Andy Warhol Read Online Free PDF Page A

filmmaker who, among other achievements, had made
Point of Order—a
film using footage from the McCarthy hearings in 1954. In the summer of 1960, de Antonio went to Warhol’s town house to have drinks:
    [Andy] put two large paintings next to one another. Usually he showed me the work more casually, so I realized that thiswas a presentation. He had painted two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was just a pristine black-and-white Coke bottle. The other had a lot of Abstract Expressionist marks on it. I said “Come on, Andy, the abstract one is a piece of shit, the other one is remarkable. It’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.” [Bockris, 98]
    It was almost a
Before and After
juxtaposition. What Warhol had been doing was adding marks that he thought were expected for a painting to be “who we are.” De Antonio made him see that the direction was the reverse of what he had believed it should be. He had to remove all the mock expressionist markings. He ought, in truth, to have done in this respect what Lichtenstein intuited was right. I have written about this episode in an essay called “The Abstract Expressionist Coca Cola Bottle.” The Coke bottle was, of course, an icon in its own right. If you want to paint it as an icon, you paint it as it is. It does not need any frills.
    The way forward was clear. It was a mandate and a breakthrough. The mandate was:
paint what we are.
The breakthrough was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply.
Before and After
is like an X-ray of the American soul. Warhol began to paint the advertisements in which our deficiencies and hopes are portrayed. Hisimages after the change were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of blue-collar newspapers, the cover pages of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies, boilerplate for throwaway advertisements. It was as though he had received some commandment to lead the lowest of the pictorial low into the precincts of high art. There were no disclosures or confessions of what remains perhaps the most mysterious transformation in the history of artistic creativity. But that is not the whole of it. Warhol went from what one of Henry James’s characters describes as “a little artist man,” on the fringe of a fringe of the art world, to the defining artist of his era. That could not have happened had the world itself not undergone a parallel change, through which the transformed Warhol emerged as the artist it was waiting for.
    Warhol’s first exhibition after the conversion was in a space that belonged by rights to the Warhol of shoes and pussycats: the Fifty-seventh Street windows of Bonwit Teller. But the paintings on display for one week only, in mid-April 1961, belong to his new phase. There are five in all.
Advertisement
is based on a montage of black-and-white newspaper ads: for hair tinting; for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders; for nose reshaping; for prosthetic aids for rupture; and (“No Finer Drink”) Pepsi-Cola. In 1960, Pepsi-Cola had begun an advertising campaign in which it proclaimed itself the drink “For those that think young,” as if it were the elixir of youth that Ponce de Leon had come to the New World to discover. Bonwit’s window also included
Before and After
, advertising the nose you are ashamed of transformed into a nose to die for. The remaining paintings are of Superman, the Little King (on an easel), and Popeye. The ads reflect Warhol’s personal preoccupations—impending baldness, an unattractive nose, a loose, unprepossessing body. But the placement of the original images—in back-page ad sections of the
National Enquirer
and