Can you hear me? No? Yes now? Yes, no?
Okay, how's that? Great? No?
This is the mic, right? Oh!
Okay, all right.
We're good to go, there were a few people still being seated, so.
Good evening.
Thank you all for coming to our second presentation of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Artist Series.
We are especially grateful for the patronage of Clarice Smith.
She's not here this evening, but let's give her a hand regardless.
[Applause]
I'm Jo Ann Gillula, the chief of external affairs of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
First a few housekeeping notes, could I ask you all to please turn off your cell phones.
They they can interfere with our sound system, and so it's just
ideal if you would turn them off, thank you.
You are all invited to a reception
following the lecture, which will be held upstairs in our Kogod courtyard, and it's an opportunity for you to meet Christopher.
I hope you can join us.
At the conclusion of our lecture, we will have a brief
question-and-answer. If you would please use one of these two microphones
on either aisles,
because we are webcasting these lectures.
I also hope you will join us for the final lecture in the Clarice series for this year,
when we welcome scholar Lawrence Weschler, speaking about contemporary artists, Ed Kienholtz
on Wednesday, November fourth.
Christopher Knight has served as art critic for the Los Angeles Times since 1989.
A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, 1991, 2001, and 2007.
Knight was awarded the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award of Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association,
The first journalist to win this award in more than 25 years.
He received his B.A. in Literary and Visual Art from Hardwick College and his Master’s Degree in Art History from the State University of New York,
and was awarded an honorary Doctor of fine arts from the Atlanta College of Art in 1999.
Knight has appeared on PBS’s “60 minutes,” NPR’s “Newshour,” “Morning Edition,” and “All Things Considered,”
and was featured in the 2009 documentary-movie, “The Art of the Steal.”
He is the author of two books, “Last Chance for Eden: Selected Art Criticism, 1979-1994," and “Art of the Sixties and Seventies: The Panza Collection.”
Reading Christopher Knight is jumping in feet-first to his exuberant, no-holds barred descriptions of art.
In a recent review in the LA Times, on the new Broad Museum, he wrote about a suite of Ellsworth Kelly paintings,
“their seamless fusion of bold geometric shapes, crisp composition, and saturated colors grabs you by the lapels.”
On one of the Kelly paintings, he wrote, “Kelly makes poise look easy.”
And on his description of Cy Twombly,
“A difficult artist, especially for audiences of the ‘My Child Could Do That’
school of fusty art criticism, Twombly’s paintings mix drawing and writing,” and he concludes,
“Twombly’s art is like an insistent echo of forgotten graffiti, murmuring from ancient walls.”
In his articulate and memorable prose, Knight invites us into his view of why Andy Warhol choose soup
for his first suite of pop paintings. In this presentation entitled, “Warhol’s Wig: Cracking the Pop Art Code.”
Please join me in welcoming critic Christopher Knight.
Thank you for the very nice introduction, thank you all for coming this evening.
Actually, part of what you heard in the introduction, you’re going to hear a little later.
One thing that I just wanted to note, I was looking at the emblem for the Smithsonian down here,
and it’s strictly an accident that it looks like Warhol’s wig. That was not a planned.
When a friend asked me a while back, what I was going to talk about in my lecture tonight, and I replied, “Andy Warhol,” the groan that came back was palpable.
“Not him again,” was the sentiment.
It was a bit unnerving because I’ve been a huge admirer for more than four decades. First of the paintings, especially from the early 1960’s, and then of the films.
But I also have to say that the groan was completely understandable.
Warhol and his legacy are ubiquitous.
He’s pretty much accepted as the most influential American artist over the last 50 years, and in the mind of the general public, he’s certainly the most famous one.
Add in the commercial licensing that the Andy Warhol Foundation has aggressively pursued over the last 10 years or so
in order to generate an income for its indispensable grant-making program,
and all of those Warhol-bedecked skateboards, liquor labels, china coffee mugs, Diane von Furstenberg resort wear, and limited-edition ballpoint pens,
might make one want to completely avoid Warhol’s art, at least for a little while.
Avoiding Warhol for a bit might even be the pause that refreshes.
And yet, speaking of the pause that refreshes,
a question comes to mind. The pause that refreshes became a Coca-Cola slogan in 1929,
just at the moment when the nation was about to need to take a break.
But in the summer of 1962, why is it that Warhol picked Coke as the soft drink bottle that he wanted to paint?
Yes, he had doodled around with it before, but that summer he went whole-hog. Why didn’t he choose Royal Crown Cola,
or better yet, why not Pepsi?
Yes, Coke was a bigger seller than Pepsi-Cola, although not by a lot.
But Pepsi had something Coke didn’t have,
something that a Hollywood-obsessed, tabloid-reading guy like Warhol might be expected to find completely irresistible.
Pepsi had Joan Crawford.
The iconic movie star had married Alfred Steele, Pepsi’s CEO in 1955, and after his death from a sudden heart attack in 1959,
Crawford vaulted onto Pepsi’s board of directors. As the 1960s dawned,
the Oscar-winning face of Mildred Pierce, a virtual goddess in the pantheon of the “Camp Gay” underground,
was on its way to becoming the commercial face of Pepsi-Cola.
Nonetheless, Warhol mostly chose to paint Coke. Why?
The same question greeted the “Campbell Soup Can” paintings when Warhol first showed them in Los Angeles at Ferus Gallery in 1962,
and then later that year in New York at Eleanor Ward’s Stable.
He was an unknown artist, but the paintings got a lot of attention, and critics wondered, “Why is he painting Campbell Soup cans?”
