read other people’s words?” Warhol asks. “It sounds so phony.” Morrissey, who is more doctrinaire, declares, “If an actor can’t make up his own lines, he’s no good.” Viva, a supreme monologist who describes herself as “the last dying gasp of verbosity,” reminds listeners that “Mae West also wrote her own lines.” As Viva puts it: “Men seem to have trouble doing these non-script things. It’s a natural thing for women and fags – they ramble on. But straight men are much more self-conscious about it.”

It is sometimes assumed that Warhol simply pushes people in front of the camera and “lets them be themselves.” This impression is seemingly corroborated by his statement quoted by Gene Youngblood: “I leave the camera running until it runs out of film because that way I can catch people being themselves. It’s better to act naturally than to set up a scene and act like someone else. You get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to act like they’re themselves.”

But very few people manage to be “themselves” in front of a camera. Warhol lets his performers be “themselves” in roles that correspond to their own characters. He selects people whose looks and personalities almost – but not quite – coincide with the characters he wishes to create. Most often, it is the discrepancies in the the behavior of a person trying to impersonate someone similar to himself that register most vividly. Warhol has a ringmaster’s ability to make his egocentric superstars expose their private selves. But his most diabolical ploy comes into effect when he deliberately goes one step too far, by asking the performer to do something that the performer thinks is degrading or contrary to his nature – for instance, getting slapped around, or fondling someone of the opposite sex.

“People always think that the people we use in our films are less than something,” says Morrissey. “Actually everybody we use has to be a thousand times extra to stand up to our kind of filmmaking. Our people are more than actors..”

Perhaps the only viable generalization that can be made about Warhol’s people is that they do not represent a broad cross-section of Middle America. The range of personality types is surprisingly narrow, and apparently conforms to certain Factory stereotypes. The male roles generally fall into three groups: (1) handsome brutes with splendidly faceted face planes and good muscular definition (Joe Dallesandro, Louis Waldon, Tom Hompertz); (2) raunchy but comical homosexuals who talk as if they had ravenous appetites for sex and drugs but look physically incapable of obtaining either (Taylor Mead, Ondine); and (3) transvestites (Mario Montez, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn). The female roles are only slightly more typical: (1) idealized, immaculate beauties who do not have much to say (Nico, Edie Sedgwick); (2) bawdy beauties who talk too much (Viva, Jane Forth); and (3) overweight and overstimulated grotesques (Brigid Polk, Lil Picard, Tally Brown). Most of the characters depicted in Warhol’s movies exist on the fringe of society, being societal dropouts or rejects who go on having middle-class values and aspirations. They are not even good at what little they can do. The best-looking men tend to be impotent, and the best-looking women had trouble bedding any man at all. And the transvestites are tacky, with make-do hairdos, runs in their stockings and no falsies.

Often condemned for advocating nudity and homosexuality in his movies, Warhol now finds himself scorned by a younger generation which demands even more sexual liberation. He has managed to antagonize both the Women’s Lib and Gay Liberation movements, which lump him among their many reactionary foes. According to Morrissey, “Andy is despised by Gay Liberation and the Women’s Revolt, whatever it is, because Andy just presents it and doesn’t take a position. An artist’s obligation is not to take a position ever, just to present. Andy’s basic position on every subject, if he has any, is comical. The absence of a position necessitates a comical attitude to make it bearable. And the most serious position a person can take is the frivolous position.”

Warhol recently completed a film on the subject of Women’s Lib that will not endear him to that movement, because the cast is comprised almost entirely of transvestites, at least one of which impersonates a lesbian. Around the Factory, this role reversal is considered quite amusing. “It’s hard for Andy or any of the female impersonators to put down the movement,” says Morrissey, “because it’s a subject that neither Andy nor any of the female impersonators have the vaguest notion about. I don’t know anything about it either. I hear a little bit about it on the talk shows – equal pay, etcetera, blah blah. But the logical extension of what they obviously want is to be a man, so why not have men represent them?”

Warhol’s interest in film appears to be fading: he is less productive and his few film projects are less ambitious. It is difficult to determine whether his present lethargy is a temporary rest period, or a lasting consequence of the monstrous murder attempt of 1968. He exhibits almost none of the creative drives and ambitions that motivated him before he was gunned down. Despite his camerawork on Blue Movie and the unreleased Women’s Lib movie (the last films he has photographed himself), he increasingly presents himself as an executive producer, a remote movie mogul whose chief interest is the supervision of an efficient and profitable production company. (Jed Johnson, an intensely quiet young man from California, who has worked at the Factory for three years, now edits and photographs some of the new films.) But when Warhol is not gloating over his supposed retirement from active movie-making, he makes vague murmurs about wanting to do something experimental again.

For a few years in the mid-sixties, Warhol displayed such incredible energy, produced so many paintings, sculptures and movies, that it seems almost unreasonable to expect more from him. From 1964 to 1967, he went through a rapid turnover of cinematic styles – from the stately Giottoesque stability of the early films, to the baroque superimpositions of the middle period, to the episodic sex narratives that culminated in the suppressed Blue Movie. In his early films, Warhol deliberately innovated certain conventions for extending and redefining our notion of reality through his unique treatment of the duration of time. But to my mind, the later works are more vibrant, intellectually more challenging and visually more satisfying. His camerawork reached a creative height in **** (Four Stars) with superb color photography and brilliant in-camera editing that he has not yet surpassed.

It is a tribute to his originality that his films have had an overwhelming effect upon an entire generation of younger experimental filmmakers, and that they have also had an influence upon such strongly individualistic filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Norman Mailer and Shirley Clarke. But more important than the matter of influences is the fact that from the hundreds of reels that passed through his camera there emerged so many dazzling images and memorable scenes – a fragmentary but nonetheless valuable contribution to cinematic art.

The Repetitions and Passivities of Andy Warhol

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:47:14 +0000

The following article originally appeared in Art and Artists in March 1968. The new preface by the original author, William S. Wilson, appeared on WarholStars.Org.

Prince of Boredom – The Repetitions and Passivities of Andy Warhol by William S. Wilson.

Preface (2004)

When an essay has been published thirty-five years ago, its meaning changes as its implicit context becomes explicit. My essay about Andy Warhol was printed in March, 1968, when much less was known about Andy – he was not over-shadowed by his images and other people’s ideas about him. The dreadful title imposed by an editor, The Prince of Boredom, echoed a desperate journalistic notion, and for me misrepresented my themes.

Mario Amaya had founded a magazine in London, Art and Artists, printing my essay about Ray Johnson in his first issue. I wrote more essays for a fee of $25.00 each, soon writing about Paul Thek and Joe Raffaele (now Joseph Raffael). In that period, Gene Swenson had interviewed artists with questions which had a strong erotic slant. In Gene’s theory, everyone was sadomasochistic, they simply didn’t know it yet. He wanted them to know it. His interviews with artists were not printed as he submitted them to Art News, because Thomas Hess changed words in both questions and responses, editing Art News as a magazine for a wholesome family. Gene was aware that Art News was misrepresenting his work, even as institutions like the Museum of Modern Art were misrepresenting visual art. Certainly he, Mario Amaya, Ray Johnson, Paul Thek and Joseph Raffaele felt misrepresented in a society in which they were discouraged from representing themselves as men who loved men (in that specific decade). Such themes of misrepresentation were emerging in the art of Andy Warhol, whose off-registration of silk-screen images was an aesthetic elaboration of the off-registrations in his daily life.

Mario asked me to write an essay about Warhol, and in his context, I wanted to suggest that the erotic and the religious might have mutual implications, and be reciprocally illuminating, with the erotic answerable to the religious, and the religious answerable to the erotic. “Repetition” looked to me like a concept that pivoted between religion, with repetitions of prayers and rituals, and erotic acts, with repetitions of bodily actions, yet also of obsessions. Since I disagreed with Gene Swenson and Mario Amaya about the way the erotic functioned in both art and life, I accepted an opportunity to correct the reduction of the spiritual to the sexual. However I lacked the courage to write about erotics in the art, and the life-world, of a living artist, so my essay became a symptom of precisely what Mario Amaya was working against, bad faith toward the erotic in art.

My mother, May Wilson, lived in a one-room studio apartment at 208 West 23rd Street, next to the Chelsea Hotel. She became friends with Valerie Solanas, so I became acquainted with Valerie, chatting with her or Jackie Curtis in the blocks they animated on 23rd Street near 7th Avenue. Valerie asked Wilson, who was sixty-three years old, for permission to keep her laundry under her sofa-bed. To amuse guests, Wilson would pull Valerie’s laundry-bag from under her bed, fold the cloth to show the outline of a gun, and explain with a wink that the stiff object was Valerie’s laundry. So for months Valerie kept her pistol under my mother’s bed, in an apartment where my three children sometimes played, obviously with none of us grasping that if a gun goes under my mother’s bed in the first act, it must be fired in the last act.

June 3rd, 1968 was the second anniversary of May Wilson removing from Maryland to Manhattan, her marriage having ended painfully. She celebrated horrible anniversaries in her own style, as during her marriage she would leave notes for her husband, and after her marriage she might send him postcards, to remind my father that the day was the anniversary, the 3rd month, or 2nd year, of whatever offense he was guilty of. That morning Valerie visited May Wilson, on whose coffee-table lay a copy of Art and Artists, perhaps open, but certainly with a book-mark at my essay about Andy Warhol. Valerie fetched her laundry-bag from under Wilson’s bed, and went off on her crusade, armed and dangerous.

By the end of that day, Ray Johnson, one of my mother’s sustaining friends, judged himself to have been mugged when rushing out to buy a late-edition newspaper. Thereafter he decided to move toward Richard Lippold, and soon bought a house on Long Island. Ray and May together had been an impromptu home-made vaudeville team. She had improvised by using Valerie’s gun as a prop in her comedy; but tragically, because Valerie misused her gun, Ray Johnson decamped for Long Island, so that his visits were less spontaneous than when he might have happened to be in the neighborhood. May Wilson still saw Ray frequently, but she and a large constellation of friends had suffered a loss of one of its reliable lights. Certainly my mother and her guests had read images in the style of Sigmund Freud, but none of us took these images seriously: phantom laundry, implying something dirty to be cleaned up; a mother’s bed; and a gun in the hands of a woman who founded S.C.U.M., Valerie’s one-woman Society to Cut Up Men.

I suppose somewhere in July I was walking west on Greenwich Avenue, toward Seventh Avenue, when I heard my name called. Andy Warhol, walking through construction work on 7th Avenue, with two young men who looked like they were made of marzipan, left them to cross from the temporary walkway to the sidewalk at the corner. The two young men stood impatiently in the area blocked for pedestrians to walk safely in the street. Andy and I chatted, with him telling me that he had read my essay in the hospital and that he liked it. He was his usual self, that is, the person familiar to people who had known him before his identity became fixed by fame, so that he was required to repeat his mumbling dead-pan performance. Looking past Andy, I could see the impatience of the two young men, so I let Andy go, and their trio continued walking South on 7th Avenue.

I was satisfied with my essay, derived from the work of Ludwig Binswanger, but then felt that a book by Stephen Koch, Stargazer (1973), was wider and deeper, so that I could leave thinking about Warhol’s work to writers like him. “Warhol is one of the masters of passive power,” he writes, and then titles a chapter, “The Tycoon of Passivity.” “The active principle enclosed within his passivity is the brilliant structure of his perceptions.”

One response to my essay understood my theme of passivity to mean that I was diagnosing Warhol as a passive person, but I was pointing toward passivity as a theme conveyed by the virtual Warhol — the man-with-the-mask implied by the art, not necessarily the actual man. The actual man did sometimes pose as passive, more acted upon than acting, but he was expressing passivity as an objective theme, as a religio-philosophic value, not as a confession of his behavior. Stephen Koch catches the ironic twist: “Warhol is one of the masters of passive power.”

I was not alleging anything like sexual passivity, although I may have coyly hinted at it while making suggestions about spiritual passivity, including self-negations. Any religious themes remain to be developed, for Warhol later painted Leonardo’s The Last Supper, with an image of Jesus which is yet to be taken seriously in studies of Warhol. In terms of passivity, the Passion on the Cross is an ironic passivity on the Cross, since Jesus is an image of a Christian God who is omnipotent. I was trying to suggest that the passivity manifest in repetition can be a further elaboration of a religious passivity, which is a method of religious action, since the negated person can be granted powers denied to the self-assertive person. Warhol’s work will be wastefully under-read until his life and art are described in analogies with spiritual adventures like self-negation.

Perhaps Boys just want to have fun, but for Andy Warhol, a man with Catholic concepts, his ironic experiences should not be reduced to campy frivolity. As I wrote in 1968, “Warhol repeats the pattern of the immoralist who burns through to his own hard-core morality.”

William S. Wilson
January 17, 2004

William S. Wilson’s original article, which appears below, was illustrated with Sleep (1966), Mounted filmstrip, 22″ x 12″, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York and Green Disaster No. 2 (1963) Silkscreen on canvas, 106″ x 79″, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. At the end of the article was the notation “An exhibition of Andy Warhol’s works is currently at the Rowan Gallery”.)

Prince of Boredom (1968) – The Repetitions and Passivities of Andy Warhol by William S. Wilson

The paintings of Andy Warhol present repeated or magnified images: flower-flower-flower; car-crash-car-crash, car-crash; FLOWER-FLOWER-Flower. The images are applied through a silk-screen, and can be repeated with a number of variations. The silk-screens are made from photographs taken by someone else, and the screening is often done by someone else in Warhol’s factory, so that the artist’s part can be isolated as the choice of images and the decision to repeat the image and perhaps to magnify it.

Silk-screening makes repetition part of the meaning of the image. Even one silk-screened print is felt as a repetition, and Warhol repeats these images until repetition is magnified into a theme of variance and invariance, and of the success and failures of identicalness. The silk-screening is a technique allowing precise delineations, but it is used sloppily by Warhol, allowing sentiment and lack of sentiment, care and carelessness, to jostle together.

Since the medium could easily be used with more precision, and is not, the purpose must be to call attention to the fact of repetition by not repeating precisely. So Warhol succeeds at failing to repeat, and this failure suggests that successful repetition is to be pitied, while the failure to repeat is to be feared.

Warhol approaches repetition in another way, through stereotypes. The word refers to a technique of printing from solid metal plates and once suggested improved repetition of an image. Troy Donohue, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor: the characters have the lustre of assembly-line products with custom trim, of things manufactured for sale. They would combine quite nicely with the repetition of endlessly unchanging assembly-lines of soup cans, ketchup bottles, green stamps. Miss Taylor is portrayed after her tabloid sickness, and there are portraits of Marilyn Monroe who died, and more portraits of Mrs. Kennedy, cruel before-and-after the assassination portraits. What these images have in common with the 13 most-wanted Men, the electric chair, the body jumping or falling from the bridge, the automobile accidents, is passivity: people and things acted upon by machines, events, circumstances. In Kulchur 16 Gerard Malanga asks Andy Warhol, “Are you allowed to do what you should by circumstances?” Warhol: “No.” Malanga: “What is beyond your control?” Warhol: “What’s that mean?”

The pictures of these people and these things reflect the process of being acted upon by cameraman, camera, and a continuing chain of impersonal operations, here described by the poet, David Antin, for the portrait of Mrs. Kennedy: “… there is actually a series of images of images, beginning form the translation of the light reflectivity of a human face in to the precipitation of silver from a photosensitive emulsion, this negative image developed, re-photographed into a positive image with reversal of light and shadow and consequent blurring, further translated by telegraphy, engraved on a plate and printed through a crude screen with low-grade ink on newsprint, and this final blurring, becoming the initial stage for the artist’s blow-up and silk-screening in an imposed lilac colour on canvas” (‘Warhol: the Silver Tenement’, Art News, Summer, 1966, p.58). Through these processes, the blurring, the repetition, and the passivity become more clearly focused.

These images are of people or of things which have received the action, or who have been constructed by other people, machines, or events, more than they have constructed themselves (even Mrs. Scull is portrayed in the construction put upon her by a subway photo-booth). The people may be actors, but they have been acted upon. When there is such passivity in the images, and such repetition of the images – when repetition is the style, and passivity is the content – then the result is the mutual implication of repetition and passivity: an instance of one is an instance of the other. Passivity is seen as the suffering of repetition. Suffering (in the other sense) seems not to be in the particular pain or unique horrible action, but in the repetition of it. The suggestion is that pain is not suffering until it is repeated, that suffering is pain in retrospect and in duplicate, and that there is passivity in suffering the repetition. But sufficient repetition passes beyond any suffering into blankness, numbness, and a repeated pain becomes an anesthetic.

In some paintings the images are not repeated by addition but by multiplication: that is, the image is magnified (not 100 cans of soup, but one can magnified 100 times). This magnification of an image out of all proportion to the rest of experience, rendering it unmanageable and a trifle overbearing, is a variation on a theme of passivity, even as multiplication is a variation of addition.

Warhol’s movies thrive on passivity, magnification, and repetition. Sleep shows a man sleeping for six hours, and repeats one reel in an endless loop, which removes the variety of actual sleep. Blow Job shows only the man being acted upon, the one who enjoys or suffers the action – the patient, as it were, not the agent. Eat presents a painter chewing, chewing, chewing, and the camera passively records the non-action. Sleep, sex, and nutrition are parts of life that make repeated demands on a person, and that demand repetition in their satisfaction. These early movies are in Warhol’s lyric and pastoral mode, his Barbizon School period, and could be introduced into any life-studies course.

