Andy Warhol Read Online Free PDF

exploratory surgery. The artist George Grosz, one of the jurors for the Carnegie Tech exhibition, voted to include it; others refused, and the nose picker was finally not picked for the official show. (Andy, who had a problem nose, bulbous, swollen, and red, like W. C. Fields’s, opted to get it fixed in 1956 or 1957.) His early painting of a nose picker was his first flamboyant self-depiction—here, as an ungainly, single-minded boy giving himself a little pleasure and relief, as if no one were watching, or as if a boy picking his nose were the most natural, riveting, and erotic sight in the world. So began Warhol’s career: he strove to frame solitary bodies picking themselves, redirecting their anatomies with a broad’s showy flair.
    He graduated from Carnegie Tech in June 1949 and then moved to New York, leaving behind Pittsburgh, despised zone of his past—city of steel, whose color is silver. A year before leaving Pittsburgh, a city he did not pick, he bought himself a cream-colored corduroy suit. Almost no one ever called Andy handsome. Some observed that when he was young, before his nose grew, he looked angelic—in photobooth shots at fourteen or so. But did anyone desire Andy in his cream corduroy suit? To reverse interpretations of Warhol’s work as the effluvia of a gawky outsider, assume that he was not an exile from beauty but its first citizen. Picture him, pale skin against cream suit, and conceive that someone wanted to touch him. Julia Warhola created him, but perhaps she, too, thought him physically unappealing. Joseph Giordano, an advertising art director who was a friend of Warhol’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s, told the art historian Patrick S. Smith, “She made him feel that he was the ugliest creature that God put on this earth.”

2. Pussy Heaven
    ANDY, WHO USED THE NAME “Warhol” for the first time in 1949, moved that year to New York City with the painter Philip Pearlstein—a fellow realist and aficionado of nudes. Over the next decade Mr. Paperbag would transform himself into one of New York’s most successful commercial artists. He won three Art Directors Club Awards for ad images and earned enough money to buy, at the end of the decade, a townhouse, on Lexington Avenue between Eighty-ninth and Ninetieth Streets, for which he paid sixty-seven thousand dollars. Despite his eccentric appearance, he begat himself as a member of New York’s topflight gay milieu: he attended the Metropolitan Opera and aspired to a queer identity defined by upper-crust men with Europhilic tastes, even if some looked down on him as uncultivated, as shamefully working class. (In revenge, a few years later he’d return populism, or at least its appearance, to the dominant gay-male image repertoire.) After trying to live with roommates, first Pearlstein, then some dancers, he settled in 1950 at 216 East Seventy-fifth Street, and his mother shortly thereafter moved in with him, preparing him bologna sandwiches with “mayon-eggs” (her word for mayonnaise), tomato soup, and mushroom and barley soup, and sleeping on the floor on a single mattress beside her son’s, in an apartment without beds or furniture but with more than twenty cats. Mother and son lived frugally: they ate their first Thanksgiving dinner in New York together at a Woolworth counter. Julia spent a lot of her time assembling packages of stuff to send back to the old country. As for Andy, he sprinkled birdseed on the pavement and told friends he wanted to make birds grow. He met Greta Garbo and gave her a butterfly drawing, which she crumpled up. He retrieved it and retitled it Crumpled Butterfly by Greta Garbo: Julia Warhola inscribed the words herself.
    In the 1950s, Andy tackled some body problems. Having lost much of his hair by the end of college, he bought his first wig in 1953, when he was twenty-five. He had his nose sanded, though the results disappointed