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Andy Warhol, the Public Star and the Private Self
CECILE WHITING
A painting of a person's face may have nothing to do with the sitter's personality: Andy Warhol portrayed Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in the early 1960s strictly in their role as public icons. In con- trast, the popular press, from which Warhol pro- cured the photographs for his silkscreens, never relinquished its claim on these women's private selves, even while it maintained their public iden- tities as movie stars. Popular periodicals, movie magazines and tabloids still publish photographs and articles portraying the scandalous romances and extravagant lifestyles of stars in the hope of uncovering the private self that propels the public star. Warhol denied the existence of a private self lurking behind the facade of the public celebrity and he took effacement of the private even further by severing the connection between painted image and private artist as that relationship exists in both high- art portraiture and in Abstract Expressionism. The negation of the private individual self in both Warhol's portraits and his own public persona in the early 1960s had far-reaching political implications because it subverted the principles cherished in the 1950s by anti-communist liberal intellectuals and the artists to which the critics among these intellec- tuals lent their support.
Warhol based his paintings not on Monroe and Taylor's private lives but upon their public images as stars in the movies and mass media. In his painting Marilyn Monroe (Fig. 1), Monroe appears in the guise of a Sex Goddess with her famous sculpted hair, heavy eye shadow, and full lips. Even though Warhol painted Monroe in the early 1960s after her death, he selected as his model publicity stills of her from the early and mid 1950s when she reached the height of her career in the role of the Blonde Bomb- shell. Likewise, Warhol depicted Taylor either as she appeared in movies of the late 1950s in works such as Liz (Fig. 2), with her teased jet black hair and sultry smile, or in her most renowned role as Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile in Liz as Cleopatra. Warhol made no effort to obscure the fact that the sources for his paintings of Monroe and Taylor lay in some of the most widely known photographic images of these women published in popular magazines such as Life, images which established their fame and iden- tities as stars. One of the reasons that we imme- diately recognise the women in Warhol's paintings without having to read their titles is that the mass media have so successfully typecast their appearance as stars that their 'brand name' is a public self, an immediately identifiable face and figure. Warhol
emphasised the 'brand-face' of his stars by mini- mising detail, emphasising outline, and exaggerat- ing expression. In Marilyn Monroe, for example, he focused on the surface features by which we recog- nise the blonde star - hair, lips, eyeshadow - even to the verge of caricature: Monroe's hair becomes a straw-yellow cap, sharply outlined and stiffly sculpted, resting firmly upon her forehead. In a similar spirit, in Liz, Taylor's red lipstick extends prominently beyond the outline of her lips, and her blue-green eyeshadow takes the form of two cut-out shapes haphazardly pasted across her eyelids and eyebrows. In both portraits Warhol insisted upon the exterior physical signs by which their subjects are recognised.
Warhol signalled his reliance on mass media imagery in a second way by emphasising the formal aspects of mass media photography - the black/ white contrasts, garish colour, graininess - which act as the transmitters of the public star image. The grainy shadows on Monroe's cheek and neck and the way in which broad streaks of white show through Taylor's hair emulate the low resolution of newspaper photographs. Warhol clearly imitated the way the popular press presents movie stars, but he exaggerated the appearance and style of both the subjects themselves and the mass-produced photo- graphic images by which they are known. Warhol's paintings are not, therefore, about Taylor and Monroe as real people at all, but about their public image in its purest form.
Despite the fact that Warhol's paintings of Monroe and Taylor rely on mass-produced photo- graphs, the rhetoric of his paintings differs radically from that of the popular press. Warhol's paintings are at odds with the popular mythology according to which a star's 'true' identity lies trapped within a public image. The existence of the public image in the mass media rests upon the foundation of this supposed private life, a private life which legitimises the reality of the public image. The popular press of the 1950s and early 1960s ventured to unmask the private individuals who lay behind the public personae of Monroe and Taylor by publishing inter- views, articles and, aided by the perfection and avail- ability of telephoto lenses after the Second World
Fig. 1. Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe, silkscreen and oil on canvas, 84 x 46 ins., 1962. Rene de Montaigue collection, Paris, courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery.
58 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987 59
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Fig. 2. Andy Warhol. Liz, silkscreen and oil on canvas, 40 X 40 ins., 1963. Galleria Sperone, Turin, courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery.
War, photographs of stolen moments from their private lives. During Monroe's life, the press, driven by the question 'What is Monroe really like?', exposed her fickle nature, her insecurities, her marriages and her mental breakdown in 1961.1 Up to the week before her suicide the photographs which accompanied most articles tended to capture the kittenish, private Monroe. In a set of photo- graphs by Alan Grant (Fig. 3) illustrating an inter- view with her entitled 'Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous', she appears smiling and playful. Stacked like a series of snapshots taken in a
coin-operated photo booth, the photographs show her in a variety of poses: in one her head is turned, in another she has her finger in her mouth, in another she growls and grimaces. The photographs, because they appear to catch her in spontaneous and natural poses, are meant to give us the sense that we are glimpsing the private, fun-loving Monroe, just as the interviewer, serving as an alter ego for the reader, promises to bridge the unbridgeable distance between the private Monroe and the public reader- ship.