The Chelsea Girls magnifies the problems of understanding Warhol, but it also shows some things more clearly than shorter films. Since the movie is shown two reels at a time, no two performances can be repeated identically (this point has been brilliantly developed by Gregory Battcock, ‘Four Films by Andy Warhol,’ The New American Cinema, pp. 233-52). The obstacles to mechanical repetition call attention to repetition as such, and the idea of repetition haunts the movie even as the movie depicts people haunted by repetitions something less than ideal. Within the movies are shown people, not quite actors, in the grip of gestures, habits, speeches, which they have not rehearsed the way actors rehearse, but which they have rehearsed because they have been repeating them and repeating them. Whatever chance, spontaneity, or the accidents of unrehearsed filming might provoke, the characters are held firmly in the grip of their own repeatings; the movie shows that for them life has been one long rehearsal, and they can be depended upon, when placed before the jaded eye of the camera, to yield their down-at-heel universality, their hand-me-down timelessness. The people emerge not as sinners, but as repeaters, as patient martyrs to repetition: trimming hair, washing dishes, complaining, torturing, failing. Appropriately enough the movie opens with a mock Holy Family (mother, child, and man who is too short to be the husband, and who doesn’t seem to be the father), and closes with a mock confession to a Pope who says so beautifully that it isn’t easy being a Pope, but that it isn’t hard either, it’s just something you are. The efficacy of confession, even to Pope Ondine, depends upon the promise that the sin will not be repeated. Clearly no one in the movie is in a position to make such a promise. Their punishment for repetition of their sins seems to be in the repetition itself, however. Sinning turns out to be another form of penance, and Warhol repeats the pattern of the immoralist who burns through to his own hard-core morality.

Warhol has announced his ambition to be a machine: “The reason I’m painting this way is because I want to be a machine. Whatever I do, and do machine-like, is because it is what I want to do.” Since a machine is capable of endless and perfect repetitions (see Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, for descriptions of machines no one could hope to emulate), and since Warhol is not, we can say that he can only succeed in failing to fulfil this ambition, succeed in showing that when repetition is an ideal, it is unattainable. But this failed machine is destined to succeed as a flower, as Dennis Hopper’s photograph on the cover of December 1964 Art Forum suggests. The early paint-by-number flower paintings, and the silk-screened flowers from a magazine photograph, present flowers as an object of thought or feeling by means of flower-like methods of thought: passivity, repetition. This identity of method and object gives the flower paintings their special authority: petal repeats petal, blossom repeats blossom, picture repeats picture. Warhol stood one day in the gallery, languidly surrounded by silver pillows drifting around the room and colourlessly reflecting colours and lights. Occasionally someone transplanted him to another spot, and as he turned in the the lights he seemed not so much photogenic as phototropic. At the opening, a guard made people wait downstairs, and Warhol waited patiently until someone pushed him forward. Upstairs, a gallery director explained that Andy was supposed to tell the paperhanger how to hang the room full of cows, but when he found the man so capable, he told him to do it his way, and left. The paperhanger covered even the light switches with those pale purple cows whose repetitiveness and passivity, however bucolic, are an elaboration of a theme evident in the earlier electric chairs. It is as if Marie Antoinette at Petite Trianon, and Marie Antoinette in the Place de la Concorde, were the same thing.

These works of Andy Warhol seem to omit happiness or joy, even pleasure, as out of the question, perhaps because such emotions do not lend themselves to repetition, and do not follow from passivity. But the melancholy in these works is offset by the daylight to be found in the perfect expression of a feeling: there’s a joy in seeing sadness perfectly portrayed. When Warhol shows repetition as an ideal of mindlessness, like an ideal it recedes from the grasp of man, who is condemned to variety, novelty and precarious margins. But even as Warhol shows that repetition cannot be achieved, he shows that it cannot be avoided. He shows repetition as a glory, as a jest, and as a riddle, and he shows the sufferance in suffering. No wonder that in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, that epiphenomenon, he has Nico sing, “Let me be your mirror! Let me be your mirror! Let me be your mirror!”

Andy Warhol’s Final Interview

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:37:59 +0000

Andy Warhol Interview – the last known interview to take place with Andy Warhol appeared in Flash Art magazine in April 1987. The interviewer was art writer, Paul Taylor who died of AIDS a week after his 35th birthday in 1992. His interview with Andy Warhol appears below.

Paul Taylor: You are going to be showing your Last Supper paintings in Milan this year.

Andy Warhol: Yes.

Paul Taylor: When did you make the paintings?

Andy Warhol: I was working on them all year. They were supposed to be shown in December, then January. Now I don’t know when.

Paul Taylor: Are they painted?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. Some were painted, but they’re not going to show the painted ones. We’ll use the silk-screened ones.

Paul Taylor: On some of them you have camouflage over the top of the images. Why is that?

Andy Warhol: I had some leftover camouflage.

Paul Taylor: From the self portraits?

Andy Warhol: Yeah

Paul Taylor: Did you do any preparatory drawings for them?

Andy Warhol: Yeah, I tried. I did about forty paintings.

Paul Taylor: They were all preparatory?

Andy Warhol: Yeah.

Paul Taylor: It’s very odd to see images like this one doubled.

Andy Warhol: They’re just the small ones.

Paul Taylor: The really big one is where there are images upside down and the right way up.

Andy Warhol: That’s right.

Paul Taylor: It’s odd because you normally see just one Jesus at a time.

Andy Warhol: Now there are two.

Paul Taylor: Like the two Popes?

Andy Warhol: The European Pope and the American Pope.

Paul Taylor: Did you see Dokoupil’s show at Sonnabend Gallery?

Andy Warhol: Oh no, I haven’t gone there yet. I want to go on Saturday.

Paul Taylor: It might be the last day. There you will see two Jesuses on crucifixes, one beside the other.

Andy Warhol: Oh

Paul Taylor: And he explained to me something like how it was transgressive to have two Jesuses in the same picture.

Andy Warhol: He took the words out of my mouth.

Paul Taylor: You’re trying to be transgressive?

Andy Warhol: Yes.

Paul Taylor: In America, you could be almost as famous as Charles Manson. Is there any similarity between you at the Factory and Jesus at the Last Supper?

Andy Warhol: That’s negative, to me it’s negative. I don’t want to talk about negative things.

Paul Taylor: Well, what about these happier days at the present Factory? Now you’re a corporation president.

Andy Warhol: It’s the same.

Paul Taylor: Why did you do the Last Supper?

Andy Warhol: Because [Alexander] Iolas asked me to do the Last Supper. He got a gallery in front of the other Last Supper, and he asked three or four people to do Last Suppers.

Paul Taylor: Does the Last Supper theme mean anything in particular to you?

Andy Warhol: No. It’s a good picture.

Paul Taylor: What do you think about those books and articles, like Stephen Koch’s Stargazer, and a 1964 Newsweek piece called Saint Andrew, that bring up the subject of Catholicism?”

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. Stephen Koch’s book was interesting because he was able to write a whole book about it. He has a new book out which I’m trying to to buy to turn into a screenplay. I think it’s called The Bride’s Bachelors or some Duchampy title. Have you read it yet?

Paul Taylor: No, I read the review in The New York Times Book Review.

Andy Warhol: What did it say?

Paul Taylor: It was okay.

Andy Warhol: Yeah? What’s it about?

Paul Taylor: Stephen Koch described it to me himself. He said it was about a heterosexual Rauschenberg figure in the sixties, a magnetic artist who has qualities of a lot of sixties artists. He has an entourage. I don’t know the rest.

Andy Warhol: I’ve been meaning to call him and see if he can tell me the story and send me the book.

Paul Taylor: Who’s making a screenplay?

Andy Warhol: We thought that we might be able to do it.

Paul Taylor: It’s a great idea. Would you be able to get real people to play themselves in it?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. It might be good.

Paul Taylor: Do you have screenwriters here?

Andy Warhol: We just bought Tama Janowitz’s book called Slaves of New York.

Paul Taylor: Does that mean you’re going back into movie production?

Andy Warhol: We’re trying. But actually what we’re working on is our video show which MTV is buying.

Paul Taylor: Nothing Special?

Andy Warhol: No, it’s called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. It was on Thursday last week and it’s showing again Monday and it’ll be shown two more times: December, and we’re doing one for January.

Paul Taylor: Do you make them?

Andy Warhol: No, Vincent works on them. Vincent Fremont.

Paul Taylor: Do you look through the camera on these things at all.

Andy Warhol: No.

Paul Taylor: What’s your role?

Andy Warhol: Just interviewing people.

Paul Taylor: If there was a movie made out of Stephen Koch’s novel, what would be your role in it?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. I’d have to read it first.

Paul Taylor: It’s not usual for business people to talk about these deals before they make them.

Andy Warhol: I don’t care if anyone… there’s always another book.

Paul Taylor: I saw Ileana [Sonnabend] today and asked her what I should ask you, and she said, “I don’t know. For Andy everything is equal”.

Andy Warhol: She’s right.

Paul Taylor: How do you describe that point of view?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. If she said it she’s right. [laughs]

Paul Taylor: It sounds zennish.

Andy Warhol: Zennish? What’s that?

Paul Taylor: Like Zen.

Andy Warhol: Zennish. That’s a good word. That’s a good title for… my new book.

Paul Taylor: What about your transformation from being a commercial artist to a real artist.

Andy Warhol: I’m still a commercial artist. I was always a commercial artist.

Paul Taylor: Then what’s a commercial artist?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know – someone who sells art.

Paul Taylor: So almost all artists are commerical artists, just to varying degrees.

Andy Warhol: I think so.

Paul Taylor: Is a better commercial artist one who sells more work?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. When I started out, art was doing down the drain. The people who used to magazine illustrations and the covers were being replaced by photographers. And when they started using photographers, I started to show my work with galleries. Everybody also was doing window decoration. That led into more galleries. I had some paintings in a window, then in a gallery.

Paul Taylor: Is there a parallel situation now?

Andy Warhol: No, it just caught on so well that there’s a new gallery open every day now.There are a lot more artists, which is real great.

Paul Taylor: What has happened to the idea of good art?

Andy Warhol: It’s all good art.

Paul Taylor: Is that to say that it’s all equal?

Andy Warhol: “Yeah well, I don’t know, I can’t…

Paul Taylor: You’re not interested in making distinctions.

Andy Warhol: Well no, I just can’t tell the difference. I don’t see why one Jasper Johns sells for three million and one sells for, you know, like four hundred thousand. They were both good paintings.

Paul Taylor: The market for your work has changed a little in the last few years. To people my age – in their twenties – you were always more important than to the collecting group of people in their fifties and sixties.

Andy Warhol: Well, I think the people who buy art now are these younger kids who have a lot of money.

Paul Taylor: And that’s made a difference to your market.

Andy Warhol: Yeah, a little bit.

Paul Taylor: How important is it for you to maintain control?

Andy Warhol: I’ve been busy since I started – since I was a working artist. If I wasn’t showing in New York I was doing work in Germany, or I was doing portraits.

Paul Taylor: What I mean is that as more and more artists come up, and as new galleries open every day, the whole idea of what an artist is changes. It’s no longer so special, and maybe a more special artist is one who maintains more control of his or her work.

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. It seems like every year there’s one artist for that year. The people from twenty years ago are still around. I don’t know why. The kids nowadays – there’s just one a year. They stay around, they just don’t…

Paul Taylor: You were identified with a few artists a couple of years ago – Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring.

Andy Warhol: We’re still friends.

Paul Taylor: But I never see you with any of this season’s flavors.

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. they got so much press. It was great. I’m taking photographs now. I have a photography show at Robert Miller Gallery.

Paul Taylor: And there’s going to be a retrospective of your films at the Whitney Museum.

Andy Warhol: Maybe, yes.

Paul Taylor: Are you excited about that?

Andy Warhol: No.

Paul Taylor: Why not?

Andy Warhol: They’re better talked about than seen.

Paul Taylor: Your work as an artist has always been so varied, like Leonardo. You’re a painter, a film maker, a publisher… Do you think that’s what an artist is?

Andy Warhol: No.

Paul Taylor: Can you define an artist for me?

Andy Warhol: I think an artist is anybody who does something well, like if you cook well.

Paul Taylor: What do you think about all the younger artists now in New York who are using pop imagery?

Andy Warhol: Pretty good.

Paul Taylor: Is it the same as when it happened in the sixties?

Andy Warhol: No, they have different reasons to do things. All these kids are so intellectual.

Paul Taylor: Do you like the punk era?

Andy Warhol: Well, it’s still around. I always think it’s gone but it isn’t. They still have their hard-rock nights at the Ritz. Do you ever go there?

Paul Taylor: No. But punk, like pop, might never go away.

Andy Warhol: I guess so.

Paul Taylor: How’s Interview [the magazine] going?

Andy Warhol: It’s not bad.

Paul Taylor: You’re going to be audited soon for the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Andy Warhol: Yeah, they’re doing it now.

Paul Taylor: What difference will it make?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know.

Paul Taylor: It will be better for advertising…

Andy Warhol: Yeah.

Paul Taylor: What’s the circulation now?

Andy Warhol: 170,000. The magazine’s getting bigger and bigger.

Paul Taylor: What magazines do you read?

Andy Warhol: I just read everything.

Paul Taylor: You look at everything. Do you read the art magazines?

Andy Warhol: Yeah, I look at the pictures.

Paul Taylor: You’ve been in trouble for using someone else’s image as far back as 1964. What do you think about the legal situation of appropriated imagery, and the copyright situation?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. It’s just like a Coca Cola bottle – when you buy it, you always think that it’s yours and you can do whatever you like with it. Now it’s sort of different because you pay a deposit on the bottle. We’re having the same problem now with the John Wayne pictures. I don’t want to get involved, it’s too much trouble. I think that you buy a magazine, you pay for it, it’s yours. I don’t get mad when people take my things.

Paul Taylor: You don’t do anything about it?

Andy Warhol: No. It got a little crazy when people were turning out paintings and signing my name.

Paul Taylor: What did you think about that?

Andy Warhol: Signing my name to it was wrong but other than that I don’t care.

Paul Taylor: The whole appropriation epidemic comes down to who is responsible for for art. If indeed anyone can manufacture the pictures of those flowers, the whole idea of the artist gets lost somewhere in the process.

Andy Warhol: Is that good or bad?

Paul Taylor: Well, first of all, do you agree with me?

Andy Warhol: Yes, if they take my name away. But when I used the flowers, the original photograph was huge and I just used one square inch of the photo and magnified it.

Paul Taylor: What do you ever see that makes you stop in your tracks?

Andy Warhol: A good display in a window… I don’t know, a good-looking face.

Paul Taylor: What’s the feeling when you see a good window display or a good face.

Andy Warhol: You just take longer to look at it. I went to China, I didn’t want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.

Paul Taylor: Have you been working out lately?

Andy Warhol: I just did it.

Paul Taylor: How much are you lifting now?

Andy Warhol: 105 pounds.

Paul Taylor: On the benchpress? That’s strong.

Andy Warhol: No it’s light. You’re stronger than me, and fitter and handsomer and younger, and you wear better clothes.

Paul Taylor: Did you enjoy the opening party thrown by GFT at the Tunnel?

Andy Warhol: I had already been there before.

Paul Taylor: In the sixties you mean?

Andy Warhol: [laughs] No – the manager or someone took me around it a few days ago.

Paul Taylor: It’s a very convenient club for the Bridge and Tunnel people – they’ll be able to come in on those tracks from New Jersey.

Andy Warhol: I don’t know whether it was my idea to call it the Tunnel or whether it was someone else’s idea that I liked, but I think it’s a good name.

Paul Taylor: And lots of people turned out for Claes Oldenburg’s show that night.

Andy Warhol: He looked happy. A lot of people said he looked happy. I always liked Claes actually. You looked great the other night. I took lots of photos of you in your new jacket.

Paul Taylor: Yes? How did I turn out.

Andy Warhol: They haven’t come back yet. Next time you come by I’ll take some close-ups.

Paul Taylor: For the Upfront section of Interview perhaps? Except that I’m not accomplished enough.

Andy Warhol: You could sleep with the publisher.

Paul Taylor: If you were starting out now, would you do anything differently?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. I just worked hard. It’s all fantasy.

Paul Taylor: Life is fantasy?

Andy Warhol: Yeah, it is.

Paul Taylor: What’s real?

Andy Warhol: Don’t know.

Paul Taylor: Some people would.

Andy Warhol: Would they?

Paul Taylor: Do you really believe it, or or tomorrow will you say the opposite?

Andy Warhol: I don’t know. I like this idea that you can say the opposite.

Paul Taylor: But you wouldn’t in this case?

Andy Warhol: No.

Paul Taylor: Is there any connection between fantasy and religious feeling?

Andy Warhol: Maybe. I don’t know. Church is a fun place to go.

Paul Taylor: Do you go to Italy very often?

Andy Warhol: You know we used to make our films there.

Paul Taylor: And didn’t you have a studio in the country for a while?

Andy Warhol: Outside of Rome.

Paul Taylor: And did you you go to the Vatican?

Andy Warhol: We passed by it every day.

Paul Taylor: I remember a polaroid you took of the Pope.

Andy Warhol: Yeah.

Paul Taylor: Did you take that from very close up?

Andy Warhol: Yes. He walked past us.

Paul Taylor: Andy he blessed you?

Andy Warhol: I have a photo of him shaking Fred Hughes’s hand. Someone wanted us to make a portrait of the Pope and they’ve been trying to get us together but we can’t and by now the Pope has changed three times.

Paul Taylor: Fred said he used to feel like the Pope in the old Factory in Union Square. He used to go out on that balcony and wave at the passing masses underneath.

Andy Warhol: He has a balcony now.

Paul Taylor: Yes, but from the current Factory he can only see the reception area.

Andy Warhol: He can wave.

