Tag Archives: Andy Warhol

From the Horse’s Mouth: Impressions of Warhol

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Warhol’s persona is almost as iconic as his images have become. Here are some New York art dealers fascinating stories and first impressions of Andy Warhol from The Art Dealers:

“The boy is a very important artist, Andy, because he helped America. He mixes very much with youth, and with all the chic people—you know, the bums. When you have such a stupid expression as Andy has—when he is being silent, before the smile starts—when you look like that, you can do anything you want in the world. As Christ said to all those priests, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” and Warhol is a horrible child.” -Alexander Iolas

“I saw the first Andy Warhol show, the Brillo boxes, at Stable Gallery. I went to the opening with James Harvey, a painter supporting himself as a freelance package designer. It was he who had designed the actual Brillo box, and strangely enough, he was a friend of Andy’s. Jim nearly collapsed when we went in and saw people actually buying Warhol’s identical versions. All Jim could do was write it off as part of the madness of life.” -Joan Washburn

“Warhol very badly wanted to join my gallery, to be with artists he admired, like Johns. I turned him down at first because I felt his work was too similar to Lichtenstein’s. Warhol told me I was very much mistaken. Was there another gallery interested? Yes, I was told. If I didn’t take him, Andy said, then he had no choice but to go to Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. And he did. His show there a year later was fantastic: the Brillo boxes, the Marylins, and the Elvis paintings. I realized I had made a big mistake.” -Leo Castelli

“A few weeks later a very strange man with a terrible complexion and mottled gray hair came in, looking for drawings by Jasper Johns. Although I told him they were very expensive, $400 or $500, he asked for the drawing of a light bulb. I showed him the Lichtenstein girl with the beach ball, and he said his own work was very similar. He then asked me to visit his studio. I was intrigued by him and went to his place on Eighty-Ninth Street, where I saw beautiful antique furnishings alongside twenty-five paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and cartoon characters. He was playing rock-n-roll music so loudly we couldn’t really have a conversation.” -Ivan Karp

“Also at that time I had my first encounter with Andy Warhol. He was about halfway into his soup-can series when I visited his studio. I spent quite a bit of time chatting with him while looking hard at those paintings. I decided virtually on the spot to show them in California, and Andy was thrilled with the idea. He had no representation at the time; he sold one or two thins with Martha Jackson and Allan Stone, but he had no New York gallery. We struck a bargain then and there, and the paintings arrived in California in July 1962. I showed them by encircling the gallery with the thirty-two soup cans, all of them the same size, 20 inches high and 16 inches across.” -Irving Blum

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The Writing on the Wall: Tangled Alphabets and Words

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Leon Ferrari, left, and Mira Schendel, right

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture containing words has worth to the nth power. The special exhibition up at MoMA now, Tangled Alphabets, examines the works of two artists who explore words extensively in their works, and it got me thinking about how words have been used in art. Writing on an artwork exists traditionally as a signature or a date, or perhaps an inscription such as ‘Marcus me fecit.’

Tangled Alphabets focuses on the work of South American painters León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. The show says that the artists “produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.“

Franz Kline, left, and Cy Twombly, right.

Since the 1950s however, writing has come into prominence in the visual arts. Surrealism, and the automatic writing it inspired (where the author writes from his or her unconscious) combined with an interest in the East, led to the prominence of the written word in Abstract Expressionist works. And, at least according to the critic Harold Rosenberg, the action painting popular at the time allowed the psyche assert or express itself, similar to the process of automatic writing.

From Wikipedia we have it that “automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters Franz Kline in his black and white paintings, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the collective unconscious.” In the hands of artists like Kline or Twombly, writing becomes a lush visual element. (Kline denied that it was in fact calligraphy; Twombly’s graffiti-like scrawls are legible.)

Andy Warhol, left, and Roy Lichtenstein, right.

Of course, pop art took words in another direction, as they exploited comic books (Roy Lichtenstein) or packaging (Warhol) In these works, the words are an intrinsic part of the image being reappropriated. In the reuse of printed materials, like some of Robert Raucheneberg’s collages, words become part of the material itself.

For a contemporary approach to automatic writing, look no further than MoMA’s recent acquisition. This untitled work, above, by British artist Jack Strange features a lead ball pressing down the g key indefinitely. (I was born the same year as the artist, 1984, and feel like I desperately need to catch up with someone who already has 2 works at MoMA!)

Words are conceptual and tied to a specific meaning, while the visual arts are just that, visual, visceral and more fluid in meaning. The combination of words and images makes your mind work overtime. Having to read something uses a different part of the brain that looking at something, and sometimes words seem too explicit. On the other hand, they certainly pack a punch.