The Museum of Modern Arthttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4381057 .

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Museum of Modern Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MoMA.

http://www.jstor.org

i j i j * TheMuseumofModernArt

A A A A A MembersQuarterly

Z V lt Jg V |

... J .. . . >

_,,;',,.,^1,,.. ,,,,, I-

ANDY

q IN BLACK I IAND WHITE

W N e w Ma r X f e M S T O C K by Chnstopher Lyon

5tm, c honce | The entire front page of theNew YorkPost was ot showers. I , e

| NEw YoRKs FRIDAY, NovEMBER 3, 1961 lo Ce t | | n w - , I devoted to Andy Warhol twlce: on June 4,

I I Pages 85 88 1 1968,thedayafterhisnear-fatalshooting,and _111 1 on February 23, 1987, the day after he died.

This apotheosis in black and white was the re- | ward of an artist obsessed by celebrity. But it _ _ _ _ | was also aparticularly apt formofrecognition

_.' _ _ _ _

I A A _ _ I of an artlst who found In tablold newspapers I _ _ _ _ _ __ I someofhisearllestandmosteffectivelmages. - _ _ __ _ __ | "Warhol'sartisitselflikeaMarchofTime

w _ A * _ I senblum in the publication accompanying _ _ _ _ _ _ | Andy Warhol:A Retrospective (opening Feb- v | ruary 6), "an abbreviated visual anthology of _ , _ _ _ . .

_ A _ _ _ the most consplcuous headllnes, personalltles, > ?V _ _ - | mythic creatures, edibles, tragedies, art- b _ -_ .

=s s r - __ | worKs, even ecologlcal proDlems ot recent t I_ | decades. If nothing were to remain of the years

,) _ 1 1962 to 1987 but a Warhol retrospective, fu- E | ture historians and archeologists would have a 9 : _ | fuller time-capsule to work with than that of-

i _ _ _ | feredbyanyotherartistoftheperiod."

s t : _ A A I A survey of Warhol's early sources reads as _ |1 < - _ _ _ _ | a catalogue of the most pervasive forms of _ iE - - . r_

s. ;}.w _ _ _ _ mass prlnt communlcatlon. Headllnes. Ads. | Comic-strip panels. News photos. Celebrity 0^0; J:_ _ _ A | portraits and candids. Wanted posters. Pro-

, X: .L * 00 _ _ _ _ _ _ | duct logos and packaging designs. Warhol's _ ,; ; t; _ _ ^_ _ _ | appropriation-thenowclichedterm-ofthese _iL ; i ; f > z _ _ _ _ _ t formscanbeseeninthecontextofanongolng

_ _ | cultural redefinition. Whole new provinces I of potential subject matter were annexed

for modern art and a broader audience was X addressed. l An earlier generation had attempted to give _ _ | public expression to psychic experience

_ _ | throughidiosyncratic,privateimages;Warhol A I andhispee}stOOkhigh-impactpublicimagery _ _ _ | andmade itexpress personal concerns. What

__ _ | led them in this direction? The example of

= _ - _ = _ | other artists, the powerfully direct visual im- _ _ _ _ _ | pact of many forms of mass communication,

_ _ _ _ _ _ | and the artists' own distinctive personalities _ _ _ _ _ | allplayedarole.Therewereprecedentsforthe

use of comics, forexample, intheearly work of Warhol' s friend Philip Pearlstein and in cer-

See Pog e 3 tain works of Jasper Johns. But the compre-

AndyWarhol.ABoy {W3 DAILY NEWS Ez ; DAILYS NEWS X Z henslveness andvariety lolflwdarhod can t be ex- for Meg. 1961. NEW YoRK<S PICTURE NEWSPAP?R ? NEW YORK'S PICTURE NEWSP^P[R e

* ib, 'en :,> , ............. s Te s.M ' *' .' =''' . ..... \e. 8 ws t h.1, gisq,rbJub tw?1s ly.;elXlw w^r ............... 0r ?,: . plaiIled solely by presumed influences.

synthet1cpOlymer MET RALU EDGES LA, 4 3 rn n tr r a r n I Warholbasedhisworkofthel960sareexam

Cu la:l^[ \ stsonal 1GANKS CURB CARDS, 4r 1 rU" | r l v"[l | Department of Painting and Scuipture in his BurtonTremaine BR9KS DOWN wo u>ou . g .^ ..