Paul Taylor: And sometimes it’s just as busy as Union Square too.

The Origin Of Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:25:58 +0000

The Origin Of Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans by Gary Comenas of Warholstars.

Robert Indiana: “I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup.” (NY Times 12/1/02)

Marcel Duchamp: “If a man takes 50 Campbell’s soup cans and puts them on canvas, it is not the retinal image that concerns us. What interests us is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell’s soup cans on a a canvas.” (QU)

Martin Heidegger: “… at bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.”
(“On the Origin of the Work of Art”)

Andy Warhol used soup cans as subject matter at various stages of his career. In addition to the soup cans of the early 1960s he also produced portfolios of soup can prints in 1968 and 1969. During the mid-1970s soup cans were included in his Reversals and Retrospectives series. In 1985 soup can imagery was again used by him for a series of small silkscreens. (AWM41)

Various people have taken credit for suggesting to Andy Warhol that he paint soup cans. The least believable is Ultra Violet’s account. Ultra says that she ran into the yet to be famous Warhol in 1961 at a luncheonette on 88th and Madison where he was sitting at the counter eating chicken soup. When she asked him what he did, he said he painted. She asked him what he painted and, according to Ultra, Warhol responded, “Not much. I’m looking for ideas.” Pointing to the Campbell soup cans on a shelf, she supposedly said, “Why don’t you paint a soup can,” to which Andy supposedly responded, “hmm….” (UV90)

The problem with Ultra Violet’s “personal” recollections is that they often seem to be based on other people’s published accounts of the era. In her autobiography, Famous For 15 Minutes, she warns the reader in a disclaimer that “Just as Impressionist painters used strokes of color rather than photographic techniques to portray objects, so I have taken artistic license in conveying both reality and essence in this book.” (UV)

Warhol never recalled meeting Ultra Violet at the luncheonette. He thought he first met her when she came by the Factory to buy a painting. (POP)

According to Ted Carey (who was one of Andy Warhol’s commercial art assistants in the late fifties), it was Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the soup cans and Warhol’s early dollar paintings.

Muriel was an interior decorator with higher aspirations who had an art gallery (the Latow Gallery) in the East 60s. She told Warhol he should paint “Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.” Ted Carey, who was there at the time, said that Warhol responded, “Oh that sounds fabulous.” According to Carey, Warhol went out to the supermarket the following day and bought a case of “all the soups”, which Carey saw when he stopped by Warhol’s apartment the next day. (PS257)

Another assistant, Vito Giallo, who worked for Warhol in 1958/59, remembers that Warhol always had soup for lunch – “tomato soup was his favorite” – which Warhol would eat “watching TV at the same time… His [Warhol's] mother was there to make soup and a sandwich. Lettuce, tomato sandwiches, very simple.” (UW20)

Gerard Malanga would sometimes go to Andy’s house for lunch during the pre-Factory days when they were operating out of a vacated firehouse and he does not mention soup in his description of lunch at Warhol’s home: “After work was completed, we would go over to Andy’s house. The firehouse was three blocks from where Andy lived with Julia, his mother… She would make lunch for us, which usually consisted of a Czechoslovak-style hamburger stuffed with diced onion, sprinkled with parsley, and always on white bread, and with a 7-Up on ice.” (GMW32).

In an interview for the Face magazine in London in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol’s mother made from tin cans. In his response, Warhol mentioned them as a reason for doing his first tin can paintings:

David Yarritu: I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days.

Andy Warhol: Oh God, yes, it’s true, the tin flowers were made out of those fruit cans, that’s the reason why I did my first tin-can paintings…You take a tin-can, the bigger the tin-can the better, like the family size ones that peach halves come in, and I think you cut them with scissors. It’s very easy and you just make flowers out of them. My mother always had lots of cans around, including the soup cans. (FA50)

Although Muriel Latow’s suggestion to Warhol that he paint a soup can may have spurred him into action, it was only natural that Warhol would choose an image to paint that he had been surrounded by in his youth. When the art critic G.R. Swenson asked him in 1963 why he painted soup cans, he replied, “I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years.” (AN)

Ronald Tavel, the scriptwriter for Warhol’s early films, later recalled that “When a friend of Andy’s, Aaron Fine, dying of cancer in September 1962, inquired why he chose to depict the Campbell’s soup can, Andy answered, ‘I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.”

PopArt – The Andy Warhol Connection

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:54:07 +0000

The following article originally appeared in the February 16, 1980 issue of the English music magazine, Melody Maker. The original article was illustrated with photographs by Adrian Boot and Kate Simon.

Some people claim that only James Brown can match Andy Warhol’s contribution to the Modern Dance. in the mid-Sixties, Warhol’s Factory in New York saw the birth of the Velvet Underground, Polaroid art and the idea of boredom being fascinating. MARY HARRON circles warily around the silver ghost of Studio 54.

POPART/ART POP – The Warhol Connection

“Because of Andy Warhol, it’s no longer possible to just do what you do and not have to act it out 24 hours a day. His style of doing things changed everybody’s idea of what the values were that could make you a star. And as a result there’s this self-consciousness going on everywhere, this use of the media. It’s not just what you do now, it’s what you say about it, the way you behave, who your friends are. Your life has to reflect it. And in a way a lot of trash has been produced because of that. Which was also part of his idea…” (Steve Piccolo of the Lounge Lizards)

Andy Warhol is one of the great unacknowledged influences on pop music. He influenced it in a very specific way, by fostering the Velvet Underground. But his influence spreads beyond that – you see it everywhere, but it’s hard to define. It’s a matter of style and attitude. Not only did Warhol leave his mark on Roxy Music, David Bowie, the Ramones, Talking heads and every other new York art rock group, but he helped make them possible.

Warhol’s influence on pop music started with pop art and what it did to America. He did not, in fact, originate pop art, but it’s very typical of Warhol that most people now think he did. It was already news in 1959 when Jasper Johns exhibited two bronzed beer cans – a good three years before Warhol showed his silkscreens of Campbell soup cans to the world. But it was Warhol who became the symbol of pop art, and who took it to its farthest edge.

Warhol’s soup cans stood for everything that was trashy, disposable and mass-produced in American life. By bringing the supermarket into the art gallery, pop art discarded all prevailing values about what was good or bad, beautiful or ugly, art or non-art.

Pop art provided an exhilarating liberation. After all, not only was trash part of the modern landscape, but it had a life and beauty of its own. In America a lot of vitality, care and imagination has gone into producing trash. For artists, that whole bubblegum/comic strip/pop music/ B-movie side of America had the excitement of forbidden territory. Children and teenagers could love it unselfconsciously, but artists had been taught to reject it as having no permanence or value. Pop art kicked down barriers; now artists could admit to their secret love of trash. But because these artists were sophisticated adults, they celebrated bubblegum culture in an ironic, self conscious way.

The age of pop art was also the age in which pop music lost its innocence. You can hear that innocence in the Ronettes and the Shangri-las and all those Twist songs, cheerfully fizzing away, never dreaming that anyone would take them seriously. But when the art world began to take an interest in pop, pop began to look at itself very differently. The two worlds locked; pop music acquired a history and influences.

Purely commercial pop continues to be produced, of course, as does purely “art” music, but it was only after the two worlds interlocked that you had arty pop. Only after pop music had become self conscious could you have a group like the Ramones, with their amazing ironic dumbness. The Ramones eternally stand back from themselves. They are both an expression of American teenagehood and a comment on it, and perhaps for that reason they have never been embraced by the mass of American teenagers. But then pop art was never truly popular either: reproductions of Warhol silkscreens never found their way onto the living room walls of Middle America.

But if most Americans didn’t approve of Warhol, and still don’t approve of him, everyone heard about him. The entry for him in Webster’s Biographical Dictionary says: “Perennially controversial, Warhol reached mythic proportions in the 1960s largely because his motives were almost totally obscure…”

Public fascination with Warhol revolved around two questions: Why is he doing this? and How is he getting away with it?

To the public he was a hustler, and in a way they were right. The way that he manipulated the media was part of his statement – which makes you wonder whether Malcolm McLaren isn’t one of his spiritual heirs. Both used the media – but, unlike McLaren, Warhol never had any subversive aims. Warhol has always had the greatest respect for money and fame and power.

The public must have been bewildered to see Andy Warhol, who seemed to be doing nothing, embraced by the Establishment – welcomed by the Museum of Modern Art, courted by Nelson Rockefeller. One reason was, quite simply, his talent. Warhol is a designer of great brilliance, and even when he seemed to be doing nothing but reproducing common American images – from dollar bills to Jackie Kennedy, from Elvis Presley to the electric chair – he did it with unmistakable flair.

Another reason was his talent for making the right social connections – at a time when art had become very fashionable. Tom Wolfe wrote in his profile of art collector Robert Scull: “Abstract Expressionism was so esoteric it had all but defied exploitation by the press. But all the media embraced Pop Art with an outraged, scandalized, priapic delight. Art generally became the focus of social excitement in New York. Art openings began to take over from theatre openings as the place where the chic, the ambitious and the beautiful congregated.”

Finally, there was the fascination of Warhol’s attitude, as seen in his occasional childlike, oracular public statements: “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” “Business is the best art.” “I love Hollywood. It’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” “We’re a vacuum here at the Factory. I think it’s great.”

The Factory was his studio on West 47th Street. The name was both ironic and candid. The building had, in fact, once been a factory; now, by silkscreen paintings and having most of his work done by assistants, Warhol was trying to produce factory art.

Warhol’s Factory threatened the whole idea of art as individual painstaking self-expression, and in this he went beyond his contemporaries. On the whole, pop art was fun. The work of someone like Claes Oldenburg – he of the enormous plaster hamburgers – could be seen as an affectionately satirical look at American life. Warhol himself was not satirical. He not only accepted the supermarket as valid subject-matter, he accepted it for what it was. He may have outraged the bourgeoisie but he approved of consumerism, of modern industrial life, in a way that the president of IBM in his most secret thoughts would not have dared to admit.

Warhol’s blank acceptance, his refusal to make value judgments, had dangerous implications, but it was also liberating. Most people had become so frightened by the modern world that they couldn’t even look at it straight. Warhol seemed to have none of the normal human reactions – no fear of alienation, loneliness, conformity.

Many of his pronouncements were witty: he was never totally sincere or insincere. The best source of these is The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A To B And Back Again) – a book which, characteristically, he did not write. His assistants wrote it up from taped conversations with Warhol: “I like eating alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDYMATS – The Restaurant for the Lonely Person. You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.”

At times Warhol seemed to be looking at the world with the naive curiosity of a creature from another planet. The only person I can think of now who shares this vision is David Byrne of Talking Heads. The title More Songs About Buildings And Food, the line “Heaven is a bar where nothing ever happens” and the lyrics to Don’t Worry About The Government are all very Warhol. But Byrne seems more vulnerable. Throughout his songs, it’s as if he’s taking a correspondence course in modern life, learning step by step how to fit in.

Both Byrne and Warhol believe in the virtues of hard work, business and success, and accept the status quo. But there’s one big difference between them. Byrne worries about human emotions; Warhol doesn’t, or at least claims he used to but stopped when he discovered the television set and the tape-recorder:

“During the Sixties, I think, most people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me.” (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol). People did not forget how to feel during the Sixties; this statement is about Warhol himself, and the solution he found to his problem in living. His problem seems to have been an extreme timidity, an almost pathological shyness which made it impossible for him to relate to people directly. He also loved and needed to be surrounded by people. His solution was to relate to them through tape and films. and because he was so famous and could attract fame, his solution was a very public and influential one:

“The acquisition of my tape-recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good it’s not a problem any more. An interesting problem was an interesting tape. Everybody knew that and performed for the tape. You couldn’t tell which problems were real and which problems were performed for the tape. Better yet, the people telling you the problems couldn’t decide any more if they were really having the problems or just performing.”

This only makes sense in the context of Warhol’s social circle, where people wanted to sit around and put their problems on tape. This doesn’t mean all his friends were rich and spoiled. Warhol hadn’t yet become the full-time socialite he is today, and some of his entourage were social outcasts – hustlers and transvestites. But they all had a certain New York style of dealing with their neuroses by turning them into theatre – by developing an attitude and then acting it out full-time in an amazing performance. Living theatre.

Warhol’s entourage was also vulnerable and narcissistic. Warhol had spotted something about film and tape: they were an invitation to narcissism. You could act yourself out and record yourself and then play yourself back.

They don’t necessarily function that way, of course – most home movies are not narcissistic. But Warhol began to make a very sophisticated kind of home movie, in which his friends acted out themselves, and which were then shown to the public. And for some of his friends it was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to them, and for some it was ultimately destructive.

In 1963 Warhol and his assistants began making films at the Factory, which was a very large L-shaped loft with the walls covered in silver paper. The early films were silent, black and white, and had titles like Eat, Kiss, Sleep, Blowjob, Haircut: single camera shots, concentrating on a single activity, sometimes for many hours. The culmination of this was Empire in 1964, the eight-hour film of the Empire State Building which contained one action: a light being switched off.

What Tom Wolfe said about modern art in The Painted Word is also true of avant-garde filmmaking: the simpler something is, the more elaborate the criticism it inspires, until the explanation becomes more important than the work itself. Thousands of pages have been written trying to explain these films, and I don’t want to add to them. Perhaps Warhol just became interested in the idea of film and approached it with his usual blank curiosity, as if he had never seen anything like this before.

So there was no story, no acting, no artistic touch. Just – “Here is a camera. See? This is what it does.” The films were stunningly boring (although they make beautiful still photographs) and were obviously meant to be. When questioned, Warhol said that he liked boredom. Boredom was great.

Gradually, the films became more elaborate, with soundtracks and scripts. The performers were drawn form Warhol’s entourage, the inner circle of the madhouse of people who filled the Factory day and night.

As Warhol’s Philosophy says: “In the Sixties everyone got interested in everybody else. Drugs helped a little there…” At the Factory members of the art Establishment and rich debutantes like Baby Jane Holzer and Edie Sedgwick met the sexual underground of drag queens and Times Square hustlers. And the drug underground, too – amphetamines played a big part in the life of the Factory.

These “underground” movies were made in a steady glare of publicity. Everything Warhol did at this time was news, and he could bestow the protection of his fame on the misfits who came off the streets to shelter at the Factory. In modern America, celebrity was becoming an end in itself; it no longer mattered what you were, as long as you were famous.

Movies, radio and TV changed the nature of fame. Until they were invented, fame had always been a matter of reputation: as long as it depended on word of mouth or on print, it was necessary to be or do something extraordinary to attract attention. You had to be very talented or very rich or beautiful or powerful or evil or saintly.

The advent of the electronic media meant that anyone’s voice or image could be sent into a million homes (an advance of sorts on the movies, which could only send them into movie theatres).

At the same time, celebrity-watching became a full-time occupation for many people, because you could now “get to know” anyone by seeing him or her on television, all by yourself in your own home. Actually, you wouldn’t get to know them at all, or at least nothing beyond their public image, but still – there they were in your living room.

The teasing sense of intimacy made the public fascinated by personalities; the emphasis shifted from what people did to what they were like. Rock music, which came of age with television, is totally obsessed by personality.

In the Sixties very few people were willing to admit that fame no longer depended on achievement. Warhol was quite happy to admit it, and to play with it. What he did was to take a group of unknown people and turn them into “superstars”.

The word itself was invented by Warhol’s friend Ingrid, a raucous blonde from New Jersey who began calling herself”Ingrid Superstar”. The more she went to parties with Andy, the more her name was printed in the papers, and Ingrid Superstar became famous. Eventually, all the personalities in Warhol’s films became known as superstars. Warhol’s Philosophy defined them as “all the people who are very talented, but whose talents are hard to define and almost impossible to market.”

Warhol was a great talent-spotter, and most of his superstars had wit and a kind of freaky glamour. (The transvestite’s outrageous thrift-shop finery was an influence on glitter rock, at least the American variety, in the shape of the New York Dolls.) Some were great beauties, like Edie Sedgwick and International Velvet, some were great talkers, like Ondine and Taylor Mead – and some were both, like Viva and the drag queen Candy Darling.

In the early films they would just start with an idea – “sit over there and eat a banana” – but even when they had scripts most of the action was improvised. The superstars would camp around or discuss their problems or reminisce, or just sit there, transmitting their presence onto the screen.

Cameras don’t make judgments: they record everything, whether it’s interesting or not. So, true to the nature of the medium, Warhol and his assistants let their cameras record everything: the early films were almost never edited. This made them boring, but life-like in a bizarre way. Warhol once called them “documentaries”. It’s true that even the most theatrical performers, the drag queens, were just repeating a performance they carried on in life; however, the camera was also inspiring them to perform.

Alan Midgette, who was probably the only professional actor to appear in Warhol’s early films, says he remembers that once the fashion model Ivy Nicholson stood in front of the camera at the Factory and tried to slit her wrists.

“Those kind of people get demented when they become involved with movies, because they don’t understand how powerful they can be,” he says. “Something gets triggered off because they’re not really acting. They haven’t been given a part to play, so they start pulling these weird things out or their psyche and throwing them at the camera.”

Appropriately enough, the only real acting Warhol asked Midgette to do was to impersonate Warhol himself. In 1966 the artist was invited to go on a university lecture tour, and since Warhol was too shy, his assistant Paul Morrissey, asked Midgette to go instead; there was a certain resemblance between the two, although Allen was younger and better looking. so he sprayed his hair silver, like Andy’s, rubbed the lightest shade of makeup on his fact to imitate Andy’s pallor, and borrowed Andy’s black leather jacket.