Likewise Taylor provided a constant dose of
60 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987
private scandal for the popular press based upon her diamond necklaces, her million dollar contract for the movie Cleopatra, her affair with co-star Richard Burton at the Cleopatra set, her five marriages, and her near death in 1961.2 Alongside articles about Taylor's tumultuous career and love life appeared photographs of her, usually arm in arm with one of her paramours, snapped on and off the movie set and at all times of the day and night. As Vogue magazine wrote in 1962 during the production of Cleopatra: 'The papers are full of Liz; and the Queen of the Nile coiffure can be felt at least as far north as Paris.'3 The combined photographs and texts published in popular newspapers and magazines flaunted Taylor's and Monroe's capricious person- alities, adulteries, marriages, and divorces, trans- forming the private lives of these female stars into public spectacle.
The mystique of the public persona depends, however, on the supposition that a star's private life always remains at least partially unrevealed by the publicity pages. While each revelation converts a piece of private life into public commodity, it also increases the drive for more information. Each new sensational photograph or item of startling gossip only pushes back the ever-receding horizon of the unrevealed private life. Here the press engages in an undertaking whose ongoing success depends on the ultimate futility of its goal. The very fact that there is always something left unrevealed and beyond the public's grasp gives the press reason to continue trying to uncover the star's private self and the public reason to continue to buy its wares. The photo- graphs of Monroe in the famous nude swimming scene shot for the movie Something's Got to Give (Fig. 4) published in the June 1962 issue of Life, a magazine meant for a broad, family-oriented audience, function as a thinly disguised metaphor for the effort to uncover the true private Monroe.4 Yet precisely at this point where she is most 'revealed', the failure of the public press to unmask the private self becomes all too evident. The image of the semi-naked woman standing by the pool pulling on her robe, half turned towards the viewer, with tousled hair and tongue between lips, automatically falls into the public category of the consumable nude, well-rehearsed by centuries of painting and pornography; Monroe in the nude embodies not the private self but instead the woman posed and objec- tified by the male gaze.5 And, as in pornography, the exposed Monroe can not satiate male desire since the moment of nearly complete physical revelation only highlights the fact that the male viewer can not actually consummate the relationship in reality. The dynamic of the popular press operates like a strip tease, promising access to the private self but never delivering it.
Monroe and Taylor were - perhaps unwittingly
Fig. 3. Alan Grant. Marilyn Monroe, 1962.
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987 61
Fig. 4. Lawrence Schiller. Marilyn Monroe, 1962.
- complicitous in the public/private dichotomy established in the popular press in that they them- selves publicly insisted on the existence of a still unrevealed private life. Taylor, by speaking of her star status as if it were a dress she could put on or take off, hinted that her essential identity lay some- where else, hidden from public view. In a Life magazine interview entitled 'I Refuse To Cure My Public Image', she commented:
The Elizabeth Taylor who's famous, the one on film, really has no depth or meaning to me. She's a totally superficial working thing, a commodity. I really don't know that the ingredients of the image are exactly -just that it makes money.6
Moreover, both women voiced a desire to guard their private selves. Taylor declared in the same interview:
Whether I have been fickle or not fickle ... is none of the public's business. In living my private life, my responsi- bility is to the people who are directly involved with me ... I have such an ingrained sense of privacy. There's a point past which I cannot go just for the public's benefit.7
In Monroe's case privacy became a conscious way of maintaining an aura of mystery and fantasy. She refused Life any pictures of her new home saying, 'I don't want everybody to see exactly where I live, what my sofa or fireplace looks like ... I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman'.8 Once again, the popular press converted Monroe's unrevealed private self into the stuff of unfulfilled sexual desire.