_2->;i-;; ; @ @ S S * that he looked for a subJect ln whlch he was

; w E 1 _ In nosplt/ llere; Llz m gome | most interested, by which he could define himself as an artist" and found it in "the fan _Kffl magazines he read to follow the lives of the

I t.: ;t : |: Fa _w_ - | stars he adored, and in the tabloids, with their | g ^ , l [ Y7 * i I -- | ads, their comics, and their screaming head-

1l3#ill | 1 <>__ _ @ _ ; /w <_ | lines.Itwas'ea;y,'itwaswhathelovedand Andy Warhol. Daily 9!il |- *-_ t E . . S _ oiX { found somehow de ply satisfying, and it was News. 1962. Synthetic 1 ^ 11 atA 14_ _ I E * _r I ground just then bei lg explored by a new gen-

polymerpainton C;IiI I we_^ I I _ _^ | erationofartis s." canvas. Collection 1111 | vA I * | * | Also in the exh bition publication, Benja- Museum fur Moderne ,-Xh l r 5f _rrss min H. D. Buchloh, an art historian and critic,

Kunst,Frankfurt. -: 1t l | pointsouttheimportanceofrecognizing"the

Photo: Rolf Lauter, degree to which postwar consumer culture was Frankfurt. a pervasive presence. It seems to have dawned

on artists of the fifties that such imagery and objects had irreversibly taken total control of visual representation and public experience." But millions read about, and were fascinated by, disaster and celebrity. Artists like Roy Lichtenstein had recognized in the graphic im- pact of ads and comics an untapped artistic potential. However, Warhol exploited to a unique extent the realization that images al- ready invested with powerful public meanings could be made to convey as well complex pri- vate emotion and thought.

The imagery presented by Warhol in each of the five works that comprised his first major appearance as an artist-in a display window at Bonwit Teller in 1961-reflects Warhol's own "desires and deficiencies," McShine sug- gests, "for all traffic in metaphors of metamor- phosis and self-transcendence." Warhol's desire to make himself over finds a parallel, for example, in the transformation of Popeye, the subject of one painting in the display window show, who "is made a new man by spinach (so much so that in Warhol's paintings, he seems to be punching the picture plane)."

Warhol's infatuation with film stars and other celebrities eventually led to the creation of some of his most famous paintings, such as those of Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, or Elvis Presley. Warhol identified with them both as objects of desire and as role models. A counterpart to such images are Warhol's paint- ings based on photos of fatal accidents and other disasters, works that give form to our most fundamental fears.

129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) (1962) was the first of what would come t6 be called the Disaster paintings. The event be ng reported was the crash on take-off at Paris of an airplane en route to the United States. Many of those who died were patrons of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta-it was an "art world" disaster. The Disaster series, mainly derived from news photos, covers a lot of ground, McShine ob- serves, from common accidents to global trag- edy: "In most of the works, Warhol uses repeated images to reinforce the obsessive way our thoughts keep returning to a tragedy, and to stress the flash of fame that these little-known victims achieve in death, as their pictures are repeated in thousands of newspapers."

The most powerful of these early works of Warhol come from the intersection of his ob- sessions with glamor and death: the images of Marilyn Monroe and, perhaps most affect- ingly, the series devoted to Jacqueline Ken- nedy. The events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy provided Warhol with a set of images that repetition, in print and on screen in the days following the killing, made indelible in the national memory.

Warhol's use of found imagery dates at least to his youth in Pittsburgh. At least one of his early paintings was taken directly from a pho- tograph. Significantly, this early work, possibly lost,, is said to have been based on a photo of a

disaster, the bombing of a train station in Shang- hai by the Japanese in 1937. Warhol, when a student at Carnegie Institute, collected tear sheets from Vogue, Life, and other periodicals.

In the 1950s, when Warhol worked in New York City as a commercial artist, he frequently borrowed illustrations from the New York Public Library Picture Collection. He also copied from newspapers, according to Bert Greene, an associate and friend. Warhol used a light box to trace pictures and was using an opaque projector by the late 1950s for draw- ings and later for his first Pop art works.

In these early Pop paintings, Warhol vacil- lated between two different techniques, as Marco Livingstone points out in the exhibition publication: a loose copying, incorporating gestural handling -and exaggerated drips-a re- sponse in part to the accepted look of New York School painting-and a second ap- proach, impassive in treatment, replicating the source material as closely as possible. He soon came to prefer the "cold," impassive paint- ings to the more "lyrical" ones.

Livingstone has sketched the art-historical lineage of this style, which would become the characteristic look of Warhol's art: "Warhol's equation of the canvas with an appropriated image can be viewed as an extension of Marcel Duchamp's concept of the Readymade by way of Jasper Johns's paintings of Flags and Tar-

gets, which had been the subjects of consider- able acclaim and critical discussion when they were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1958."