Midgette impersonated Warhol at lectures, meetings with academics, and in interviews.”I knew as Andy you could answer a question anyway, and that the most ambiguous answer was the closest to being like Andy.” Eventually, the hoax was discovered, and the fees for the lectures had to be returned – but it also won Warhol thousands of dollars’ worth of free publicity.

When questioned Warhol told a newspaper: “Oh, well, we just did it, well, I uh, because, uh, I really don’t have that much to say. The person who went had so much more to say. He was what the people expected.”

Midgette thinks that it was seeing his replica accepted on the lecture tour that gave Warhol the confidence to appear in public. Warhol, who always delegated everything , had succeeded in delegating the responsibility for being himself.

Warhol was, at this point, probably the most famous and highest-paid artist in the world. And, ironically, his superstars became famous, too – real media celebrities. In a way, what Warhol had done was sick. He had let people expose themselves to the camera, and he had shown that not only did they want to expose themselves but that other people wanted to watch. He had made voyeurism chic.

Some of the superstars destroyed themselves, like Edie Sedgwick, who became a drug addict and died of an overdose at 27. But something good came out of those films, too. It was an attitude – tough, funny, sharp-witted – sustained by many of the superstars even when they were showing their scars. It was the attitude of people who had been through the mill and come out flaunting. Their detachment, the way they paodied themselves, was a form of courage – and if you were a drag queen in 1966, you needed all the courage you could get.

You can find the same attitude among certain personalities on the New York rock music scene today, like Lydia Lunch. You can also find the same sickness and affectation.

So many worlds converged at the Factory and Warhol knew so many people that it was probably inevitable that he should meet the Velvet Underground.

He was friendly with the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, in whose Theatre of Eternal Music John Cale played when he first came to New York. Warhol also knew a conceptual artist named Walter DeMaria, who played drums for John Cale and Lou Reed in an early incarnation of the Velvets called the Primitives.

According to Gerard Malanga, at one point Warhol was planning to start his own rock band along with Young, Zazeela, De Maria and Patty Oldenburg, the wife of Claes Oldenburg. The idea of Warhol fronting a rock band is irrestible but it never came to anything. However, it does show that rock was on his mind. By 1965 he had plans to open the first mixed-media show in New York, involving live music, dancers and film.

It was Gerard Malanga who actually led Warhol to the Velvet Underground. Malanga was Warhol’s personal assistant during the mid-Sixties, a poet and superstar, and Warhol’s opposite in every way: good-looking, street-smart, an unabashed exhibitionist and extravagantly heterosexual. Warhol fired Malanga years ago, for some undisclosed transgression; this was after 1968, when the Factory had moved premises to Union Square and its whole style had changed.

It was easy to track Malanga down to his home on 14th Street at 3rd Avenue. It seemed appropriate to find this symbol of the old Factory still living here, on a a block lined with cut-price stores, pawnshops and liquor stores. It is not one of the most dangerous streets in New York, just one of the sleaziest, like Times Square. Everyone, even the newsagents, looks like they are involved in something vaguely illegal and unsuccessful. It is also a drug street, where addicts of various kinds huddle in little groups rocking back and forth, whimpering long, frenetic monologues.

Whenever anyone talks of the romance of streetlife I always think of 14th Street at 3rd Avenue and wonder if that’s where they really want to be. But I also suspect that all the New York art undergrounds, from the Beats to the Factory to the rock scene, have been most alive when they connected with this world, maybe because it acts as a constant reminder of what you face when you put yourself “outside of society.” Certainly, the Factory stopped taking risks after it closed its doors to Times Square.

When I met Malanga he still looked very much the way he does in photographs from ten years ago, down to the black leather trousers that he made into a fashion. Malanga explained that it was the first time in years that he had worn leather: he was leaving that night to appear at a poetry festival in Amsterdam and though he should dress for the part.

It was the way he dressed when he went to see the Velvet Underground at the Cafe Bizarre at the tend of 1965. He was also carrying a large whip at the time. Not because he was into S & M, but as an accessory – it went with the leather. As the Velvets played Malanga began to do an extravagant whip dance, and afterwards Lou Reed came over and asked him if he’d come and dance every night.

Warhol’s mixed media show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, opened upstairs at the Dom Theatre in early 1966. Sometimes five films would be projected at once, running all over the walls and ceiling, and anyone from the audience could come up and run the projector. Sometimes the Velvets would all wear white so that they simply reflected the film images and became invisible onstage, and sometimes the entire cast of the Living Theatre would come by after a performance and start leaping around the room.

This was the time when the whole Factory entourage hung out in the backroom restaurant at Max’s Kansas City. Warhol’s bill there was said to be 3,000 dollars a month. Deborah Harry, who was a waitress there at the time, has said in interviews that not only were the Warhol crowd the rudest people she ever met, but they never left any tips.

The Velvets began to rehearse at the Factory, and did so nearly every day for almost two years. The phone was always ringing with invitations for Warhol and his entourage. This was an age of lavish parties, in lofts and art galleries, parties everywhere from discotheques to the Statue of Liberty. And so the Velvets wrote All Tomorrow’s Parties: “What costumes shall the poor girl wear/To all tomorrow’s parties?”

Malanga says, “The Velvets were always invited to things, and usually they would show up. But they were very much in the background, and no one really paid any attention to them. Except for Nico, because she had a lot of social connections.”

Nico was then a successful fashion model who had appeared in La Dolce Vita and cut a single in London with Andrew Oldham. Malanga: “It was Warhol’s idea to bring Nico into the group; he wanted her in because he felt the Velvets on their own ‘lacked charisma’.”

Of all the Velvets, Lou Reed spent the most time at the Factory and was closest to Warhol.

In some way their attitudes were close. Warhol has often gone on record as saying that sex is too much trouble, but he is fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semi-pornographic in a distanced, ironic way. A friend of Reed’s in the Factory days said to me: “Lou is mostly a voyeur. In my experience he never had any sustained interest in either sex. You see, sex just doesn’t offer Lou enough – he’s just really bored by it.” But like Warhol, Reed was interested in the idea of sex, in the sexual role-playing of transvestitism and S&M.

Reed drew on the Factory for his subject matter – the Chelsea Girls are all Warhol people, Candy Says is about Candy Darling and Walk On The Wild Side is a series of vivid superstar portraits – but he didn’t share Warhol’s passive, objective eye. Candy Says is a very moving song, and Lou Reed had obviously been touched by this people; he identified with them.

Some of the Velvets’ most important songs,, like Heroin, Venus In Furs and I’m Waiting for My Man, were already written by the time they met Warhol. He functioned less as an inspiration than as a source of financial and moral support.

Sterling Morrison, the Velvets’ guitarist, thinks they might have broken up in six months if it wasn’t for Warhol. Morrison says: “He argued against restraint.” John Cale says: “Andy’s a good catalyst.” One reason why Warhol had such a powerful effect was that he created an atmosphere at the Factory where it seemed that all the old rules and forms had been broken and anything could be tried. His attitude was “Why not?” Or, when faced with a problem, “So what?”

Walter De Maria says, “There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge.”

When I asked him if the people at the Factory ever thought about the future he said, “No, I think the present was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way.”

1966 is said to have been the great year at the Factory. By 1968 the Velvet Underground, after touring with the Plastic Inevitable, had come to an amicable parting of the ways with Warhol. That same year a lesbian feminist named Valerie Solanas appeared on the outer fringes of the Warhol entourage, and played a small part in one film, I, A Man.

Solanas, who seems to have had a certain sense of humour as well as a badly deranged mind, formed a group called SCUM – The Society for Cutting Up Men. When Warhol refused to produce a film script she had written, she became resentful. On June 5, 1968, she took the elevator up to the Factory, walked over to Andy Warhol, who was talking on the telephone and shot him three times in the chest.

In his Philosophy, Warhol wrote: “Before I was shot, I always thought I was more half-there than all there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” After being shot, he says, he knew that he was watching television: “The channels switch, but it’s all TV.”

Be that as it may, it affected him enough to cause a revolution in the Factory. The open-door policy was stopped and the Factory moved premises to Union Square and became an increasingly professional organisation. Paul Morrissey, who had become Warhol’s chief assistant (and who once managed NIco), too over the filming. The result was more commercial, and admittedly more entertaining, films like Flesh, Trash and Heat.

The new Factory, in Union Square, houses the offices of Interview magazine. Glenn O’Brien who edited it for three years and now writes its music column, says it was started to give Gerard Malanga something to do.

It began as a film magazine, but eventually concentrated almost entirely on interviews. They were all transcripts from tape recordings and, like the early films, were interesting because they left in all sorts of things that a professional editor would have cut out. The interviews read just like conversations, sometimes boring and trivial, but with the fascination of eavesdropping.

Interview seems to have influenced the punk fanzines. Punk magazine, which started in New York in 1975, picked up the random, slightly surreal style of the early Interview. Mark P. told me in the summer of 1976 that, although he thought Punk was too much of a comic book, it had given him the inspiration to start Sniffin’ Glue. And the rest is history. Or not, as the case may be.

The editorial policy of Interview is avowedly to cover people who are doing interesting things, but it has concentrated increasingly on those who are rich or already famous. It’s now edited by Bob Colacello, who contributes a rather arch monthly column about his social-climbing. Interview has done a great deal for Warhol’s own social connections, and he seems to appear at every important party. But then Andy Warhol – who was born Andrew Warhola 52 years ago, the child of Czech immigrants, whose father worked in the Pittsburgh steel mills, and who grew up in poverty – has always been infatuated with the rich.

The reception area of the new Factory is very quiet. There is a lot of polished wood floor, and polished tables, and the minute you walk in a young man politely asks you what your business is.

There are several of those young men wandering around the Factory, all remarkably alike. They are fair, well-dressed and very well groomed, rather sweet, but enervated. They have the kind of faces that appear in Interview magazine, and like all those faces they are faintly disappointing in the flesh – they only achieve perfection in photographs.

I sat down to wait. Fred Hughes, who is listed as the “President” of Interview, walked in. He is small, neat, impeccably dressed, but brash. I suspect that brashness is his most likeable characteristic.

Hughes sat down at the telephone and smiled at me suspiciously. Did I have an appointment? I was glad that I did, because there is a potential for nastiness at the Factory. If you did not have an appointment they could make it very clear to you that you were not beautiful, rich, amusing, or in any way fabulous enough to have walked in there at all.

Warhol came in and we were introduced, not that I had any trouble recognising him. there was a slight shock at first when I realised how old he was – I had always thought of Warhol as permanently 30. At first sight he is unearthly. His skin is like nothing I’ve ever seen on a human being. His face, beneath the dyed silver hair, is so pale that it seems to have been modeled out of putty, ridged with little crevices that are, in fact, nothing more sinister than adolescent acne scars. He speaks very softly, and with a shy boyish charm that immediately begins to take effect.

Warhol explained that he had some business to take care of, and I sat down to wait again. I noted, with some satisfaction, that the paint was peeling from the ceiling. Warhol returned and we retired to one end of the room, past a huge vertical prism filled with rainbows, surrounded by black screens and potted plants, past a stuffed penguin on top of a marble table, surrounded by black armchairs. I brought out my tape-recorder.

“Is the radio on?” asked Warhol. He went over and switched it off, so that it wouldn’t interfere with the recording. Warhol knows about tape recorders.

I knew that a few days previously Warhol had been down at the Mudd Club filming a “Rock and Roll Funeral Party” in progress there. The party ran for two nights in the upstairs room. The room was filled with shrines, each designed by a different artist. One was a replica of a trashed hotel room with a psychedelic Moon. Another was a room with a psychedelic poster on the wall and a lamp covered with a fringed shawl; on the floor lay a dummy in beads and feathers with a hedge of hypodermic needles sticking out of her arm – Janis Joplin.

“We have a show we’re trying to do on cable television called Fashion,” said Warhol. “So we were filming it down there.”

What did you think was the best exhibit?

“I liked it… uh… well, I liked it because the party was for two days. I think the one I liked was the ham sandwiches in front of the candles.”

The shrine was to Mama Cass. Warhol said he thought the kids there wore great clothes. I asked if he thought the fashion had changed recently.

“Well, I think they’re, uh, just… well, it looks like they’re wearing the Sixties. I don’t know. Without being hippies.”

In England they’re all wearing mod clothes now.

“They are? Oh, again? Oh, really? Oh, great. I like all the things the kids… the punk thing still looks great.”

This was all very nice, and very polite, and curiously paralysing. Partly it was the effect of Warhol’s shyness; partly it was because I knew that he might walk away at any moment.

In your book, the one that’s coming out now (Exposures), which groups have you…uh… have you got any groups in there? (Hesitation was catching.)

“I think so, yeah.” (Later, Glenn O’Brien would assure me that Andy really did have a bad memory.) “I think we have the Talking Heads and, uh, we have Walter Steding, who works here. We have Lou Reed. Just, uh, anybody who usually comes up here.”

How did you come to… didn’t you do an ad for Talking Heads?

“Oh well, I guess I met them a long time ago and I did an interview with them and I thought they were really terrific.”

We talked about the Palladium, which Warhol said was great, and then I asked him about the first time he saw the Velvet Underground. What were they playing?

“They were just playing loud.”

What did they look like then?

“Well, they always wore black. And Maureen played one note and John wore black. They all wore black. They were great. But somehow they were in the New York kind of music, and California kind of won out with all the hippy kind of music.”

Didn’t you take the Velvets out to California?

“Oh yes. we were there with Bill Graham at… what’s the name of that place?”

The Fillmore?

“The Fillmore, yeah. Jim Morrison saw the show, and I think he picked up some of his style from that. He began to wear leather, like Gerard. Actually, Barbara Rubin wanted to bring us to London, so I guess if we’d really gone to London it might have been more successful. I’m sorry we didn’t do that. She wanted to get the Albert Hall.”

Warhol couldn’t remember how his involvement with the Velvets stopped.

“I don’t know. I like them so much, we might have had a contract but it didn’t matter… they just decided to find some other manager. Well, it was just too hard going around. It was fun to go around for a few months. And then we could have gotten another night club, and it would have meant staying up till seven every morning and it was just too hard to worry about that. So then the group broke up or something like that… and then it took years and Lou just kept on working. He’s very good now, he’s changed a lot.”

Do you ever go to his concerts?

“Oh yeah, I think they’re terrific.”

The Velvets were really the first art rock band weren’t they?

“Well, I think the Talking Heads are doing it better. They seem to be more sensible and they work at it. They were art kids, too. They went to Rhode Island School of Design.”

What do you mean – more sensible?

“Well, less crazy. It was a crazier time then, I guess. Now they’re doing it more like a profession. And they’re good at it.”

You said something in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol about how the Sixties were very cluttered, and the Seventies were very empty…

“… What are the Eighties going to be like?”

Right.

“Oh, well, all I know is that New York is as fun now as it was then, but even more so. Well, the hippies were around then; that was sort of wonderful.”

I was stunned – in the Sixties, Warhol and the Factory stood as a symbol for everything that was urban and cynical and decadent – everything that the hippies were not. Also, Allen Midgette and Sterling Morrison had both told me that everyone at the Factory used to laugh at hippies. But, on second thought, I’m sure Warhol does think the hippies were wonderful. He likes to see a lot of activity.

Do you think New York went dead for awhile?

“Yeah, it did, it really did. Well, they kept pushing that New York was such a terrible place. There’s just as much crime happening now as was happening then. There are the same people on the same streets.”

Do you ever go to London?

“Oh yeah, we were just there with Martha Graham and Liza Minelli and Halston and Steve Rubell. Oh, it was wonderful.”

Does it strike you as having changed?

“Well, it was really wonderful and, uh, great.”

I asked Warhol about his superstars. What was the difference between that kind of fame and other kinds?

“Uh… well, it was really wonderful and, uh, great.”

I asked Warhol about his superstars. What was the difference between that kind of fame and other kinds?

“Uh… well, it was just such a good time for the kids. You got famous in one movie, and they didn’t know that you had to go on to acting school if that was your career. It just happened too easy.”

I guess they didn’t realise that it wasn’t going to last.

“I always thought it was just sort of good training. And after you did it, you really had to go on to school to be an actor and really learn what technique was. Because it is technique.”

Did any of them try?

“Well, Joe Dallesandro is in Rome. He makes a lot of movies. Not many of the others.”

But wasn’t that part of it – that it was very easy fame?

“Well, it was just all right then, because everybody was supposed to do something new. And they all had the chance, but they just didn’t know what to do with it.”

It’s a bit like how people get famous in rock music.

“Yeah. like that group that was so great that just sort of fell apart and one of the boys died.”

The New York Dolls?

“No, no, no, the English one.”

Oh, the Sex Pistols.

“They were just so famous. But they were really talented. I guess the guy who killed himself was just the same kind of Sixties… you get famous with something, and then you have to keep doing it because it’s what you know. But the other one, the one that seems to quit because he realised it had gone too crazy – what’s he doing now?”

John Lydon? He’s got a new group.

“It must be… a different theory, right? So you can change and do anything.”

I asked Warhol about Nico.

“Nico is really fat now. She’s in town. Have you interviewed her?”

Do you think she ever cared about being famous?

“Well, Nico had like eight careers going for her, and every time they happened she changed. She was a French movie star, and as soon as she became almost successful at that she left and came with the Velvets. And then as soon as she was singing the right kind of songs and she was getting more work, she’d buy an organ and do chanting. Every time it’s almost successful, she changes her whole style. I don’t know why she does that.”

We talked about John Cale, who Warhol said was the most talented of the Velvets. Just then a young man drifted past.