Revealing Warhol’s show for Arts Magazine in January of 1963, a young and then relatively little-known artist named Donald Judd had this to say:
“It seems that the salient metaphysical question lately is, ‘why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup Cans?’
The only available answer is, ‘Why not?’”
Judd continued, “Actually, it’s not very interesting to think about the reasons, since it’s easy to imagine
Warhol’s paintings without such subject matter. Simply as overall paintings of repeated elements.”
In other words, Judd was looking at brand new pop art through the emerging tendency of brand-new minimalist art.
What he found to be significant was the overall repeated elements,
the same shape and the same color, repeated over and over and over.
He thought that the particular commercial subject matter of Campbell Soup didn’t matter much.
It’s fair enough. Overall repeated elements also describe a lot of Judd’s own emerging art, which he called “specific objects.”
So, it’s reasonable to assume that he would be attracted to a similar element in Warhol, and yet,
there’s something else in Judd’s review that is very much worth focusing on here,
something that puts him in, if not the same camp as Warhol, at least in a related one.
It’s that little dig he made about the very question of subject matter of Campbell Soup.
Judd describes the subject matter as being “metaphysical.”
Metaphysics, the study of what is outside objective experience, was portrayed as the problem with art.
Judd’s friend and fellow artist, Sol Lewitt, makes objectivity pretty clear in this work, also from 1962.
And the question of metaphysics was the problem with art because it was intimately bound up with the understanding of tradition,
especially the post-war tradition of abstract expressionism.
Barnett Newman, one of the great spokesmen for Abstract Expressionism, distinguished the new post-war
painting from much of what came before, by describing it as “a metaphysical act.”
The zip down the middle of an abstract picture like Newman’s “Onement” from 1948,
is either the suggestion of a solid mass, or its exact opposite, a spacial void, depending on how you look at it.
Making the zip could even be likened to the biblical story of Genesis, the story of creation.
Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,
and God said “let there be light,” and there was light, and God divided the light from the darkness.
These were the metaphysics of abstract expressionism, metaphysics that had dominated American art and artistic discourse for more than a decade,
holding it in a very tight grip. Donald Judd meant to break that grip, and so did Andy Warhol.
They just went about it in different ways.
What I want to propose tonight is this: Despite Judd’s indifference to the specific image of Campbell soup,
the subject matter of Warhol’s paintings is extremely important.
In fact, it’s critical.
The subjects he chose for his silk screens, especially in the extraordinary years between 1962 and 1966, had everything to do with his work.
Not only is it very interesting to think about the reasons Warhol chose to paint Campbell Soup cans in particular,
it is not possible to fully understand his work without it.
So why did he pick soup cans to paint?
Why not, say, cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli?
Or B&M Baked beans?
Why not Alpo, the first commercially available canned dog food?
Alpo was manufactured in Allentown, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, Warhol’s birthplace and family home.
In fact, lots of different brands of canned goods stocked US supermarkets in the 1950s and early 1960s,
and any one of them could have signified the ubiquity of commercial imagery in contemporary American life.
Any one of them could represent modern mass production at its most banal.
These are the usual reasons given for Warhol’s full-bore move into pop subjects, which began in 1961-62, with his paintings of Campbell Soup cans.
But why soup?
Rather than any of the scores or even hundreds of competing commercial products?
The short answer is this:
“soup” was essential studio slang in 1950s art vernacular,
the conversational patter among New York school artists when they talked about their work.
Soup was a descriptive word that artists used to identify the robust, fluid paint in abstract expressionism.
Soup was a signifier of art’s fundamental nature, of its purpose and function.
Willem de Kooning, the most famous American artist working when Warhol did his “Soup Can” paintings,
made a point of using the analogy to soup when talking about the philosophy that drove his art.
About a year before Warhol put brush to canvas, de Kooning told an interviewer in an important documentary film, that soup is what he painted.
The movie was released in 1960 by Oscar-winning film-maker, Robert Snyder.
Now, Snyder was a very big deal in his day. He was a protégé of Robert Flaherty, the genre pioneer,
whose 1922 movie “Nanook of the North” established the documentary as an important art form.
In 1950, he made a film about Michelangelo called “The Titan,”
in which he teamed up with Flaherty, as well as Dante scholar, Michael Sonnabend.
Yes, that Sonnabend, the same one who married Leo Castelli’s ex-wife, Ileana Sonnabend.
Michael Sonnabend advised on the Michelangelo script.
Their film won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, and
in 1952, it was broadcast nationally on CBS, when a national broadcast was highly unusual.
6 years later, in 1958, Snyder was nominated a second time for a documentary Oscar, this time for a nature film.
He didn’t win, he lost out to a Disney documentary on the Canadian wilderness.
But a year after that second nomination, Snyder and Sonnabend teamed up again.
This time, it was for a film that was titled, “Sketchbook #1: Three Americans.”
A documentary about avant-garde architecture, music and painting.
The three subjects were architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who was Snyder’s father-in-law;
the composer Igor Stravinsky, who lived in Hollywood and was then the most influential composer in the nation;
and painter Willem de Kooning, himself the reigning titan of the New York school.
The movie was released in 1960, and it was later subdivided into three separate short films, one per artist.
In the Art segment of Snyder’s movie, de Kooning is dapper in a checked sport coat and no tie and with sleek silver hair parted at the side.
He’s seated at a big round table in his studio among a group of friends,
landscape-related gestural abstractions of the kind he began making in 1957 lean against the wall behind him.
The table is littered with half-empty liquor bottles and coffee cups, while cigarette smoke drifts through the air.