The mechanical copying of images was only a beginning, however. The process of transmission also involved changes that would transform the image. Characteristically, such changes were not imposed by Warhol directly but instead proceeded from some unforeseen aspect of the process. When working with an assistant, for example-and Warhol had assis- tants from very early in his commercial career- he observed that there is a "certain amount of misunderstanding of what I'm trying to do," but that he preferred this state of affairs:

If people never misunderstand you, and if they do everything exactly the way you tell them to, they're just transmitters of your ideas, and you get bored with that. But when you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.

Far left: Andy Warhol. Untitled. 1960. Watercolor, pencil, and cut newspaper pasted on paper. Collection The Estate of Andy Warhol.

Left: Andy Warhol. Saturday's Popeye. 1960. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Collection Landesmuseum, Mainz.

- ---- ........

V A publicity still of Marilyn Monroe for the film Niagara (1953), showing crop marks made by Andy Warhol. Courtesy The Estate and Foundation of Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol. The Six Marilyns (Marilyn Six-Pack). 1962. Silkscreen ink

on synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Collection Emily and Jerry Spiegel.

Photo: Zindman/Fremont.

:f-.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~0 k 0

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~S~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1

, .*. . , ,... ,,*, ........# : s

s : :

4 :

f;s - i@^|

-. B - A

41, ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 1

4id{t^ 0 ii 1 r ;,

';1 ) f

.'';;'r *;'i''''J'*-, ';'

* o;X ,* ; ** H's. 3S-f't ......................%

After experimenting with various other methods of printing, including the use of a rubber stamp or woodcut, Warhol moved to silkscreening. His initial use of the hand-cut silkscreen soon gave way to use of commer- cially produced photo-silkscreens. Images in the Disaster series were among the earliest to be produced this way. Synthetic polymer paint was used for backgrounds; the photographic image was itself printed in oil-based enamel or occasionally vinyl ink, "usually in black," Livingstone points out, "to reinforce the asso- ciation with newsprint photographs." Warhol's exploration of color, through his inventive use of screenprinting procedures, for example, or in the late Camouflage works, added layers of meaning and a remarkable complexity of vis- ual experience to the black-and-white founda- tion of his early work.

In his 1980 book POPism: The Warhol '60s, written with Pat Hackett, Warhol re- called the first use of silkscreening:

In August '62 1 started doing silk- screens. The rubber-stamp method I'd been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted some- thing stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect.

With silkscreening, you pick a photo- graph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face-the first Marilyns.

In this recollection, elements of technique fuse with eroticism, glamor, and death. The image used for the Marilyn pictures was cropped by Warhol from a publicity still by photographer Gene Kornman for the 1953 film Niagara. Otherwise unaltered, it is neverthe- less transmuted by the peculiar alchemy of Warhol's art and becomes a contemporary icon and a reflection of our time.

Warhol's own celebrity made him an appro- priate subject for his paintings, and self- portraits are an important aspect of his work. In the 1981 painting Myths, he comments wryly on his own fame and on his position in American popular culture. Seen in vertical strips of repeated images are Superman, at the extreme left, Mickey Mouse and Uncle Sam in the middle, and, along the way, Howdy Doody, Greta Garbo, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The extreme right-hand column is filled with a repeated image of Warhol him- self. It is a study in white and black: his white- haired head at the very edge of the painting and the dark shadow of his face filling the frame, presenting his profile with features simplified and exaggerated by the shadow's elongation. The retiring figure of Warhol, who cast such a long shadow over the culture of his time, is elevated to the pantheon of popular heroes- but, characteristically, it is the insubstantial, distorted image of the artist that dominates the frame; Warhol himself remains obscured. Off to one side. Observing.

Above: Andy Warhol. Jackie (The Week That Was). 1963. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Collection Mrs. Raymond Goetz.

Left: Andy Warhol. Ambulance Disaster. 1963. Silkscreen ink on canvas. Collection The Dia Art Foundation, New York. Courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Noel Allum.

Below: Andy Warhol in 1964. Photo: Ken Heyman Archive Pictures Inc.

AO MAN

vi - - S

K.

,11?|.__~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __1 -:

q 4

-~~~~~~~~

S ,,

4JIL~~~~~s

AT~~~~

~~7 4. __~~~~~~~~~a

t/~ ~ ~~~~~~ _l

s ~ t UL4r,