“Have you met Walter Steding? Want to meet him? He’s great. Walter, do you want to do a little interview? He’s the person you ought to interview, he’s the one who plays the violin…”

He beckoned Steding over and said: “Why don’t you tell her what you do, why don’t you sit down and be interviewed.” He turned to me and said simply, “Walter wants to make it, so…” So it made more sense for him to be interviewed.

Walter Steding, a rather shy and sweet young man, sat down by the tape recorder and told me about his first stage performance, in which he used electrical impulses from his brain to activate a synthesizer while he played the violin. Meanwhile, Warhol had disappeared. He had succeeded in delegating the interview.

Whatever Warhol did that was of real importance was probably between 1960 and 1968; once the shock of his refusal to make value judgments was over, he stopped being a radical force and became just an uncritical member of the Establishment. But we are left with his influence. It’s particularly strong in the New York rock underground because he virtually created it, by taking the Velvet Undergound into his social world.

Andy Warhol’s great virtues were his immense curiosity about people and the world around him, his open mind, his astuteness and his nerve. He could take almost any attitude and make it look cool.

This made him a great legitimiser. He legitimised the sophisticated use of bubblegum which would turn the Shangri-las into Blondie, and beach party music into the B-52s. He legitimised the ultra-naive-but-sophisticated celebration of America, and therefore made it possible for Jonathan Richman to write a happy song about a shoppping plaza, and David Byrne to write a touching song about his apartment building, without being laughed at.

He made his entourage famous, and their outrageousness inspired the rock fashion for using transvestitism and S&M leather for shock effect. With this came the whole idea of using decadence or a parody of decadence as a subject for rock music.

Warhol proved in his own life that no matter how fucked up you were you could survive through style – as long as you were never embarrassed. Wahol’s particular style involved an emotional detachment that was based on a fear of emotion, and he helped make non-feeling cool.

He understood the media brilliantly, and he showed how to use them before they used you, by consciously developing an image. His success also made it seem more important to have an image. He probably created David Bowie, and it seems right that Bowie, whose talent for celebrity rivals Warhol’s own, should be the only rock star to write a song about him. And when Bowie was at his most famous he projected an invulnerability that, like Warhol’s, was based on the sense that he wasn’t quite human. He was a star personality who, in fact, had no personality, just a constantly changing image.

After Bowie, Warhol’s influence seemed to fade in England. The Sex Pistols, may have killed it. I think one reason why English groups are so concerned with taking moral stands and New York groups are positively hostile to them, is that Warhol’s influence is much stronger in New York. Morality is contrary to the Warhol style. The advantage of this is that you are never self-righteous, and the disadvantage is that you are never sincere – or concerned.

At its best, the influence of Warhol’s style means that the New York groups are witty and sharp and clear-eyed enough to express unpleasant truths; at its worst it means they will play with evil and not care about the consequences because, well, life is just a movie.

A few days after interviewing Warhol, I saw Glenn O’Brien. He’d just finished taping his cable television show, TV Party. Once a week Glenn and his friends, including Deborah Harry, get together and have a party. On television. (Probably this could only happen in New York.) I told Glenn about the interview, and I asked him whether Warhol meant it when he said everything was great.

“Andy does like everything,” Glenn replied. “The only thing he wouldn’t like would be something that was boring or imposed on him. But it’s also a very intelligent, Machiavellian politeness. If you say everything is great, some people will take you at your word and some people will think you’re being ironic. The people who think it’s great will think you’re saying it’s great, and the people who think it’s awful will think you’re really saying it’s awful. So you’re always saying the right thing.”

And that’s where we have to leave it, because that’s Warhol’s message, that’s what he’s been saying all along: Here is the modern world – and it’s great.

Andy Warhol at the Rowan Gallery

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:37:05 +0000

The following review of Andy Warhol’s show at the Rowan gallery in England first appeared in the Guardian newspaper on March 9, 1968:

Andy Warhol at the Rowan Gallery
by Norbert Lynton

Andy Warhol, says the catalogue; “born Philadelphia 1930, lives in New York”. That is all. The last item is right, the second is questionable, the first in its implications problematic. According to some sources he was born in 1927, which would put him on the unglamorous side of 40. No matter, as long as it is Andy we have before us, but here the difficulty arises: no one shows less of himself in his art.

Note the paradox. We all know about him – telly, colour supplements, art magazines, word of mouth. What do we know about him:? We know about his endless films about sleeping, about the Empire State, about the Chelsea Girls (I can claim to have seen the untruncated three-hours-plus of that one; sheer devotion to duty); we know about multiple soup can pictures and carrier-bags, about paintings mechanically derived from photos of people; disasters, disastrous people; about gas-filled silver pillows that float around. And what do we know about him? Nothing.

The Rowan gallery is showing a selection of his photo-based, silk-screened faces. Two sorts: criminals, taken from the rough half-tones of the New York police gazette, full-face and profile, also four unposed snapshots. And, Marilyn Monroe in a series of 10 prints, the same photo used 10 times in different colour combinations.

They are the Most Wanted Men. The enlarged half-tone fascinates visually. Close to, it resembles some complex constructivist programme of varyingly intense spots of paint and of intervals on a grid. We draw away and are surprised at our conceptual agility. With the most immediate of compulsions wee translate a dot cluster into tone and tone into features and features into personality. They look like television actors, French intellectuals, the man next door, a headmaster. Only one of them looks thuggish and he has a ghastly bruised eye, more thugged than thugging.

On the other wall, the most wanted woman. Her at least we know: her name evokes a swarm of film and newspaper images, sportive and sad. Yet, looking at Warhol’s reproductions of that familiar face, we lose the familiarity. Each version is different because of the colour and tone values and the way the register is allowed to drag a little. They are Marilyn but they contradict each other and we lose sight of her behind the suave and garish surfaces. In the end it is as though she has been exorcised from her own public image, and suddenly the twinges we all felt at her death seem narcissistic.

Whether Warhol himself at any point touched any of these pictures does not matter: in some way or other he made them exist, and they touch us. Or strictly, they are there for us to enter into dialogue with or not, as we wish. He has said “Someday everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike.” His pictures invite us to think what we will – a mass media Bruegel, he holds up mirrors.

Shopping with Andy Warhol – Article on Andy Warhol

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:29:50 +0000

Shopping with Andy Warhol by Stuart Pivar, 1987.

The following essay originally appeared in volume five of the Sotheby’s Andy Warhol Collection 1988 auction catalogue.

Andy Warhol loved to buy art. We used to go shopping for it together for a few hours practically every day in the past couple of years. He bought many, many things.

After discussion and planning by phone in the morning we would set out around 11 o’clock. I would usually pick him up or we would meet at a gallery. He often brought a stack of Interviews, which he gave away as we went along. There was a lot of ground to cover. It included Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street galleries, the antique center and antique shops everywhere, the downtown antique importers, the antique shows as well as the auction exhibitions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s Christie’s East, Phillips, Doyle’s, Manhattan Galleries, and even Lubin’s. Every Sunday I used to pick up Andy at church and we spent the day at the flea markets at Twenty-sixth Street and the one on Columbus Avenue. Saturdays Andy had to paint.

Andy was interested in all the arts – fine, decorative and minor, contemporary and old – all periods and styles. We went anywhere things were for sale. With a car we could cover a lot of ground and have the immediate satisfaction of keeping our purchases with us and reviewing them on the way back. Andy had to report to the Factory for lunch around 1:30.

Andy used to marvel at the number of categories, as he called them. We might decide one day to do American paintings, and we would see Chases and Sargents at places like Ira Spanierman and Didi Wigmore; the next day we might do classical antiquity or nineteenth century sculpture. Andy used the auction house system in categorizing art history.

Andy never bought art to hang it or display it any more than Hearst of Lorenzo de Medici did before him. He had the ample storage space required by the true collector and could afford most of what he saw. There was no logical reason to limit the collection, for any reasons of quantity or bulk. The pursuit of masterpieces did not prevent him from finding objects of interest in all ranges of quality. On the quest for objects of great quality or bronzes of fine patination or ciselure, he would buy Rodin’s Le Penseur in black glazed ceramic for $26 at the flea market. As he became interested in sculpture, he started to collect pedestals because he realized that good ones were harder to find than the sculptures. Anything looked good on a a fine pedestal from Barye’s great Theseus Slaying the Centaur to the Pizza Man in polychromed plaster. We both knew the basic rule of collecting that you are wasting your time to buy anything other than a masterpiece, but this was called into question daily. If I said that some object or other looked like junk to me, he would say, “Oh really. See how much it is.”

There were refinements of taste that often went unperceived by well-meaning colleagues and friends. Out of respect for them, Andy would secrete things in certain remote areas, which eventually turned into major art storage depots. “Most art is no good,” he would say, possibly quoting Degas.

Andy knowingly followed the pattern of great collectors of profligate over-accumulation to be succeeded in good time by soul-searching deacquisition. There was a vague plan for eventual divestiture, code-named Warhol Hall, having to do with a gallery, a gift shop, or flea market stand. He designed a collection label. Once he consigned a huge Mexican ceremonial mask he had just bought at Doyle’s Tag Sale to an antique shop, but we had to rush back when he realized they might actually sell it.

Andy was still in the over-accumulation phase. He was only just beginning to collect art.

The Arts and the Mass Media

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:23:20 +0000

The Arts and the Mass Media by Lawrence Alloway

Lawrence Alloway is often incorrectly credited with the first published use of the term “Pop Art” in the following article which first appeared in the February 1958 issue of Architectural Design & Construction. Note that although the article does contain references to “mass popular art,” the actual term “Pop Art” is never used.

In Architectural Design last December there was a discussion of “the problem that faces the architect to-day – democracy face to face with hugeness – mass society, mass housing, universal mobility.” The architect is not the only kind of person in this position; everybody who works for the public in a creative capacity is face to face with the many-headed monster. There are heads and to spare.

Before 1800 the population of Europe was an estimated 180 million; by 1900 this figure had risen to 460 million. The increase of population and the industrial revolution that paced it have, as everybody knows, changed the world. In the arts, however, traditional ideas have persisted, to limit the definition of later developments. As Ortega pointed out in The Revolt of the Masses: “the masses are to-day exercising functions in social life which coincide with those which hitherto seemed reserved to minorities.” As a result the élite, accustomed to set aesthetic standards, has found that it no longer possesses the power to dominate all aspects of art. It is in this situation that we need to consider the arts of the mass media. It is impossible to see them clearly within a code of aesthetics associated with minorities with pastoral and upperclass ideas because mass art is urban and democratic.

It is no good giving a literary critic modern science fiction to review, no good sending the theatre critic to the movies, and no good asking the music critic for an opinion on Elvis Presley. Here is an example of what happens to critics who approach mass art with minority assumptions. John Wain, after listing some of the spectacular characters in P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste observes: “It sounds rich. But in fact – as the practised reader could easily forsee… it is not rich. Books with this kind of subject matter seldom are. They are lifeless, petrified by the inert conventions of the adventure yarn.” In fact, the practised reader is the one who understands the conventions of the work he is reading. From outside all Wain can see are inert conventions; from inside the view is better and from inside the conventions appear as the containers of constantly shifting values and interests.

The Western movie, for example, often quoted as timeless and ritualistic, has since the end of World War II been highly flexible. There have been cycles of psychological Westerns (complicated characters, both the heroes and the villains), anthropological Westerns (attentive to Indian rights and rites), weapon Westerns (Colt revolvers and repeating Winchesters as analogues of the present armament race). The protagonist has changed greatly, too: the typical hero of the American depression who married the boss’s daughter and so entered the bright archaic world of the gentleman has vanished. The ideal of the gentleman has expired, too, and with it evening dress which is no longer part of the typical hero-garb.

If justice is to be done to the mass arts which are, after all, one of the most remarkable and characteristic achievements of industrial society, some of the common objections to them need to be faced. A summary of the opposition to mass popular art is in Avant Garde and Kitsch (Partisan Review, 1939, Horizon, 1940), by Clement Greenberg, an art critic and a good one, but fatally prejudiced when he leaves modern fine art. By kitsch he means “popular, commercial art and literature, with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, advertisements, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap-dancing, Hollywood movies, etc…” All these activities to Greenberg and the minority he speaks for are “ersatz culture… destined for those who are insensible to the value of genuine culture welcomes and cultivates this insensibility” (my italics). Greenberg insists that “all kitsch is academic,” but only some of it is, such as Cecil B. De Mille-type historical epics which use nineteenth-century history-picture material. In fact, stylistically, technically, iconographically the mass arts are anti-academic. Topicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word, which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely that the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.

The popular arts of our industrial civilization are geared to technical changes which occur, not gradually, but violently and experimentally. The rise of the electronics era in communications challenged the cinema. In reaction to the small TV screen, movie makers spread sideways (CinemaScope) and back into space (Vista Vision). All the regular film critics opposed the new array of shapes, but all have been accepted by the audiences. Technical change as dramatized novelty (usually spurred by economic necessity) is characteristic not only of the cinema but of all the mass arts. Colour TV, the improvements in colour printing (particularly in American magazines), the new range of paper back books; all are part of the constant technical improvements in the channels of mass communication.

An important factor in communication in the mass arts is high redundancy. TV plays, radio serials, entertainers, tend to resemble each other (though there are important and clearly visible differences for the expert consumer). You can go into the movies at any point, leave your seat, eat an ice-cream, and still follow the action on the screen pretty well. The repetitive and overlapping structure of modern entertainment works in two ways: (1) it permits marginal attention to suffice for those spectators who like to talk, neck, parade; (2) it satisfies, for the absorbed spectator, the desire for intense participation which leads to a careful discrimination of nuances in the action. There is in popular art a continuum from data to fantasy. Fantasy resides in, to sample a few examples, film stars, perfume ads, beauty and the beast situations, terrible deaths, sexy women. This is the aspect of popular art which is most easily accepted by art minorities who see it as a vital substratum of the folk, as something primitive. This notion has a history since Herder in the eighteenth century, who emphasized national folk arts in opposition to international classicism. Now, however, mass-produced folk art is international: Kim Novak, Galaxy Science Fiction, Mickey Spillane, are available wherever you go in the West. However, fantasy is always given a keen topical edge; the sexy model is shaped by datable fashion as well as by timeless lust. Thus, the mass arts orient the consumer in current styles, even when they seem purely, timelessly erotic and fantastic. The mass media give perpetual lessons in assimilation, instruction in role-taking, the use of new objects, the definition of changing relationships, as David Riesman has pointed out. A clear example of this may be taken from science fiction. Cybernetics, a new word to many people until 1956, was made the basis of stories in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950. SF aids the assimilation of the mounting technical facts of this century in which, as John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding put it, “A man learns a pattern of behavior – and in five years it doesn’t work.” Popular art, as a whole, offers imagery and plots to control the changes in the world; everything in our culture that changes is the material of the popular arts.

Critics of the mass media often complain of the hostility towards intellectuals and the lack of respect for art expressed there, but, as I have tried to show, the feeling is mutual. Why should the mass media turn the other cheek? What worries intellectuals is the fact that the mass arts spread; they encroach on the high ground. For example, into architecture itself as Edmund Burke Feldman wrote in Arts and Architecture last October: “Shelter, which began as a necessity, has become an industry and now, with its refinements, is a popular art.” This, as Feldman points out, has been brought about by a “democratization of taste, a spread of knowledge about non-material developments, and a shift of authority about manners and morals from the few to the many.” West Coast domestic architecture has become a symbol of a style of living as well as an example of architecture pure and simple; this has occurred not through the agency of architects but through the association of stylish interiors with leisure and the good life, mainly in mass circulation magazines for women and young marrieds.

The definition of culture is changing as a result of the pressure of the great audience, which is no longer new but experienced in the consumption of its arts. Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to define culture solely as something that a minority guards for the few and the future (though such art is uniquely valuable and a precious as ever). Our definition of culture is being stretched beyond the fine art limits imposed on it by Renaissance theory, and refers now, increasingly, to the whole complex of human activities. Within this definition, rejection of the mass produced arts is not, as critics think, a defence of culture but an attack on it. The new role for the academic is keeper of the flame; the new role for the fine arts is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes the mass arts.

Surrealism, Dada and the Abstract Expressionists

tomgurney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:08:45 +0000

When Time magazine reviewed the “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936, they described André Breton, the “founder” of Surrealism, as someone “who frequently dresses entirely in green, smokes a green pipe, drinks a green liqueur and has a sound of knowledge of Freudian psychology.” (MF)

Although Breton did have a predilection for the colour green – art dealer Julien Levy later recalled that Breton “never removed his green jacket and vest” (MA273) – he had not actually been to the United States by the time of MoMA’s exhibition and Time magazine’s description of him. The founder of Surrealism arrived in the U.S. in the summer of 1941 – one of the later arrivals of a group of European artists aligned to the Surrealist movement who immigrated to the U.S. during World War II. Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Matta (née Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren) and Yves Tanguy had all arrived two years prior to Breton – in 1939. (Paalen would move from the U.S. to Mexico the same year that he arrived. (WC)) In 1940 Gordon Onslow Ford and Kurt Seligmann arrived. Breton, André Masson, Max Ernst (accompanied by his wife-to-be Peggy Guggenheim) all arrived in 1941. Marcel Duchamp arrived in 1942 (MD).

