Andy Warhol Read Online Free PDF Page B

him—he’d hoped to become a veritable beauty. To strengthen his eyes, he affected, for a time, pinhole cardboard glasses. In 1954 he went with a friend to a gym. The results were unclear.
    Andy divided his labors between commercial assignments, for which he enlisted the help of a series of assistants, including his mother; and fine-art projects, comprising freehand sketches, hand-colored prints, collages (many using gold foil), and homemade books. Critics segregate the work of the two periods, the 1950s and the 1960s: the record and book jackets and ads were for money, while the Pop paintings and the movies were for eternity. However, the division is not simple, because Andy continued to do commercial work (while keeping it secret) in the 1960s, well into his Pop period; and because after 1968 he resumed commissioned projects explicitly for profit, calling them “business art,” though he continued to market them as fine art. Ironically, the enormous number of drawings and books that he produced in the 1950s—for galleries, gifts, private consumption, and social and career advancement—fall more conventionally in the tradition of fine art than do his Pop paintings, which pretend to trash as many aesthetic rules as possible. In fact, Andy was more of a fine artist in the 1950s (if we demand the presence of the “hand” in fine art) than after he actually became one in approximately 1960. That many viewers will be inclined to dismiss or devalue his 1950s work, especially his sketches of nude “boys” (actually they were grown men) or his gold-leaf drawings of celebrity shoes, because these early pieces seem sentimental, soft, kittenish—by the hard standards of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella—suggests that the first step in understanding Andy Paperbag is getting to the bottom of what he means by “pussy.”
    In his Diaries , published posthumously, the phrase “pussy heaven” occurs in the entry for September 16, 1980: he remembers the death of a beloved female cat and suggests that this bereavement catapulted him from the 1950s to the 1960s, as if the pussy died so Pop could be born. He mentions that he should have begun POPism ,his memoir of the 1960s, with this cat’s death, a trauma that fashioned him into a cold and legitimate artist. Before she died, he had emotions. Afterward, he gave them up. The entry begins with a description of a party attended by a bunch of “old bags.” At the time, Andy Paperbag was only fifty-two, but he, too, felt like an old bag (his father had died at fifty-five). At the party, Andy recognized a man with a woman’s name, Bettie:
    I saw Bettie Barnes who let my cat die. It’s a man. B-E-T-T-I-E. I once gave him a kitten and the kitten was crying and I thought it wanted its mother so I gave him the mother. We had two cats left, my mother and I had given away twenty-five already. This was the early sixties. And after I gave him the mother he took her to be spayed and she died under the knife. My darling Hester. She went to pussy heaven. And I’ve felt guilty ever since. That’s how we should have started Popism. That’s when I gave up caring. I don’t want to think about it. If I had had her spayed myself I just know she would have lived, but he let her die.
    To hear him tell it, the death-by-surgery of a female cat spayed him of tender feelings; perhaps pussy Hester was named after Hester Prynne, who wears the scarlet A , Andy’s own, in The Scarlet Letter. A man without feelings, Bettie Barnes, freezes Andy’s heart by annihilating his mother pussy. “Pussy heaven”—an insensitive, jocular phrase—sounds like misogynist slang for a brothel or harem, where homo Andy would hardly have felt at ease. Thus when he says “pussy heaven”—with a mocking, faux-naive pretense that the word “pussy” refers only to cats and not to