The room is dark, the group of artists and writers is spotlighted by the bright illumination necessary for filming.
The cinematic set-up is obviously meant to recall legendary nights spent drinking coffee and talking about art at the Club,
the informal 8th street loft shared by a then-impoverished group of artists, or else carousing at the blue-collar Cedar Tavern,
the downtown New York painter’s hangout on nearby University Place.
The Cedar is where de Kooning and Jackson Pollock once famously fell out into the street
in a playful, drunken argument over which one was the greatest living American artist.
Snyder’s filmmed conversation is peppered with insider jokes and is full of knowing glancing between intimates.
It covers aesthetic territory no doubt well-rehearsed on many evenings fueled by caffeine or scotch.
De Kooning is seated in the center of the frame.
He is flanked on one side by his fellow abstract expressionist and drinking buddy, Franz Kline,
and on the other by Harold Rosenberg, the brilliant and contentious art news critic, and de Kooning’s most ardent champion.
The group also included Fairfield Porter, the great realist painter and erudite art critic, as well as the abstract colorist, Herman Cherry.
Seated with his back to the camera is Michael Sonnabend.
In this carefully composed cinematic picture, Sonnabend functions as a repoussoir figure.
He represents the outside observer, you and me, who is questioning the artist on the viewer’s behalf.
Among the inquiries he makes to de Koonings is one that concerns the degree to which an artist,
standing in as a spokesperson for all of humankind,
defines his own reality as represented in the physical act of painting.
"Which comes first," Sonnabend wants to know,
"human life as a meaningful essence,
or a human being’s dynamic experience?"
His exact words are, “I want to ask you a question, if you are creating yourself as you paint your picture?”
This is the standard existentialist inquiry of the day, and de Kooning, who certainly heard it more than
once in the period’s critical discourse during his rise to the top of the 1950s art heap,
greets the question with genial aplomb, and then he pretty much waves it away like a bothersome house fly.
It’s clearly a question whose answer he has recited many, many times before.
When asked if he’s creating himself when he paints, de Kooning answers, “Everything is already in art.
Like a big bowl of soup.
Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you.”
Like a big bowl of soup.
In the intimate environment of de Kooning’s studio, explained among fellow painters and friends,
the high-flown existential mysteries and profound philosophical dramas of modern abstract painting,
articulated with literary eloquence in the little magazines by the likes of Rosenberg and fellow critic Clement Greenberg,
is handedly reduced to soup.
De Kooning was talking the way artists talk among themselves in the studio, not the way critics, curators, historians, or theoreticians write about art.
He was using popular vernacular in the context of an important documentary movie,
by a Hollywood producer and director, who had previously won an Academy Award for a feature-length film about Michelangelo,
and who had been nominated a second time just two years before.
And he chose to describe his work, the most important and widely-acclaimed painting of the day, as soup.
So, if Willem de Kooning, America’s greatest living artist, the most respected painter in New York, painted soup,
it is certainly reasonable to assume that an ambitious, unknown artist like Andy Warhol would want to paint soup, too.
And about a year after Snyder’s movie was released, Warhol did just that. He painted his first Campbell Soup can.
Now, I cannot say whether or not Warhol saw Robert Snyder’s film, nor can I prove that he heard de Kooning utter the soup analogy at artists’ hangouts downtown.
And we know there are various stories that say other people suggested the soup can to him, most notably art dealer Muriel Latow.
Whether any of them heard de Kooning talking about soup, I do not know.
But what I do know, is that Warhol was an extremely ambitious artist. His fondest wish was to be a rich and famous artist, not unlike Willem de Kooning.
But his art career at the time was going nowhere, and painting soup, as it were, was certainly in the air.
I’d be very surprised if Warhol didn’t know.
So what I want to propose tonight is that there is an iconography to Warhol’s art,
the subjects he chose to paint are very specific,
and like the Campbell Soup Cans, the subjects of his paintings in the 1960’s are virtually all of a certain type.
The subject of Warhol’s classic pop art paintings is not popular culture, as it is usually made out to be,
neither is the subject commodity culture, nor is it celebrity culture.
Instead, the subject of Warhol’s paintings is art culture,
the myths, values and stories and artists that populate the history of Western art, and especially the post-war American art of the New York school.
When Warhol painted soup, he was painting what de Kooning painted.
In the classic work from the early 1960s, he was picturing established, high art, using ordinary images from daily life that could represent it.
De Kooning’s painted soup, plus the supermarket kind, equaled Warhol’s “Soup Can” paintings.
If the soup can were replaced by a can of baked beans, or a can of dog food, its meaning would be lost.
The theme developed quickly.
In 1961, Warhol painted “Telephone,” a black and white canvas showing an old-fashioned candlestick phone, copied from a 1928 newspaper ad.
Whenever this painting is discussed, it's the hand-painted telephone that usually gets all the attention.
But I’d like to direct you to something else. I’d like to direct you to that wide, solid black stripe
that runs down the right side of the painting.
The black stripe is nearly as large and imposing as the telephone image, but it’s almost never commented on.
The tall black rectangle is a pure, geometric abstraction,
and it has the same visual weight as the candlestick telephone.
And this is Barnett Newman’s painting, “Black Fire I” also painted in 1961.
It’s one of a large group of black-and-white abstractions that Newman worked on between 1958 and 1966, including the 14-part “Stations of the Cross.”
I’d suggest that Warhol’s “Telephone” is a pictorial balancing act.
An equalizing of a low-art image of an old-fashioned communication device, the candlestick telephone,
and the pure, avant-garde, black-and-white, high-art geometric abstraction.