THE EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE

Breton and other emigrating artists were helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee (sometimes referred to as the American Rescue Committee) in Marseilles – an organization that had been set up in the U.S. with financial contributions from private individuals in order to rescue cultural and political refugees threatened by Hitler’s advance into Europe. Varian Fry, a Harvard educated Quaker, arrived in Marseilles during the summer of 1940 to oversee their operations in France – the same summer that the German forces occupied the country. (SS116) At the time of the occupation Breton was enlisted in the French Army. On September 16, 1939 he had written a letter of introduction on behalf on Wolfgang Paalen to Leon Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico in which he noted that he (Breton) would soon be in uniform as part of a medical staff attached to a pilot training school near Poitiers. (SS66/7). By August 1940 Breton was in the city of Salon having traveled there after being demobilized in Gironde. On August 10, 1940 he wrote to Kurt Seligmann in New York from Salon suggesting that he (Breton) give a series of lectures in New York in order to obtain an exit visa from France. (SS114/5) He then left Salon and moved south to Montargis temporarily (where he wrote Plein Marge) before making his way to Marseille where he joined Varian Fry and other artists attempting to leave France.

On December 3, 1940 Breton, who had been a member of the French Communist Party from 1927 – 1935, was arrested in Marseilles and held for four days. Vichy premier Henri Philippe Pétain was due to visit the city the next day. The official report on Breton described him as a “dangerous anarchist sought for a long time by the French police.” In February – March 1941 the publication of two works by Breton – the Anthologie de l’Humeur Noir and his poem Fata Morgana were banned by the Vichy government. Breton finally left France, accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, and their child on a transatlantic steamer which departed from Marseilles on March 24, 1941. (FR) One of his fellow passengers on the ship was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss:

“The scum, as the gendarmes described us, included among others André Breton… Breton, by no means at his ease in such a situation, would amble up and down the rare empty spaces on deck, looking like a blue bear in his velvety jacket. We were to become firm friends in the course of an exchange of letters which we kept up throughout our interminable journey; their subject was the relation between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality.” (FR)

When the ship reached the port of the Fort-de-France in Martinique after about a month at sea, Breton was sent to a concentration camp in Lazaret by the Vichy authorities in Martinique who had been warned about the “dangerous agitator.” Although he was released a few days later he remained under surveillance during the three weeks he stayed on the island. (FR) On April 30th André Masson arrived at Fort-de-France from Marseilles. (Masson would contribute both text and illustrations to Breton’s book Martinique: Snake Charmer.)

André Masson [from La Mémoire du monde (1974)]:

“One day, while strolling on the island’s Atlantic coast, where the lianas in bloom blended with the foam of the ocean waves, Breton, to my great astonishment, spoke to me of Paradise. Not that of the theologians… No, a true Paradise, here on Earth… Reviewing the paradisiacal utopians, we went from the famous ‘withering away of the state’ to the ‘end of History,’ lingering long over Charles Fourier, whom I have always called the Douanier Rousseau of socialism.” [Breton's Ode à Charles Fourier would be published in c. 1947]. (FR)

Breton and his wife finally left Martinique on May 16, 1941, arriving in New York in June after a brief stop in the Dominican Republic where they visited the Spanish Surrealist Eugenio F. Granell. (FR) On June 24, 1941 Breton’s wife wrote a letter of thanks to Varian Fry for helping them get out of France, describing America as “the Christmas tree of the world.” (SS140) (Unknown to the Bretons at the time was the fact that throughout their stay in the U.S. they were kept under close watch by the F.B.I. (FR))

Breton would live in the United States for about 4 1/2 years, returning to France in about May of 1946. (From December 1945 to March 1946 he visited Haiti, Martinique and the Dominican Republic). (FR) It was a time in New York when, according writer Robert Lebel, “everybody met everybody. The influence was collective and this is how it spread. Each one met someone through another one. The Reises had a party at least once a month; everyone met at Peggy Guggenheim’s parties – Pollock, Baziotes, and Rothko… Later the Americans hid their Surrealist paintings, but when we saw Pollock during the war he was like a little boy in front of Max Ernst.” (SS197)

The “Reises” were New York accountant Bernard Reis and his wife, Becky. Bernard was the accountant and treasurer of VVV, the magazine that Breton produced during his stay in the U.S. (HH477) Reis would later act as a advisor to Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko and also advised Peggy Guggenheim as she went about opening a gallery to house her art collection. Guggenheim and her lover, the Surrealist Max Ernst, arrived in New York about a month after Breton but, unlike Breton, traveled by air on a luxurious Pan Am Clipper plane just two years after its maiden transatlantic voyage. (Guggenheim and Ernst would marry later in the year in Virginia.) In January 1942 Breton contributed an essay on Surrealism to Guggenheim’s catalogue of her collection and came up with the idea of including photographs of the eyes of the artists whose work was included in the collection to accompany their biographies in the catalogue. (MD223) Originally Guggenheim hoped to open a nonprofit museum to house her collection but Bernard Reis suggested that she add a ‘for-profit’ element (a gallery) from which she would be able to deduct expenses. (MD224) She opened her Surrealist art gallery, Art of This Century on October 20, 1942.

TRUTH AND AUTOMATISM

At the Reis’ frequent gatherings Breton would often lead the guests in a game of Truth in which they were expected to answer personal questions (often about sex), with complete honesty. (MD224) The game was treated seriously. Violators of the rules were fined. (MD224) In addition to Breton, artists who attended the Reis’ parties included Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, André Masson, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Pavel Tchelitchew and Matta. Matta, an on-again off-again follower of Breton, held his own gatherings of artists where Surrealist techniques such as automatism would be explored.

Matta:

“Automatism is a method of reading ‘live’ the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking about; to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal, with the language we possess, if possible grasping instantly, all at once, one and once make it. Automatism means that both the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks into each other and light the common road… Automatism is purposeless on purpose.” (PF6-7)

Artists who gathered at Matta’s studio to explore automatism included Robert Motherwell, and (briefly) Jackson Pollock.

Irving Sandler [art writer]:

“Matta had a perverse love-hate attitude toward André Breton and his coterie. Bob [Robert Motherwell] recalled: ‘Matta wanted to show them up as middle-aged, gray-haired men who weren’t zeroed into contemporary reality.’ … Matta then tried to put together a group of young artists who would be daring in their exploration of automatism… At first he enlisted Esteban Francis, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and Bob. But he wanted more New Yorkers in his group, and he asked Baziotes, whom he recently met, to recommend artists he knew on the Federal Art Project. Baziotes suggested Pollock, de Kooning, Peter Busa, and Gerome Kamrowski. Baziotes and Bob visited them, and Bob ‘taught’ them the theory of automatism, or so he claimed. De Kooning was not interested in the surrealist ‘adventure,’ but Pollock, who drank through the meeting, liked the idea, although he would not join a group. Then Matta capriciously gave the whole thing up. Only Arshile Gorky was accepted into the Surrealist inner circle.” (IS90)

Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, and Gerome Kamrowski produced several collaborative works around 1940/41 in which they experimented with an ‘automatic’ technique of painting.

From Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School by Martica Sawin:

“One evening in the winter of 1940-41, [William] Baziotes brought Jackson Pollock over to [Gerome] Kamrowski’s studio, and the three artists began experimenting with quick-drying lacquer paint that Baziotes had bought at Arthur Brown’s art supply store. They spread some cheap canvases out on the floor and began brushing and then dripping the paint onto them. In the process of ‘fooling around,’ as Kamrowski called it, they all worked on the same canvases and during the course of the evening produced a number of collaborative spontaneous works. All three artists already had some knowledge of Surrealism and were familiar with the concept of ‘pure psychic automatism,’ and they were trying to find ways in which the new quick-drying paint developed for commercial use could be put to this end. When Kamrowski moved out of that studio… he threw out most of these experimental canvases but kept one as a kind of souvenir, and this three-man canvas [Collaborative Painting] has surfaced in a number of recent exhibitions as a kind of proto-abstract expressionist work. Although each artist made use of dripped paint and a gestural approach in combination with other techniques during the next few years, it wasn’t until 1946 that dripping lacquer began to be the basis for an entire painting and that Pollock reached what Kamrowski referred to as ‘his greater freedoms.’” (SS169)

DADA

The result of automatic painting or drawing was visual images arranged randomly, by chance – a concept which had previously been explored by the Dada movement which Breton had been involved with prior to founding Surrealism. Dadaist Jean (Hans) Arp had produced a series of collages in 1916 whose elements were arranged by chance. (TJ23)

Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:

“… it seems fitting to mention some of Arp’s experiments which were of far-reaching importance because they were in line with activities that were later to play a large part in the theory of prospecting in the land of the unconscious. Each morning, whether inspired or not, Arp repeated the same drawing, and so obtained a series showing variations which indicated the curves of automatism. He also experimented with chance, putting on a piece of cardboard pieces of paper that he had cut out at random and then coloured; he placed the scraps coloured side down and then shook the cardboard; finally he would paste them to the cardboard just as they had fallen.” (RD134)

Arp’s collages were “Untitled” but subtitled “According to the Laws of Chance.” Arp later wrote that the “law of chance which comprises all other laws and surpasses our understanding… can be experienced only in a total surrender to the unconscious.” (LZ37)

Three years before Arp’s collages, Marcel Duchamp had created Three Standard Need Weavings (1913) using a similar random technique.

Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:

“This was the experiment: Duchamp took three threads, each a meter long, and these he let drop successively, from a height of one meter, on three virgin canvases. He then scrupulously preserved the contour of the fallen threads, fixing them with a little varnish; the result was a dessin du hasard, a chance design or drawing… Again and again we encounter Duchamp, both in Paris and New York, and in Picabia and Man Ray, this obsession, in various forms, with the laws of chance…”(RD140)

André Breton, as a writer and poet, experimented with automatism through automatic writing. In May/June 1919 He produced, in collaboration with Philippe Soupault, a text written ‘automatically’ titled Les Champs magnétiques. (WB) In The Dada Spirit in Painting, Hugnet noted the influence of Breton’s use of written automatism on visual automatism when referring to the Surrealist Max Ernst: “The works of Max Ernst, collages or imaginary paintings, based on technical inventions that are a pictorial application of automatic techniques similar to those used by Breton and Soupault in their book, Les Champs magnétiques, bring to Dada painting a new and very personal vision which foreshadows Surrealism.” (RD178) Les Champs magnétiques was first published in Breton’s Littérature magazine, a Dada- friendly journal published from 1919 to1924 in France. (The first issue was February 1919.) (HB/WB)

Litterature

Cover of Littérature, vol. 2 no. 13, Paris 1920
edited by Louis Aragon, André Breton and Philippe Soupault

Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:

“Louis Aragon, André Breton and Philippe Soupault were contributors to various advance guard magazines, among others Sic… In 1919 they founded Littérature… These men, whom we shall call the ‘Littérature group,’ represented a poetic and critical position between Rimbaud and Lautreamont on the one hand and Jarry and Apollinaire on the other; they supported the effort to liberate the mind in progress since the second half of the nineteenth century… they were immediately attracted to the activity proposed by Dada… they saluted Dada, a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the post-war economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste everything in its path. They felt that it would be an offensive weapon of the first order. Thus, through the word Surréalisme, borrowed from Apollinaire and already full of meaning, was regularly used by the Littérature group and their friends, their magazine, for want of an alternative course at the moment, gave itself to Dada, a scarecrow erected at the crossroads of the epoch.” (RD165/167)

TRISTAN TZARA

Although Breton initially embraced Dada and would borrow from it for Surrealism, his relationship with the movement became strained after the arrival in Paris at the end of 1919 of one of Dada’s founders, Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock on April 16, 1896 in Moinesti, Romania). Tzara edited his own Dada magazine, simply titled Dada, in Zurich (the first issue was July 1917 (RD34)) and also contributed to Breton’s Littérature magazine beginning with the second issue. One of the first Dada events that Tristan participated in after arriving in Paris was organized by Breton and the Littérature group – the “Premier Vendredi de Littérature” which took place on January 23, 1920 at the Palais des Fêtes. Tzara promised to read a new manifesto at the event but instead read a newspaper article. According to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes in History of Dada (1931), “when Tzara, after announcing a manifesto, merely read a vulgar article taken out of some newspaper, while the poet Paul Eluard and Theodore Fraenkel, a friend of Breton, hammered on bells, the public began to grow indignant and the matinée ended in an uproar.” (RD109) The uproar included cries of “Back to Zurich!” from the audience. (DC441) During another event, the Dada Festival, which took place on May 26, 1920 at the Salle Gaveau, Tzara couldn’t get his “Vaseline symphonique” to work. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes recalled about the “symphonique” – “though scarcely very musical, it encountered the open hostility of André Breton, who had a horror of music and suffered from being reduced to the role of an interpreter.” (RD111)

The “open hostility” of Breton mentioned by Ribemont-Dessaignes may also have had something to do with an insulting unsigned letter Tzara received prior to the Festival which was suspected to be from Breton or the Littérature group.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes [from History of Dada (1931)]:

“It was also at Picabia’s, between the Maison de l’Oeuvre Dada demonstration [March 27, 1920] and the next [the Dada Festival on May 26, 1920], that we experienced the repercussions of a strange event known in the Dada archives as the ‘affair of the Anonymous Letter.’ Tristan Tzara had received a highly insulting unsigned letter, and its terminology led one to suspect that it had been written by either one of the Dadaists or one of their close enemies. Through application of the Hegelian-Dadaist dialectic, we came successively to the conclusion that the letter had been written by one of the members of the Littérature group, by Breton or Aragon, or possibly even by Philippe Soupault, Theodore Fraenkel or Francis Picabia, or, finally, by Tristan Tzara, who perhaps had written the letter to himself in order to foster demoralizing suspicion amid his own group.” (RD111)

The relationship between Tristan Tzara and Breton’s group of Dadaists became strained even further after negative comments made by Tzara during a mock Dada trial organized by Breton in 1921 and Tzara’s failure to endorse a Dada congress which Breton attempted to organize not long after the trial. The “Trial and Sentencing of M. Maurice Barrés by Dada,” took place at the Salle des Societies Savantes in the Rue Danton on Friday evening, May 13, 1921. (RD116) Maurice Barrés was a liberal writer who, during World War 1, became a staunch nationalist. Breton set himself up as judge for the mock trial and published the proceedings in Littérature. (PJ354)

Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:

“The Littérature group put on the most subversive meeting, from the moral point of view, in which Dada had ever been involved. The ‘Barrès trial’ forced Dada to take a position on several concrete questions. On Friday, May 13, [1921] in the Hall of Learned Societies, Maurice Barrès was “indicted and tried by Dada.” André Breton, president of the tribunal, had drawn up a stern and scathing indictment… In announcing the verdict, Breton declared ‘Dada, judging that the time has come to endow its negative spirit with executive powers, and determined above all to exercise these powers against those who threaten its dictatorship, is beginning, as of this date, to take appropriate measures…. Dada accuses Maurice Barrès of offense against the security of the spirit.’ … The tone of the verdict is somewhat different from that of the usual Dada writing… Practically speaking, the result of the new extravaganza was general dismay, expressed, as far as the critics were concerned, in a threat never again to mention Dada in their columns. Once again Dada had been unable to reply categorically: the role of judge did not suit it at all.” (RD184-5)

Although Tzara participated in the trial he used his testimony to attack it, declaring “I have no confidence in justice, even if this justice is made by Dada.” He referred to both the accusers and the accused as “a bunch of bastards… greater or lesser bastards is of no importance.” (PJ354) When Breton attempted to get Tzara’s support for his idea of a Congress of Paris (with Breton as the director), Tzara refused to get involved. (The initial committee for the Congress consisted of seven people – Breton, Georges Auric, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Amédée Ozenfant, Jean Paulhan and Roger Vitrac.) (PJ372fn69)

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes [from History of Dada, 1931]:

“Breton’s personal reactions led him to conceive of a grandiose undertaking in which he would have played the leading role. This was to be a super-congress of all intellectuals wielding influence on the state of the modern mind, in order to determine what was modern and what was not, in short, a grand congress of the mind… But the Dadas were not in agreement. Tristan Tzara, in particular, supported by Ribemont-Dessaignes, raised numerous objections because of the dogmatic aspect such an undertaking would assume… With him Paul Eluard, Theodore Fraenkel, Ribemont-Dessaignes and Eric Satie withdrew. But the publicity which the Congress of Paris had received prevented Breton from retreating. So he persisted and, despite the defection of the greater part of Dada – it is true that he had the support of Picabia who had become anti-Dada – he continued his work as director of the Congress. But new difficulties arose, and certain members of the committee resigned. To add to all this the poet Roger Vitrac, head of Aventure magazine, on which Breton counted heavily, fell ill. This finally discouraged Breton: he abandoned the undertaking on which he had so set his heart.

The bitterness Breton felt led him to cast the main responsibility for the failure on Tristan Tzara and to indulge in open vengeance. He published in Comoedia several articles in which, scorning Dada amorality, he adopted a bourgeois point of view toward Tzara’s conduct. He specifically accused Tzara of not being the father of Dada and of having defrauded Serner by claiming authorship of the Dadaist Manifesto of 1918… In writing of Tzara, he used pejoratively such terms as ‘arrived from Zurich,’ just as Picabia had called him a ‘Jew’… Finally, he called Tzara a publicity-mad imposter, and concluded with a pathetic appeal in favour of himself who ‘proposed to consecrate his life to ideas.’” (RD119)

Breton’s comments to “the readers of Comoedia” were later published in the “After Dada” section of Breton’s Three Dada Manifestos.