Abstract art, specifically abstract painting of the New York school, had been established as
the pinnacle of modernism, inheritor of the great artistic tradition born in Europe.
“Abstraction represented the triumph of American painting,” as historian and critic, Irving Sandler would later so eloquently describe it.
But look at Warhol’s “Telephone.”
Notably, he did not choose to paint a princess telephone on this canvas, even though the princess phone, which
was just introduced in 1959, was the newest, the nowist, the most stylish and up-to-the-minute model.
Supposedly, “new” and “now” are the Warhol pop art mantra.
But not here.
Instead, he chose to paint an obviously outdated telephone.
He made the image of an old-fashioned, out-moded form of communication,
a pre-World War II candlestick telephone, a virtual equivalent to abstract art.
Abstract painting, Warhol’s work says, equals yesterday’s art.
The iconography matters.
And, lest we forget, the iconography matters in those Coca-Cola paintings, too. Where did the Coke bottle come from?
And why did the Hollywood-obsessed Warhol pay next to no attention to Joan Crawford’s brand?
For an answer, we need to go to the tabloids.
In 1962, Warhol painted “129 Die in Jet!,” the first of his so-called “Death and Disaster” paintings.
It's the largest and most sophisticated of a group of works based on screaming headlines in the tabloid press.
At 8’4” high, and 6’ wide,
the painting assumes the monumental scale of an abstract expressionist canvas by Mark Rothko or Franz Kline,
or for that matter, by de Kooning.
De Kooning had painted a celebrated pair of dramatic abstractions bristling with urban energy,
both of which represent the blustery, energetic, rambunctiousness of tabloid newspapers.
This is de Kooning's “Gotham News” and “Police Gazette,” both from 1955.
The “Police Gazette” was an actual tabloid newspaper, which specialized in coverage of grisly murders, sex scandals, and vaudeville celebrities,
all subjects right up Warhol’s alley.
“Gotham News” was a total fabrication.
Notably, it was named for a city in a comic book.
Gotham being the urban lair of Batman.
Before Warhol hit his stride with the "Campbell Soup Can" paintings, he had tried making a Batman painting.
And this is Warhol’s Daily Mirror.
Warhol’s work reproduces in black-and-white most of the front page of the June 4th, 1962 New York Daily Mirror,
painted by hand with the help of an opaque projector.
The central picture shows the grim wreckage of an airplane, its shattered wing standing upright, almost perpendicular to the ground.
The silhouette of a French policeman, and several other men, are in the foreground. If you look closely, just beneath the photograph of the wreckage,
you’ll see that the newspaper caption to the original photo is missing from Warhol’s painted version.
That’s probably because it didn’t really need to be there. A local New York audience would immediately recognize the scene.
The worst aviation disaster in history involving a single aircraft had occurred at Orly Field in Paris the day before.
A chartered flight en-route to Atlanta, Georgia, by way of New York’s Idlewild Airport, crashed on takeoff.
All 122 passengers died, along with 8 crew members, while two flight attendants seated in the rear were injured but survived.
Two features of this awful story were distinctive. First was its historic nature, and second was its cargo.
The crash was historic because in 1962 commercial jet service was less than a decade old,
and transatlantic jet flights were rarer still, having started less than 4 years prior to the tragedy in Paris.
Jet flight and regular transatlantic air service are commonplace today,
with more than thirty thousand flights completed every day in the United States alone,
but when Warhol chose the subject, the phenomenon was still new.
The rarity magnified the disaster.
And second, the flight that crashed held the specific human cargo.
The jet was a private plane that had been chartered by the Atlanta Art Association as part of a month-long tour of Europe’s art treasures.
On the morning of the crash, the art-lovers had been visiting the Louvre museum.
Almost all of the group, 106 of the 122 passengers killed, comprised the leading arts patrons in Atlanta.
The epic disaster wiped out virtually the entire civic art establishment.
The fact that Atlanta is also the headquarters of the iconic Coca-Cola company surely resonated with Warhol,
given his professional standing as a leading American commercial artist.
In fact, so successful was Warhol in the world of advertising, that it 1960, he grossed $70 thousand for his commercial work.
That’s the current equivalent, when adjusted for inflation, of more than half a million dollars in annual income.
Warhol was rich.
And he wouldn’t match that degree of prosperity as a painter until 1969.
He had long since become wealthy enough to begin collecting modern art himself.
Paintings by Georges Braque, Paul Clay, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and many others.
In 1962, he bought 6 small paintings by Frank Stella, an American wunderkind who was barely 26,
but who had already shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and in a solo exhibition at Leo Castelli.
That same year, he acquired Marcel Duchamp’s “Box in a Valise,” an addition carrying case containing
miniature replicas, photographs, color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one original drawing.
In the weeks immediately following completion of “129 Die in Jet!,” which he subtitled “Plane Crash,”
Warhol made 10 Coke Bottle paintings,
a new subject in his work,
experimenting in their production with a Balsa wood stamp, an opaque projector, hand retouching, and other impersonal or commercial techniques.
He made images that range from a single body standing in splendid isolation,
to seven rows of them lined up like products on store shelves.
“210 Coca-Cola Bottles” is a monumental canvas, at 6’10” high by 8’9” wide.
The canvas is a mural.
It is roughly the same size of several Jackson Pollock drip paintings, like “Number 1A” from 1948 and “Number 1” from 1949.
Like the all-over composition in each Pollock,
which has no primary focal point amid the tangled lines of paint,
the repeated rows of 30 identical bottles lined up edge to edge across the canvas,
create a laterally dispersed field.
In fact, this is partly what Donald Judd had in mind when he wrote of the "Campbell Soup Cans," that
it’s easy to imagine Warhol’s paintings without such subject matter, simply as overall paintings.
But I also think it’s worth pointing out something else about Warhol’s iconic presentation of the Coke bottle.
We all know that icons are a "watchword" in Warhol’s art,
and what is an icon? Essentially, an icon just a popular version of a totem.
A totem is a natural object or animal believed by a particular society, to have spiritual significance and to be adopted by it as an emblem.
Totems were endemic within abstract expressionist painting and sculpture.
This is Adolph Gottlieb’s “Totem” from 1948, and one of David Smith’s extensive series of “Tanktotem” sculptures from 1957.
The bridge between the totem and the icon runs straight through Robert Rauschenberg.
His 1958 “Coca-Cola Plan” was an obvious inspiration for Warhol.
The 1962 “Three Coca-Cola Bottles” completes the transition from metaphysical totem to objective popular icon.
Now, critics of Warhol's art have made much of his penchant for choosing subjects broadly related to death and disaster.
In fact, a whole literature has grown up around Warhol’s supposed insights
into the degree to which modern consumerism, mass media, and capitalism
are bound up in grave social and personal issues of human mortality.
And the preoccupation with death
is said to underscore the importance of a vanitas theme in his work.
Vanitas being the moralizing caution that, sooner or later, death will take us all.
To be blunt, I don’t put much stock in this interpretation.
I don’t think Warhol was engaged in a lengthy philosophical meditation on death in his work.
It’s the critics who’ve chosen to do that.
What I want to emphasize is that Warhol’s choices of death and disaster images
were not generalized ruminations on mortality in the popular new world of mass culture.
They were virtually always highly specific,
and they virtually always represent elements of established art culture.
When it comes to “129 Die in Jet!,”
it is almost equally worth looking at what Warhol chose not to paint,
as it is to look at what he did choose to paint.
Just three short months before the Paris Art Crash, another fiery local airplane tragedy made headlines.
In that catastrophy, an American Airlines 707 plunged nose-first into Jamaica bay, next to Idlewild, killing all 95 passengers onboard.
Warhol did not choose this horrific crash for a painting.
Instead, the first disaster he decided to paint was unique.
“129 Die in Jet!” was distinguished by its direct relationship to art.
When an epic disaster in Paris wiped out virtually an entire art establishment, Warhol seized on it for a painting that represents a radical changing of the guard.
The modern concept of an avant-garde had always meant the full dismantling of the cultural status quo.
The existing art establishment faced eradication.
Typically on behalf of a marginalized, often abrasive faction of society.
The goal of the avant-garde was to create a rupture.
The front page of the Downmarket New York Daily News, showing a terrible modern disaster on a Paris airport runway, certainly recorded an awful human tragedy.
But more to the point, the painting of a smoldering disaster also pictured a wholesale clearing of the cultural decks, wiping the art slate clean.
The subject rose to the level of an abstract metaphor, in a picture from daily life, that represented a dramatic, artistic rupture.
Warhol was making room for his own work in an abstract expressionist dominated art world that had no place for him.
Remember, he was an absolute genius at advertising and market illustration,
and what a commercial artist does, is to make or choose pictures that can represent an abstract idea.
Warhol was an ace at that, so when he began to make paintings that use commercial imagery, he chose the images to speak in code.
Let me run through a number of examples very quickly to show you what I mean.
We’ll start in 1962, with these.
The “Do It Yourself” series are landscapes, seascapes, still lifes paintings were based on paint by numbers kits.
The kit was invented, developed, and marketed in 1950 by the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit Michigan,
the ground zero for industrial mass production in the modern era, and in the following year,
Palmer introduced the Craft Master brand, and proceeded to sell more than 12 million kits
under the marketing slogan, “A beautiful oil painting the first time you try.”
These were followed by a colored pencil version made by a company called “Venus Paradise,” and they’re the source that Warhol used.
Warhol’s “Color by Numbers” canvases embody three things.
The standard retort made by the general public to avant-garde art, which we heard a little earlier in the introduction, “My Child Could Do That.”
Simultaneously, they pictured Marcel Duchamp’s neo-dada conviction that it’s the audience that completes the work of art.
And finally, they encompass the terms of a long-standing argument around how an abstract expressionist painter can possibly know when a painting is finished.
“Do It Yourself” split the difference. It is a finished painting of an unfinished painting.
The “Dance Diagram” paintings were not meant to hang on the wall, but to be shown flat on the floor, and
they refer to Jackson Pollock and his  famous dance around a canvas spread out on the floor, when he made his celebrated drip paintings.
The fact that they’re diagrams,
patterns meant to be followed in order to learn how to do it,
makes them like the “Do It Yourself” paintings. They’re perhaps the clearest example of the problem faced by the New York school in the 1960s when
second and even third generation abstract expressionism was under fire for being repetitive and formulaic.
Warhol’s “Do It Yourself” and “Dance Diagrams” show you exactly how to do it.
This is “Black and White Disaster” from 1962 and a detail on the side,
so you can see the photographic image.
It’s a newspaper photograph of the aftermath of a New York City apartment building fire,
burning down the house,
showing a fireman and another man removing a limp body from the ruins.
The source for this kind of painting in general is something like
Rogier van der Weyden’s “Descent from the Cross,”
from 1435, or any of hundreds of other example of the same subject.