André Breton:

“… I inform the readers of Comoedia that M. Tzara had nothing to do with the invention of the word ‘Dada,’ as is shown by the letters of Schad and Huelsenbeck, his companions in Zurich during the war, which I am prepared to publish, and that he probably had very little to do with the writing of the Dada Manifesto 1918 which was the basis of the reception and credit we accorded him. The paternity of this manifesto is in any case, formally claimed, by Max Serner, doctor of philosophy, who lives in Geneva and whose manifestos written in German before 1918 have not been translated into French. Moreover it is known that the conclusions formulated by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, even before the war, plus those formulated by Jacques Vaché in 1917, would have been sufficient to guide us without the manifesto. Up to now, it has seemed distasteful to me to denounce the bad faith of M. Tzara and I have allowed him to go on using with impunity the papers of those whom he robbed. But now that he has decided to exploit this last opportunity to be talked about, by wrongfully attacking one of the most disinterested undertakings ever put under way [the Congress], I am not reluctant to silence him.” (RD205)

Tzara later explained the problems he had with the Congress (and the Dada movement in France) in a letter to Christian Zervos dated February 16, 1937. In the letter Tzara complained about a “newspaper release” that referred to him as a “publicity hungry imposter” which “occurred only a few days after the official invitation to participate in the Committee of said Congress” – presumably a reference to Breton’s comments in Comoedia. (RD304). He also made reference to a performance of his play Le Coeur a gaz which took place at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris on June 10, 1921 as part of the Salon Dada Exposition Internationale exhibition which ran from June 6 to June 30, 1921. Although the performance of Tzara’s play was meant to be the high point of the program of Dada performances, the audience walked out soon after it started. (PJ355/356) Tzara asked in his letter to Zervos, “Is it not likely that this demonstration, the hostility of which was directed… against the second part of the program, the performance of my play Le Coeur a gaz, was not the expression of a principle, but of a personal vengeance directed against myself?” (RD305).

THE DEATH OF DADA AND THE BIRTH OF SURREALISM

According to Ribemont-Dessaignes, “the situation [between Tzara and Breton] became so strained that it was decided to liquidate. A meeting took place at the Closerie des Lilas, the old cafe on the Place de L’Observatoire. Breton was summoned to explain his ‘un-Dadalike’ conduct… Far from pacifying tempers, this effort merely brought about a final break, and officially marked the death of Dada.” (RD117-19) The funeral of Dada in France took place on November 30, 1924. An announcement of the funeral appeared in Le Mouvement accéléré: “The friends and acquaintances of Dada, deceased in the prime of life from acute literaturitis, will assemble the 30th of November 1924 at 2:30 around the tomb of their brother in nothingness so as to observe a minute of silence. We will gather together at the entrance gate of the Montparnasse cemetery. – Attendees are asked not to wear any badge of a literary school.” (AI263) About a month before the funeral of Dada, Breton published a manifesto for a new movement – Surrealism. (The term “Surrealist” was first used in print in 1917 when the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, subtitled his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias as a “Drame Surrealiste.” (MF))

André Breton [from the Manifeste du surréalisme (published October 15, 1924) (AJ)]:

“We are still living under the reign of logic… Under the pretence of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer – and, in my opinion by far the most important part – has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud… Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity… has still today been so grossly neglected…. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.”

Included as part of the manifesto was Breton’s definition of Surrealism:

“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.”

Surrealism then, was initially conceived by Breton as “psychic automatism” in its “pure state” – or the application of automatism to the psyche. The “unconscious” or subconscious was more important than the conscious or rational state. The “superior reality” was based not on God or religion but on the “omnipotence of dream,” “previously neglected associations,” and “disinterested play of thought.” God was replaced by Freud and the search for a “new myth.” When Breton contributed “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst” to the April 1942 issue of Charles Henri Ford’s View magazine, he subtitled the article, “preceeded by a brief discussion on the need for a new myth.” (VP33)

Max Ernst issue of View

André Breton [from "The Legendary Life of Max Ernst preceeded by a brief discussion on the need for a new myth," View (April 1942):

"... I have often reflected on the fact that the average man, in France, for example, derived less and less support from secular beliefs and institutions during the last twenty years. No further point can be reached in the process which has separated the symbol from the thing for which it stands. Very well then, making a clean break with all that benefits only from external marks of veneration or respect, I do not fear to say that I have seen engendered - oh! after how many attempts! - the embryo of new signification... The prophets are Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, many others: only yesterday there were more than enough of them to agitate the schools. You cannot deny that some of them handle imperatives powerful enough to deflect the course of a young man's life and to decide the adoption of heroic careers. This much I can assure you of. The obscurity of their language as it reflects their exhortation is not different in kind from that of John or Daniel. Notice, too, that the most active are those who left no portraits: Sade, Lautréamont, or those who have left ambiguous testaments: Sade, Lautréamont, Seurat. You see, I cannot grant you that mythology is only the recital of the acts of the dead..." (VP34)

VVV

Breton had been contributing articles to View magazine before he arrived in the U.S. and continued to contribute after he arrived.View was an American avant-garde magazine edited by Charles Henri Ford which initially focused on Surrealism but became increasingly oriented toward Existentialism during the mid - late 1940s . (View was published from September 1940 to Spring (March) 1947.) When Breton began producing his own magazine in America, VVV, he also explored the concept of myth in the first issue. (The first issue - No. 1 - was the June 1942 issue. The last issue was No. 4 - the February 1944 issue.)

VVV first issue

VVV No. 1 (1942)

The first issue of VVV featured a cover by Max Ernst and contributions from Robert Motherwell, André Masson, Kurt Seligmann, Gordon Onslow Ford and Charles Henri Ford, among others. David Hare was designated the editor of the magazine. Matta had originally suggested that Robert Motherwell be the editor and Motherwell had written to William Carlos Williams suggesting that he become the American literary editor of the magazine. In his letter to Williams, Motherwell noted the importance of automatism to his own work: "Now I have taken a partisan stand, in the creative sense that Surrealist automatism is the basis of my painting." (SS214) By the time the first issue of VVV was published Motherwell had resigned.

Robert Motherwell:

"I'll tell you what I remember - and there's a lot I don't remember. In France before the war I think Skira - but I'm not sure - published an extremely elaborate deluxe art magazine called Minotaure that increasingly became a vehicle for the Surrealists. The Surrealists were proselytisers. Which the other artists weren't at all. They very badly wanted a vehicle here. By hook or by crook slowly some money was raised. The actual editor was André Breton who always was the chief of everything Surrealist. I think Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst if I remember were associate editors. But the Surrealists had a feeling - not really realizing that artists in America are not taken very seriously - that they were politically radical, etcetera, they were aliens, exiles, etcetera, and that ostensibly there should be an American editor. There was also some effort to get some Americans to contribute. William Carlos Williams and so on. And so for a time I accepted the role simply to help them out. Then one day it became clear to me in an angry discussion in French, which I only partly understood, that they had also assumed that I had American connections and could raise some money. Which I didn't have, and couldn't. Then I got furious and resigned. And the compromise was that Lionel Abel and I co-edited. And then what transpired was that Abel, who had no job, no money, no anything, asked for the colossal sum of twenty-five dollars a week simply in order to exist while he was gathering the manuscripts and all the rest of it. And again, they got furious at that and fired him. Then I said, "I resign." Then David Hare who had, I think, an independent income agreed to be the nominal editor. (SR)

Motherwell, who in 1951 would publish an anthology of Dada painters and poets, also provided an explanation of the title of Breton's magazine. VVV was meant to be a new letter of the alphabet.

Robert Motherwell:

"Something very interesting to me... is how the name VVV came about. They wanted to invent a twenty-seventh letter in the alphabet. In French the letter W is double V (VV). And so they hit on the idea of having triple V (VVV) as the twenty-seventh letter. And Breton also didn't know a word of English. And as sort of their American adviser, lieutenant, liaison officer, I pointed out to him that for reasons I didn't understand double V in English is pronounced double U so that it would not translate; in English you would have to call it triple U when nevertheless the sign was three V's and it really wouldn't work. He would not accept that it wouldn't work. And it used to confuse everybody. People didn't know whether to say V-V-V or triple V or triple U or whatever. But if it were literally transcribed into English the proper title would have been triple U. And the fact that they choose V with the way that English-speaking people say V made it not translate. Well, if you said triple U [as] the name of the magazine [then] immediately Americans would have got the point. But it was always called triple V and nobody got the point. It seems senseless.” (SR)

For the first issue of VVV Breton promised a new manifesto but instead provided a “Prolegomena” – in which he railed against Salvador Dalí, Aragon and Paul Éluard and those “who follow either the Bible or Lenin” as well as Surrealist imposters (“Tomorrow it will be Matta’s turn to be imitated.”) He then asked “Can society exist without a social myth?”

André Breton [from "Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism - or else," VVV no. 1 (Spring 1942)]:

“Man is perhaps not the center, not the focus of the universe. One may go as far as to believe that there exists above him on the animal level beings whose behaviour is as alien to him as his own must be to the day fly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily prevent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of reference since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage, which no matter how you imagine it becomes plausible when you consider the theory of form and what has been discovered about mimetic animals.” (SS215)

The article was accompanied by a drawing by Matta, presumably his interpretation of Breton’s ‘camouflaged’ beings as the new myth, titled The Great Transparents. In 1943 Kurt Seligmann would also take up the concept of invisible myths and paint Melusine and the Great Transparents. The American Surrealist artist, Gerome Kamrowski who attended Matta’s gatherings during the early 1940s, would later refer to the Great Transparents as “a myth that didn’t fly.” (SS217))

MYTH, ROTHKO, GOTTLIEB AND FREUD

Around the same time that Breton and Matta were attempting to create a new myth, the concept of myth was also being explored by some of the New York artists who would later be referred to as Abstract Expressionists, particularly Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Both artists were classified as Surrealists in Sidney Janis’ book Abstract and Surrealist Art, when it was published in November 1944. (SS351) According to Janis, Rothko had specifically requested to be included in Surrealist section of book.

Sidney Janis:

“My book Abstract and Surrealist Art was finally published in 1944. It included many artists who had not yet reached their image – works that might be termed Pollock before Pollock, Hofmann before Hofmann, Rothko before Rothko. When I visited Rothko at his studio in 1943, I selected a picture for my book that was quite unlike those of his later years. At the end of the evening, Rothko asked me, ‘What section do you think you’ll put me in? I would like to be in the Surrealist section.’” (AD35)

Robert Motherwell later recalled that “Mark [Rothko] was very interested in psychic automatism,” adding that “He was one of the few American painters who really liked Surrealist painting, went to Surrealist shows and understood” what they were doing. According to Motherwell, Rothko told him that “there was always automatic drawing under those larger forms” of Rothko’s paintings. (RO185)

Rothko devoted a considerable amount of space to the subject of myth, including two sections titled “The Myth” and “The Attempted Myth of Today” in a book he worked on during 1939 – 1941. The notebook/folder containing his essays was discovered after his death and published in 2004 as The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art with an introduction by his son, Christopher Rothko. In his introduction to the book, Christopher notes that “the bulk” of Rothko’s “book” was probably written around 1940 – 1941 – the same period that Rothko and Gottlieb were painting mythological subjects. (CRxvii)

artists reality cover
Cover of Mark Rothko’s Artists Reality

Mark Rothko [from "The Attempted Myth of Today" in The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art]

“Ultimately, this attempt to represent the universal rests upon one of a few solutions. The artist must either fall back upon the treatment of a single figure… or they must await the evolvement of a series of anecdotal myths which will give a universal significance to their newly found unity, or they must fall back upon the allegories of the past… In the hope for the heroic, and the knowledge that art must be heroic, we cannot but wish for the communal myth again.” (CR104)

Rothko’s use of the term “communal myth” can be likened to Breton’s search for a new “social” myth. But whereas Breton, Matta and other Surrealists were searching for a new myth, such as the “Great Transparents,” Rothko, as well as Gottlieb, turned to classical mythology for inspiration. The first time that Rothko’s myth paintings were displayed publicly was at the “Contemporary American Paintings” exhibition/sale at Macy’s department store in January 1942 which included Rothko’s Antigone and Oedipus paintings. (RG185) Gottlieb also borrowed from the Oedipus ‘myth’ for two pictographs he painted in 1941 – Oedipus and The Eyes of Oedipus. Two other mythological paintings by Gottlieb and Rothko were included in the third exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in June 1943 – Gottlieb’s Rape of Persephone and Rothko’s The Syrian Bull. When Gottlieb was later asked why he and Rothko adopted mythological themes, Gottlieb recalled that he came up with the suggestion. According to Gottlieb he asked Rothko “How about some classical matter like mythological themes?” and “we agreed… Mark chose to do some themes from the plays of Aeschylus, and I played around with the Oedipus myth, which was both a classical theme and a Freudian theme.” (AG35)

Adolph Gottlieb:

Well, I think what happened in the early Forties after the war started was, first of all, a number of Surrealists came to this country and we were able to see them in the flesh, and see that they were just ordinary people such as we are. Then we were also cut off from the periodicals that used to come over like Cahier des Arts. So that we weren’t so continuously immersed in French art. I think there was some kind of sense of crisis so that you had to, at least I felt that I had to, dig into myself, find out what it was I wanted to express, what it was possible for me to express. .. That was when I started doing what I called the pictographs which a lot of people think have something to do with primitive art, my interest in primitive art. Like when you were saying that Surrealists seemed to think it had something to do with some sort of universals. My recollection is that it was Jung who came out with the idea of the collective unconscious. I was interested in reading Jung at the time and the idea interested me. Then it just appeared; I mean it just corroborated my idea that I wasn’t really interested in primitive art, that if I decided to use certain symbols in my painting, for example an egg shape, I did this without extending it to be a symbolic reference. Why couldn’t I come up with the idea of an egg as signifying fertility just as well as some aborigine in Australia? …

I decided to restrict myself to those shapes which I felt had a personal significance to me. And I wanted to do something figurative. Well, I couldn’t visualize a whole man on a canvas. I couldn’t see him in a flat space. I felt that I wanted to make a painting primarily with painterly means. So I flattened out my canvas and made these roughly rectangular divisions, with lines going out in four directions. That is, vertically and horizontally. Running right out to the edge of the canvas. And then I would free associate, putting whatever came to my mind very freely within these different triangles. There might be an oval shape that would be an eye or an egg. Of if it was round it might be a sun or whatever. It could be a wriggly shape and that would be a snake — whatever I felt like doing. Then there would be very little editing or revision…” (AS)

In “playing around” with the Oedipus myth, Gottlieb was looking for new symbols or a new meaning for old symbols or symbols used merely as visual elements without any other meaning. In Artists Reality, Rothko also explores the use of symbols in one of the few references he makes to Surrealism in his book, noting that the Surrealists are “attempting to bridge the impassable darkness between the world of the mind and the world of emotion” through “symbolism and the study of dreams and other atavistic, subconscious repositories of this, at once, new and old demonology, hoping that through ordering the symbols they can reconstruct the expression of this essence.” (CR108) Gottlieb’s pictographs can be seen as an attempt at such an “ordering” of symbols. Gottlieb’s comments about using symbols with a “personal significance” or the use of a symbol “without extending it to be a symbolic reference” are similar to Breton’s comments about “new signification” and the separation of “the symbol from the thing for which it stands” as quoted earlier. The technique used by Gottlieb of painting by free association with “little editing or revision” is also reminiscent of the Surrealist technique of automatic writing or painting – a correlation he draws himself in another interview when discussing his interest in Freud and Jung – an interest also shared by Breton and the Surrealists. Breton visited Freud in Vienna in 1921 in addition to corresponding with him during the 1930s. In 1937 Breton asked Freud to contribute to a planned anthology, Trajectoire du rêve, which Breton published in 1938. (AQ)

Adolph Gottlieb:

“My interest in Freud and Jung started with my interest in Surrealism – because the Surrealists were interested in Freudian theories of dreams. In the early 1940s I was very much influenced by Surrealism and was using a type of free-association which was one of the Surrealist techniques. I was putting images into the compartments of my painting as if I were doing automatic writing… I admired Miro, early [Salvador] Dali, Max Ernst; the automatism of Masson certainly was an influence. At the same time Rothko was also doing some mythological subjects, partly semi-abstract, partly Surrealist in style.” (SS299)

Although Gottlieb and Rothko borrowed from Surrealism during the early 1940s, they were never particularly close to its founder on a social level. Breton spoke hardly any English and tended to socialize with the other European exiled Surrealists. Breton was also primarily a literary figure rather than an artist. Matta, who had arrived in the U.S. a couple of years prior to Breton, socialized more with the New York artists than Breton and, being a visual artist himself, exerted more of an influence on their work. Of the artists already living in New York at the time of the Surrealist invasion it was probably Arshile Gorky who was the closest to Breton on a personal level. Matta would also befriend Gorky but with ultimately tragic consequences.

ANDRÉ BRETON AND ARSHILE GORKY

Arshile Gorky had emigrated to the U.S. in February 1920 after surviving the Armenian Genocide (see April 1915). Barnett Newman would later refer to Gorky as “the white-haired boy of Breton and the Surrealists” (HH557) It was largely through Breton’s efforts that Gorky got his first dealer – Julian Levy – and his first solo show in New York for which Breton wrote the preface to the catalogue. Breton’s preface (“The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky”) would also be included in the second edition of Breton’s book Surrealism and Painting published in 1945.

andre breton and gorky

Arshile Gorky (L) and André Breton
Roxbury, Connecticut (March 1945)
(Gorky’s daughter is on his shoulders)

Andre Breton [from "The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky"]:

“The eye-spring… Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed!… One can admire today a canvas signed by Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, which should be considered the great open door to the analogy world… Gorky is, of all the Surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sits down to paint before her… Here is an art entirely new… a leap beyond the ordinary and the known to indicate, with an impeccable arrow of light, a real feeling of liberty.” (HH478)

Gorky did not actually meet Breton until early 1944. Jeanne Reynal, a friend of Gorky’s wife, wanted to meet Breton herself so she asked Isamu Noguchi to help arrange a dinner that included herself, Gorky, Gorky’s wife Mougouch and Breton. Jeanne and Mougouch could speak French and acted as translators for Breton and Gorky during the dinner. Mougouch later recalled that Gorky “had found a soul mate” in Breton. According to Mougouch, “Breton promised to see Gorky’s work in the next day or so” and “Gorky and I danced all the way home.” (HH450) They invited Breton to Gorky’s Union Square studio for dinner and a chance to look at Gorky’s work.