Warhol was, of course, raised in an Eastern Orthodox church,
and went to mass several times a week throughout his life. He would certainly have known the Gospel’s account
of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Christ down from the cross.
“Black and White Disaster” is a secular reenactment of a biblical story, as was told in the daily chronicle of the tabloids,
and remember, by the time Warhol made this in 1962,
Barnett Newman was already four years into his monumental series, the “Stations of the Cross.”
The deposition, or descent, from the cross is station number 13.
This is the “Gold Marilyn” which has always been talked about as a very obvious riff on religious gold-ground paintings,
in which the light reflective golden field is an evocation of heaven.
On the far right is Pietro Lorenzetti’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” in the Met, from about 1342,
but there are also modern secular version, probably the most famous one being Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.”
This is how the Museum of Modern Art explains on its collection website what they think Warhol was up to with the gold-ground painting:
“Warhol made this painting the year that screen-legend Marilyn Monroe committed suicide.
He painted the canvas an iridescent gold, and silk-screened the star’s face in the center of the composition.
Like other paintings by Warhol that feature Monroe’s likeness, this work is based on a 1953 publicity still for the movie ‘Niagara.’
By duplicating a photograph known to millions, Warhol undermined the uniqueness and authenticity characteristic of traditional portraiture.
Instead, he presented Monroe as an infinitely reproducible image.”
Well, I suppose that’s good as far as it goes, but I think the choice of Marilyn is much more complicated than that,
and it isn’t just just because de Kooning had also used her in his paintings.
Marilyn died on August 5, 1962, just as Warhol's “Campbell Soup Can” show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles was closing, a few miles from her home.
But like those soup cans, hundreds of famous movie stars, including movie stars who were alive and who Warhol met when he was in Los Angeles,
could have fit the Museum of Modern Art’s description of what the artist was up to, infinitely reproducing a portrait.
I think it’s more productive to consider Marilyn in the larger context of all three iconic American women who would become indelible subjects for the artist.
This is the “Marilyn” diptych,
one of the “Elizabeth Taylor” silkscreens below it from a Life Magazine spread on her title role in the movie, “Cleopatra,”
and Jackie Kennedy sixteen times in four photographs from the day of JFK’s assassination in Dallas,
on the airplane at LBJ's swearing in, and at her murdered husband’s funeral.
All three of them are faces of tragedy.
Marilyn Monroe’s suicide is laid over her role in the movie, “Niagara,” where she played a woman plotting murder.
It's the movie that turned her from a bit player to a major Hollywood star.
“Cleopatra,” who also committed suicide,
was the movie in which Elizabeth Taylor, herself, narrowly escaped death,
when she came down with a severe respiratory disease, perhaps pneumonia, and was saved by an emergency tracheotomy.
And of course, Jackie layers a stunning national tragedy over a horrifying personal one.
Let me read a short excerpt from a very famous letter to the editor of the New York Times,
that was published in its pages in 1943 and written by painters Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, with an uncredited assist by Barnett Newman.
It created a sensation at the time.
The artists were complaining about the newspaper’s conservative art critic, Edward Alden Jewell,
who had written several reviews claiming that abstract painting was empty, meaningless, and represented nothing.
Here’s what the artists wrote. “[We] do not intend to defend our pictures.
They make their own defense…
We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.
We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal.
We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth…
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”
Marilyn, Liz, and Jackie all fit that bill.
Simple expressions,
large shapes,
flat forms on the picture plane,
and most important of all, subject that is tragic and timeless.
Even the tragic and timeless curse that haunted poor Liz Taylor turned up in the Police Gazette, that tabloid that de Kooning had immortalized back in 1955.
The “Car Crash” paintings also enter territory of representing abstract expressionism in vernacular terms, and
turning its highfalutin subject matter of the tragic and the timeless into something a bit more down-to-earth.
Here, it’s inextricably tied to art in the pretty obvious reference to Jackson Pollock and his sudden death
at the age of 44 in a drunken Long Island car crash.
Pollock is dead, and so is New York school abstraction.
The “Race Riot” series came from news photographs that were published a year earlier when
Birmingham, Alabama, policemen using German shepherds and high-pressure hoses assaulted peaceful African-American Civil Rights demonstrators.
I think they’re Warhol’s version of a widely-discussed phenomenon in 1950’s American painting, and that is the emergence of black paintings.
They were often spoke of as paintings with high moral seriousness,
almost as if Goya was an abstract expressionist.
In addition to Barnett Newman’s Black Paintings, which we’ve already seen, there are Robert Rauschenberg’s black paintings,
Jackson Pollock’s black paintings,
Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, and maybe most important, Frank Stella’s black paintings. Stella became a sensation at the tender age of 23,
when a group of striped, black paintings were shown at MoMa.
Warhol collected Stella’s work,
and as an artist, he wanted what Stella was getting, so Warhol made black paintings, too.
This is one of the “Electric Chairs,"
“Orange Electric Chair,” from 1964. At the Sing Sing correctional facility and maximum security prison in upstate New York,
Eddie Lee Mays, age 34,
became the last person to walk the longest mile on August 15, 1963,
having been convicted of the murder of a female bar patron during a 1962 robbery in Harlem.
Warhol’s painting shows the Sing Sing electric chair, which was being put out of commission.
The “Electric Chair” paintings are the only Warhol paintings from the core years of 1962-1966 that include a word not printed on a commercial product label.
If you look closely at the detail on the right,
on the rear wall above and to the right of the execution device is an admonishing sign that demands silence.
I think the word invokes the famous silence of avant-garde composer, John Cage,
whose celebrated 1952 composition, “4 Minutes, 33 Seconds,” instructed the musicians not to play their instruments for the entire length of three movements.
The silence of the musicians opened a space for the sounds of the daily world.
“Silence” was the title Cage chose for his successful and widely reviewed book of collected essays, published in 1961.
These are the “13 Most Wanted Men,” which was of course, done as a public commission for the exterior
of the State pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow.
Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the mural taken down after just a few days, fearful of the bad publicity.
The idea for the paintings came from a very specific source. The idea was born just six months earlier, at the Pasadena Art Museum in California,
when Warhol attended the October 8th opening of “Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition.”
This is the poser Duchamp himself made for the museum show, a wanted poster with a self-portrait at the center.
In his poster of a poster, Duchamp cast himself as a most wanted man.
The artist as an outlaw, who rises to the level of cultural hero.
These are the “Box” paintings, there’s “Kellogg's Corn Flakes" box, the “Brillo” box, probably the most widely well known one, the “Heinz”
box, “Mott's” apple juice, “Del Monte” peach halves, and Campbell’s Tomato Juice.
I think of these boxes not as sculptures, but as three-dimensional paintings.
They’re made from flat plywood squares nailed together and silkscreened.
Warhol had bought one of Duchamp's “Box in a Valise” works, in which art was conveniently boxed, so making box paintings seems quite logical.
In abstract expressionism,
a painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity.
Such paintings are fundamentally autobiographical.
The “Box” paintings that Warhol chose from the supermarket shelves all have autobiographical roots.
Pittsburgh was Warhol’s hometown, and Pittsburgh's nickname in those days was Steel Town,
given it’s leading place in the modern American steel industry.
It adds a nice twist to Brillo boxes, which are full of steel wool pads.
As we know, the design of the commercial Brillo box was made by James Harvey, an abstract expressionist painter
who, like Warhol in the 1950s, made his living in product design and advertising, while painting on the side.
Heinz, is of course, one of the biggest names in business in Pittsburgh.
Del Monte was a west coast company whose east coast headquarters were also in Pittsburgh,
and the company had recently launched a new advertising campaign for its freestone peach halves with a tagline that implored,
“Let Del Monte freestones take you back home tonight.”
There are Campbell's tomato juice, and Mott’s apple juice boxes, which,
like the Soup cans, picture a common 1950s slang term for a successful abstract expressionist canvas.
A painting with juice was a painting that exudes muscularity and verve.
Warhol put the juice of his own Campbell’s brand of painting,
on the same plane as the juice in a painting of apples by Cézanne, father of modern art.
And finally, Warhol’s “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes” are an outrageous pun.
Claude Monet’s renown impressionist paintings of haystacks, poplars and Rouen cathedral facades at different times of day,
were the stars of another exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum that included Warhol’s work,
on the subject of serial imagery in art.
Monet’s serial imagery became Warhol’s cereal imagery, in three dimensional paintings.
Now, puns about art were becoming a very prominent feature of Warhol’s work, which makes perfect sense,
since puns are a staple of advertising copy,
and almost all of Duchamp’s work is based on puns.
Among my favorite examples are the “Flowers.”
As we know, Warhol appropriated a picture of a commercial seed catalogue to make the paintings.
They show flowers in a riot of color, blossoming in a field of grass.
Like his black paintings, and his cereal imagery, these are Warhol’s “Color Field” paintings.
Clement Greenberg, the critic who had championed American abstract painting had anointed the color field
paintings of Morris Lewis, Kenneth Noland, and his former girlfriend, Helen Frankenthaler,
as the successor to the achievements of Jackson Pollock.
So Warhol made “Color Field” paintings.
This one is pretty straightforward.
Most often in the literature, Warhol’s cow is linked to Elsie, the Borden’s cow,
maybe because that’s the most famous cow in popular culture that anyone can think of.
You can find the claim in lots of books, written by art critics, art historians, art philosophers,
and even the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America,
which says that Andy chose Elsie the same way he chose Marilyn to be a subject of his art.
But I think the cow has absolutely zero to do with Elsie,
since Warhol’s image looks nothing like her.
Instead, I think it’s a very sharp reference, not to a pop culture cow, but to an art culture cow,
specifically to Pablo Picasso’s alter ego in art, which was the macho “Bull.”
This 1942 “Bull” assemblage is partly a retort to Marcel Duchamp’s Dada ready-made of a bicycle wheel.
The most famous and highly regarded artist of the 20th century,
Picasso was the macho, misogynist bull.
So Warhol, who was gay and effeminate, cast himself as the feminine, pink cow.
And this is Elaine de Kooning’s 1958 painting, “Bullfight,”
which gives form to the clashes of machismo that define so much of abstract expressionism.
Last but not least, let’s talk about Warhol’s wig.
In 1959,
while still in his early 20s,
Andy Warhol began to go bald.
Two years later, as you can see in the far screen, like many men insecure about their looks, not least in Manhattan's youth-obsessed homosexual subculture,
he started wearing a toupée,
a mouse brown hair piece blended with the natural hair he was losing.
Warhol wore a naturalistic toupee for the next ten years.
Then, suddenly, in 1963, just as his art career was beginning to take off,
supplanting his career in advertising,
his physical appearance underwent a radical change.
Warhol took off the light brown toupée and never wore it again.
In its place, he donned the famous silver wig,
parted at one side and swept across his forehead.
No one would ever mistake Warhol’s new toupée for natural hair. The silver wig became a trademark.
What was going on seems pretty clear by now, at least I hope it does.
After looking through the iconography of his early 60s paintings.