Mougouch [Arshile Gorky's wife]:

“I had never had a poet to dinner… I walked all over New York getting out dinner. We had artichokes, rice pilaf and a large Brie for dinner… We scrubbed the darkest corners [of their apartment] but it couldn’t have mattered if we had sat in the dust and eaten straw, it was all so emotional and exciting. Breton gave without measure, and this was what Gorky needed; Breton didn’t, as Gorky said, ‘miss the point.’ He understood about all those childhood memories, all the mythology of Gorky’s childhood, he didn’t laugh or look embarrassed but instead made sympathetic noises and had tears in his eyes and was exquisitely polite, and Gorky and I nearly went up to heaven then and there with happiness.” (HH430)

Gorky had, of course, been aware of Surrealism for a considerable period of time prior to meeting Breton. Gorky’s first dealer, Julien Levy, later recalled that when Levy’s book, Surrealism, was published in 1936, “he [Gorky] straightaway read it in the back room of my gallery and soon borrowed it to take home.” (MA284) Initially Levy was reticent to take on Gorky.

Julien Levy:

“Arshile Gorky did not come to my gallery directly to show me his own work. In the winter of 1932 he came urging me to look at the work of a friend of his named John Graham, and it was Graham who generously suggested that I also look at a portfolio of Gorky’s own drawings. ‘My portfolio is already in your back office,’ Gorky reluctantly confessed, and my secretary told me that ‘that man is always leaving his portfolio in the back office. He comes back days later and pretends he has forgotten it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Gorky shamelessly, ‘and I always expect you will have opened it and discovered masterpieces….’ So I sorted through them, and I answered Gorky gently… I listened to the woes of his financial disorder, and I lent him $500. Later, when he couldn’t repay, I bought some of his drawings. But I could not promise him an exhibition.” (MA283)

Levy overcame his initial reticence at showing Gorky’s work after Breton’s endorsement of the artist. Gorky signed with Levy’s gallery in 1944. His first solo show opened on March 6, 1945. (HH474) On New Years Eve in 1944 Breton visited the Gorkys and helped to name the paintings that would be included in the first show. On January 10, 1945 Mougouch wrote to Jeanne Reynal, “Breton came down new years eve and gorky told him something associated with or of each painting and breton with his marvelous incision picked those of g.s. words which made a title. They are very nice I think, they are gorky not surrealism… and andre was very anxious to maintain that you know he did not want to make them surrealist.” (HH465/original grammar retained) Despite Mougouch’s assertion that the titles were “gorky not surrealism” the names of the ten paintings that were included Gorky’s first exhibition at Levy’s gallery do reflect a Surrealist influence: The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl, One Year the Milkweed, Water of the Flowery Mill, The Sun, The Dervish in the Tree, The Horns of the Landscape, They Will Take My Island, The Pirate, Love of a New Gun, and How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life.” (HH467)

The show was, unfortunately, badly hung (according to Breton) and poorly attended. Julien Levy had neglected to mail out the announcements in time for the opening. He also, apparently, didn’t understand the paintings he was exhibiting. Gorky’s wife Mougouch later reported to Jeanne Reynal that at the opening of the show, “Julien was half drunk. He was a heavy drinker and he always smelled of Roquefort cheeze. At the opening Gorky overheard Julien explaining his paintings to someone, and it made him so angry he went into a corner and started to sharpen his pencil. He was just horrified. Then he realized that Julien didn’t really understand his paintings at all and was just backing him because he thought he would take off and he was getting Gorky for nothing.” (HH474-5)

Mougouch [from a letter to Jeanne Reynal in early April]:

“I guess to tell the truth it was sort of disappointment to us because we had both thought of something really good in the way of presentation he had everything paintings and andre’s beautiful preface which he [Levy] badly translated so many things that julien muffed like only printing a couple of hundred catalogues so that now there are no more… Everyone said (except andre who told julien it was badly hung and framed and now thats a new swords point) it looked very beautiful and of course it couldn’t help but… but all this made us very worried about he opening and we got there a bit late and drank a lot of cocktails furnished by an old friend of Gorky’s and very soon gorky had that wild disheveeled look… By that time julien had so tactfully and understandingly told him that the critics who had been there through the afternoon had been stonier and more unresponsive than he had ever known them…” (HH275)

In her letter to Reynal, Mougouch also mentioned going to the Reis’ home for a dinner party. Presumably this was the first time that Gorky and his wife attended one of the Reis’ gatherings. According to Mougouch the party was “full of surrealists” most of whom “were not on speaking terms” with Breton.

Mougouch [from the letter to Jeanne Reynal]:

“… well anyway at our opening pierre matisse asked us to come to dinner on Thursday so we decided to sell my diamond pin and just stay for three days and debauch which we did… [Gorky and Mougouch were living in David Hare's home near Roxbury Connecticut at the time. (HH470)] We had supper with andre [Breton] and elisa [Claro] who is awfully sweet and she just loves gorky… andre gave us his manuscript for the preface and I am sending it to you to read it is so different in french and the they took us to some party in some people named reis house they have many paintings and the party was full of surrealists and most of whom were not on speaking terms with andre… at this party andre had a loud verbal fight with seligman while everyone looked on terrified while they waved their pipes and pranced at each other and gorky just went on talking about maro [their daughter] to the hostess how she said ge ge at the moon… (HH477)

The woman who Mougouch named as accompanying Breton to dinner – “Elisa” – was Elisa Claro (née Binhoff) who would soon become Breton’s third and final wife. Breton’s book, Arcane 17 – written while Claro and Breton were visiting Canada (c. summer – October 1944) was largely inspired by Elisa. (FR/AJ) Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s current wife, had been having an affair since 1943 with David Hare who worked with Breton on VVV. Breton was aware of the affair. During the summer of 1943 Lamba and Hare stayed with Breton in a rented house in Hampton Bays where he wrote his epic poem Les Etats Genereaux. (AX) Breton divorced Lamba and married Claro in Reno Nevada during the summer of 1945. (PH)

In early January 1945, prior to Breton’s divorce from Lamba, Gorky and Mougouch moved into Hare’s property near Roxbury Connecticut on 148 Good Hill Road where they would live until about September 1945. While staying at Hare’s property they subleased their New York apartment at Union Square West to relatives of Mougouch. In April 1945 Breton visited them at Hare’s house and asked Gorky to do some illustrations for his soon-to-be published book of poems, Young Cherry Trees Secured against Hares. (HH469/481). The same month, Jacqueline Lamba visited the Gorkys with her daughter and was particularly bitter about Breton. After the visit Mougouch wrote to Reynal about Breton and Lamba splitting up, “All I can say is may such a horrible nightmare never happen to us.” (HH482) Three years later, in 1948, an even worse “nightmare” did happen to Mougouch and Gorky after Mougouch fell in love with Matta – the consequences of which would be far more tragic than the split-up between Lamba and Breton.

Breton visited Gorky and Mougouch again at Hare’s property in May 1945 before he and Elisa headed for Reno where he divorced Jacqueline and married Elisa. During his visit with Gorky, Breton encouraged him to move to Paris and also asked if he would contribute some drawings to an American issue that he hoped to publish of a British Surrealist publication titled Message from Nowhere. (HH483) About a week after Breton’s visit, Mougouch wrote to Jeanne Reynal that her and Gorky were planning to move to Paris “in the spring of next year.” (HH485) In addition to going to Reno in 1945, Breton also went to Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona where he visited several Indian reservations including the Pueblo, Hopi and Zuni tribes. (FR)

Breton was still in Reno in July 1945. Marcel Duchamp wrote him there on July 2, 1945 suggesting a front cover for the second edition of Breton’s book, Surrealism and Painting: “Take the bare feet, Magritte’s shoes. Instead of black, make a print in sanguine on pink paper (or just white). This bloodshot reproduction would be imprinted in the middle of the board and also imprinted your name, the title of the book… and Brentano’s below.” (DW) Breton followed Duchamp’s suggestion and used Magritte’s Le Modèle Rouge (or Red Model) for the cover. The image was also used as part of the Brentano’s window display for the book. Swiss artist Isabelle Waldberg, who lived in New York from 1941 – 1946, contributed a mask to the Brentano’s display. On November 10, 1945 she wrote to her husband in Paris “Yesterday morning, we did the window at Brentano’s Surréalisme et la peinture. Marcel [Duchamp] naturally did everything, all design and execution. Here’s a drawing of it.” (DW) As the display took place in November the book probably came out around the same time.

surrealism and painting cover

The front cover of the second edition of
Surrealism and Painting by André Breton (1945)

Breton and his new wife left the United States not long after the publication of the book, leaving on December 4, 1945 to travel first to Haiti, Martinique and the Dominican Republic before returning to Paris. (FR) Prior to Breton’s departure the Gorkys moved (in c. mid-late September) from Hare’s Roxbury house to a farmhouse owned by Jean and Henry Hebbeln in Sherman, Connecticut. An agreement was worked out where Henry Hebbeln would share Gorky’s Union Square studio and Gorky and Mougouch would rent the Hebbeln farmhouse after it was remodeled. (HH487). According to Gorky biographer, Hayden Herrara, “the Hebbelns made bad housemates. Henry was mostly in New York living with a male lover, but he sometimes came to Sherman on weekends. Childless, married to a homosexual, and already deeply descended into alcoholism, Jean Hebbeln needed the Gorkys to share her home.” (HH493) When the Hebbelns were in Sherman on the weekends, Gorky and Mougouch were able to stay at Union Square on their occasional visits to New York. (HH496-98) Presumably they were staying there when they attended a farewell dinner for Breton organized by Matta at the La Parisienne restaurant on Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. By the time of the dinner, Matta had also divorced his wife, Anne, after she gave births to twins. He hosted the farewell dinner with his new wife, Patricia. (HH498) After dinner, they played the game of Truth.

From Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work by Hayden Herrera:

“After dinner the guests sat around the table and played the Surrealist game of Truth or Consequences or Le jeu de la verité, in which players take turns at being asked embarrassing questions, usually involving love and sex. Those interrogated must answer truthfully or accept the consequences, which could be even more embarrassing – for example, they might be told to kiss someone in the room, preferably someone else’s spouse, or, when these games got out of hand, they might be told to pretend to masturbate in public. Mougouch was asked, ‘What part of a woman’s body do you kiss most attentively when making love to her?’ She blushed and said she didn’t know. Gorky glowered. Sensing trouble, Breton, who always played master of ceremonies at these events, announced, ‘Passons!’ He then patted Mougouch’s hand and the players went on to the next victim. At the end of the evening came another sort of Surrealist game – Matta absconded without paying the bill. As Mougouch wrote to Jeanne, ‘We were all suddenly asked to pay the bill – André was in a rage from start to finish but I began to think they just love to be outraged.’” (HH499)

Breton finally returned to his Paris apartment at 42 rue Fontaine in late May of 1946 and continued to encourage Gorky to come to Paris. (SS387) Jeanne Reynal wrote to Mougouch on October 6, 1946 that Breton had told her that Gorky was “the one artist for whom he would do something in Paris.” (HH528) The same day Mougouch wrote to Breton telling him they hoped to move to Paris and suggested that a small house near the city would be appropriate accommodation. On November 4th Breton wrote back with words of encouragement. He was planning a large Surrealist exhibition to take place the following year and wanted Gorky to participate. (HH531)

EXPOSITION INTERNATIONAL DU SURRÉALISME

The exhibition that Breton was busy organizing was “Le surréalisme en 1947: Exposition international du surréalisme” which opened in early July 1947 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. It included the work of about 100 artists from 24 countries. Gorky contributed How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. Other artists associated with Breton’s stay in the U.S. who also showed at the exhibition included David Hare, Gerome Kamrowski, Frederick Keisler (who had designed Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery), Kay Sage (Tanguy’s wife) and Man Ray. The exhibition focused on alchemy, esotericism and myth. The gallery was arranged as though it was a place of initiation. After climbing twenty-one book steps visitors crossed the Hall of Superstitions into a labyrinth, inspired by voodoo rituals, containing alters dedicated to “a being, a category of beings, or an object, real or imaginary, capable of being endowed with a mythical life, such as the Great Invisibles.” (SS395)

A limited edition of the exhibition catalogue was produced which featured a rubber breast on the cover designed by Marcel Duchamp. A copy of the catalogue can be seen at:
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/89754.html. (If you own one of these catalogues and have noticed breast deterioration the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has published a guide to preserving the breast which asks “How do you dissuade those enquiring fingers from having a feel and why should you?” You will find the V & A guide at:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/res_cons/conservation/treatment/core/ob_story/index.html)

Although meant to be a major exhibition that would reinvigorate the Surrealist movement in France, Breton’s “Exposition international du surréalisme” failed to live up to its promise. Surrealism had lost the ability to shock. In the July 9, 1947 issue of Figaro Albert Palle wrote, “We are no longer moved by it [Surrealism]… the enormous destruction of the world which we lived through during the dark years has emptied Surrealism of its explosive force.” The Paris correspondent for Time magazine agreed: “After the gas chambers, those heaps of bones and teeth and shoes and eyeglasses, what is there left for the poor Surrealists to shock us with?” (SS398) David Hare attended the show (accompanied by Breton’s ex-wife, Jacqueline Lamba) and, on August 8, 1947, wrote a letter to Enrico Donati giving his own impressions of the show. (Donati was also included in the exhibition and had worked with Duchamp on the cover of the catalogue. (SS394))

David Hare [from the letter to Donati (August 8, 1947) - grammar and spelling as per the original]:

“The show finely opened after all the various disagreements that you so well emagin since you remember VVV. However the public didn’t know all that so they are labering under the imprestion the surrealists are one big happy family. Surrealism is accepted as past history. The gallery is crowded with humanity with nothing better to do on an afternoon. There are no discussions, no fights, no real interest and yet it is a suces as a publicety stunt for the gallery. .one would say it was a popular success, but an intellectual failure… a small group of people amusing themselves with ideas which they invented in 1929. (SS398)

Arshile Gorky never made it to the exhibition and would never move to Paris. He committed suicide in 1948 after a series of misfortunes. First he was diagnosed with cancer, then on June 26, 1948 Julien Levy crashed his car into a roadside post while Gorky was his passenger. Gorky suffered a broken collarbone and two fractured vertebrae in his neck. HIs painting arm was paralyzed. Although the paralysis would partially subside the traction device he was required to wear after the accident made movement difficult and painful. In July 1948 Gorky’s wife, Mougouch, told him that she was in love with Matta. (In late June Mougouch and Matta had had a secret romantic rendezvous.) Mougouch told Gorky that although she loved Matta, she loved Gorky more. (MS364) On July 21, 1948 Gorky’s body was found hanging from a noose in a shed on the Connecticut property. A short suicide note was scrawled on a nearby crate. His neighbours Peter Blum and Malcolm Cowley found the body. According to Blum, the suicide note read “Good-by my loves.” According to Cowley it read “Good-by all my loved.” (HH612/613)

After Gorky’s death, Matta telephoned Breton in Paris to defend his behaviour in Surrealist terms. He attributed his affair with Mougouch to the “unrestrained pursuit of desire,” pointing out that the Marquis de Sade had been revered by the Surrealists. Breton called him a murderer and hung up on him. (HH623) On October 25, 1948 Breton’s group of Surrealists issued a statement that expelled Matta. (SS)

Eleven years later Matta was accepted back into the Surrealist fold when he participated in a Jean Benoît Surrealist performance piece titled Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade at the apartment of the poet Joyce Mansour.

Costume for Execution of the Testment of the Marquis de Sade

Costume from Execution of the
Testament of the Marquis de Sade
(http://homepage.mac.com/photomorphose/benoit0.html)

Hayden Herrera [from Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work]:

“Eleven years later, at a kind of happening, entitled the Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, Matta was reinstated. Some two hundred members of the Parisian haut monde and intelligentsia stood in a semicircle, their mood made suitably solemn by a tape recording of Breton reading from Sade’s Justine against the background sound of an erupting volcano. An artist dressed as a devil came onto the stage dragging a black coffin with an erect penis poking through its lid. A woman undressed him, revealing a body covered in black paint, and the devil then grabbed a red-hot iron and branded the word Sade on his heart. ‘Who is next?’ he asked, and the tipsy Matta, happy to be back in Breton’s company, rushed forward, bared his chest, and branded his left breast.” (HH623)

The performance took place on December 2, 1959 – two weeks prior to the opening of another “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” organized by Breton with the help of Duchamp. The exhibition took place at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris from December 15, 1959 to February 14, 1960. Artists included Robert Rauschenberg (RC) and Jasper Johns (Target with Plaster Casts (1955)). In 1965 Breton organized his final exhibition of Surrealism, “L’Écart absolu” at the Galerie L’Oeil. He died the following year on September 28, 1966 in Paris.

From André Breton’s obituary in The New York Times:

“When Mr. Breton returned to France in 1946, the world had changed. If such painters as Matta or Wilfredo Lam had given Surrealist art a new lease on life, existentialism was dominating the literary scene… Nevertheless he continued to write, publishing two magazines, a work on Rimbaud, poems and essays… The last years of his life were spent in a country house in southwestern France and in an apartment at the bottom of Montmartre littered with manuscripts, books and African art. He was suffering from Marcel Proust’s disease, asthma, and recently told a friend that the one writer he envied was Victor Hugo ‘because at his funeral were all the people of Paris.’ (BC)

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