Warhol was declaring himself
to be the next Willem de Kooning in American art.
De Kooning was famously dashing, his handsome face crowned by a shock of silver hair.
Warhol, by donning a silver wig, which he wore for the rest of his life,
snatched de Kooning’s victorious laurel wreath, and placed atop his own head.
Warhol’s wig was to de Kooning’s physical features,
what Warhol’s soup cans were to de Kooning’s painterly soup.
If Warhol’s first go-round with a toupée in the 1950s was itself a nominal tragedy,
his second go-round in the 1960s was a blazing farce.
The importance of de Kooning’s rarefied place in the New York art world to Warhol’s emerging pop aesthetic is almost never considered.
Perhaps because critics and art historians have spent so much time fantasizing about Warhol’s relationship to popular culture and movie stars,
rather than his actual relationship to art culture and art stars.
But the pivotal “Soup Can” suite, and the trademark silver wig, together demonstrate just how central de Kooning was to the younger artist’s work.
I would say that the source of Warhol’s obsession with de Kooning is pretty easy to identify.
In 1961, Warhol got to know the artist Robert Rauschenberg.
One of the first silkscreens Warhol made used a photograph borrowed from Rauschenberg that showed his hard-scrabble family in Texas,
that’s a close up on the right,
a family not so different from Warhol’s own hard-scrabble family back in Pittsburgh.
Warhol titled the silk-screen “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,”
a title that celebrates his friend’s new success as an artist,
a success that so far, had eluded Warhol.
And probably Rauschenberg’s first claim to fame came in 1953, when he went straight after the titan of the New York school,
with his highly controversial, even notorious, “Erased de Kooning Drawing.”
It took Rauschenberg a couple of weeks to painstakingly erase the pencil, crayon, and oil paint, on a drawing that de Kooning gave him,
but when he was finished, the fact that an upstart young artist had obliterated de Kooning was the talk of the town.
In 1959, Rauschenberg was included in the landmark exhibition, “16 Americans,” organized by the Museum of Modern Art.
The statement he wrote for the show’s catalogue is now universally regarded as a touchstone for the 1960s.
Rauschenberg wrote,
“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.”
What I’m proposing here, is that Warhol took that advice literally, and he ran with it.
When Warhol painted soup, he was painting what de Kooning painted.
When he chose a commercial soup can label to paint de Kooning’s soup, he was acting smack in the middle of that gap between art and life.
The subjects of virtually all those extraordinary silk screen paintings of the 1960’s was other art,
and usually the art that was standing in the way of his own success.
Most often his chosen commercial images represent the basics of the 20th century avant-garde:
Picasso, Pollock, de Kooning, the abstract expressionist ethos, and neo-Dada challenges to them.
After the untimely death of Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning emerged as a bona fide modern art celebrity.
In the words of playwright and essayist, Lionel Abel, his close friend,
“Walking with de Kooning through Greenwich village was like being with a movie star.
Heads turned and strangers stopped him in the street.”
De Kooning enjoyed a degree of public celebrity in the New York art world that was virtually unprecedented for a modern, American artist.
Art culture, not pop culture, was inseparable from Warhol’s starstruck inspiration for wearing a de Kooning wig.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
I'd be happy to take some questions. Oh, just one caution,
make them questions rather than speeches from the floor.
It's hard to answer a speech.
But I'd be happy to take questions.
I think they want you to go to the microphone if you can.
Or if you yell it out, I could repeat it.
Here we go.
Audience member: Testing, one two three, test.
Okay, thanks. I haven’t studied Warhol, I just know, you know, I knew a little bit about him, you know, just seeing things and the “Soup Cans,” and
some more things, but, so, the question is driven by, just, lack of knowledge.
You basically said he was a “copy cat,”
and what I know, maybe I’m exaggerating, but he copied. And I know that in art, and I do some photography and
so I know we all copy from each other, we all learn from each other, copy. But, I mean, I’m just
curious to know if what you presented tonight is something that,
kind of new, developed knowledge on what he did, or is there, you know something that’s been presented and there’s been some debates about?
Where this came from, or it kind of definitive,
and was it known to the artists that he was copying from, and was a source of unhappiness among them?
My friend was sitting next to me, she was saying that the “Soup Can,” she had heard his mother
fed him a lot of soup, so you know, who knows? Maybe that’s where it comes from. I don’t know, I’m just saying, like is this a hypothesis, or?
Knight: That’s the standard, well, two things.
The standard line is Warhol always said he had Campbell’s soup, tomato soup every day for lunch,
his mother always made Campbell's soup, which is great advertising line for his work as an artist.
I mean, he was not a stupid guy.
Maybe he did have Campbell’s soup every day for lunch? I don’t know.
I also, I don’t know whether it was his intention to represent imagery of abstract expressionism in all of his work from
that period, the question of artistic intention is really a question for art historians, not for art critics,
but it certainly is quite a coincidence that virtually everything he made does have that kind of reference.
I think to say that he’s “copying” ab-ex is not quite right, because abstract expressionism, generally speaking,
is an art that is about the assertion of an autonomous individual self, and autonomous identity.
The simple use of pop culture images, commercial images, like Warhol used, denies that, it says
that the self is not autonomous, it says that the self is part of, is embedded in a larger system, in a larger social system.
So, even though his imagery is based on abstract expressionism, it’s completely transforming it.
Well if there aren’t any other questions, I’d like you to join us upstairs, in the Kogod Courtyard
for an informal reception with Christopher Knight, but I want to thank Christopher for his wonderful talk.
[Applause]