Yet Monroe's greatest contribution to the mass media's public/private dynamic was not in inter- views but through her suicide in 1962 because this single act generated the ultimate exercise in the exploitation of private identity to legitimize public myth by the press. Monroe's personal tragedy raised both the mystique of an uncovered private life and the public act of revelation to new extremes. Although, on the one hand, Monroe's suicide asserted her ultimate control over her private life, on the other, it issued a challenge to the popular press to discover the reasons for her act and present them to its public audience. The press cast Monroe in the role of a tragic victim, a woman whom no one had really understood and whose Hollywood image had driven her to death.9 Newsweek, for instance, suggested:
That she withstood the incredible, unknowable pressures of her public legend as long as she did is evidence of the stamina of the human spirit. Too late one can only wish that somehow, somewhere that pressure might have been lifted long enough to let her find the key to the self behind the public image.10
These articles suggested it was the pressure of the Monroe legend which had caused her to drink, take drugs, and finally to kill herself. Recognition of the Monroe image as a separate entity created by Holly- wood, an image which had victimized the 'real' Monroe, implied the existence of a far more complex private Monroe than any previously shown to the public. The press thus had to redouble its quest to reveal Monroe's private desires and personality, this time in order to discover those aspects that had been crushed by the movie star legend. Splashy new stories revealed Monroe's personal frustrations with her movie career; they blamed Hollywood for having typecast Monroe as a breathy, vacant sex symbol in B-grade movies despite the fact that she had wanted more serious acting roles. Photographs of Monroe published after her suicide portrayed a wide range of private emotions and were meant to
THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 10:2 1987 62
demonstrate that her personality was more complex than her public image as the sexy blonde, or even her temperamental-yet-playful pre-suicide private image, might have suggested. In photographs taken by Bert Stern immediately before her suicide, but published in Vogue magazine after her death, she appears wistful, helpless and forlorn. The popular press succeeded in developing a far more compli- cated vision of a private Monroe after her suicide, a Monroe who, while often silly and loving, was also fraught with anxieties.
This image has continued until the present day and is perhaps best exemplified by Norman Mailer's book on Monroe published in 1973. Mailer includes a myriad of public and private photographs meant to function as a mosaic of her life, career and the different facets of her shifting personality.11 In the chapter of his book entitled 'The Lonely Lady', which recounts her approaching suicide, the number of photographs of Monroe looking sad and helpless increases dramatically. Nevertheless, this new post-suicide image is in no way closer to the 'real' Monroe than the pre-suicide one; rather it is a more extreme example of the press digging deeper into the star's private life and dredging forth new material to convert into an even more spectacular public image.
Artists working in the high-art medium of oil on canvas could - and did - adopt the popular press dynamic of the private self legitimising the public star as their own. And, in fact, it is precisely with the ultimate exercise of the popular press machine- the Monroe tragedy - that high art paintings seemed most at home. A number of paintings of Monroe completed after her death developed a vision similar to that of the press - the tortured Monroe trapped within the smiling public facade. James Gill's painting Marilyn (Fig. 5) shows a full colour view of Monroe seated before three black and white framed images of herself. Seen by itself against a blank backdrop, the foreground image in a red dress might seem to constitute a rendition of the public Monroe. But juxtaposed against the three pictures in the background, which resemble publicity photographs, the figure in red becomes the 'real' Monroe behind - or in this case, in front of- the popular image. All three images in the back- ground show her multi-faceted public allure: her hairstyle, the angle of her head, and the twist of her body differs in each one. And all three demonstrate a public expression of pleasure; she is all smiles. Initially the smile of the Monroe who sits dressed in red in the foreground appears to repeat the expres- sion on the central image in the background. On closer examination, however, the foreground Marilyn stretches open her mouth, which also looks darkened by a deep shadow cast diagonally across it, much wider than the background image; read in contrast to the smiling Monroe in the background the expression on the face of the foreground Monroe transforms itself into a grimace of seeming inner
anguish. Yet since Gill's image can not actually get closer to the real Monroe than the other products of the popular press, his supposed juxtaposition of public/private ends up as no more than yet another echo of the suicide vision of Monroe manufactured by the portrait pictorials in the media.
In a similar spirit, Derek Marlowe's painting A Slight Misfit (Fig. 6) portrays the destructive effect of the publicity world on the private Monroe. In Marlowe's canvas elements of Monroe's public image, most notably her smiling face, mingled with hints of her private tragedy suggested by the split that cleaves apart the two halves of her face. The scraps of newsprint filling this facial fissure point to the villain responsible for Monroe's destruction. In other sections of the canvas several words printed in bold black newsprint stand out and constitute a sort of eulogy. They read: '[Fa]rewell', '[I]t was Fun while it Lasted', 'Love', and 'Savage World'. All of the words (except perhaps 'Love') must of necessity be addressed to the private Monroe since they speak of something which has passed and the public Monroe did not die with her mortal body; she is in fact still very much with us to this day. Marlowe's painting, like Gill's, posits the presence of a private tragic figure behind the smiling public image.
Not only did high-art painters parrot the rhetoric of the popular press, the mass media adopted such images for their own purposes. Life magazine repro- duced both Gill's and Marlowe's paintings as moral- ising works which dealt with the publicity world of stardom that enveloped and eventually doomed the private Monroe.12 The popular press had little difficulty recognising in these paintings the textual and photographic strategies which it itself practised; these were artists who spoke the media's own language.
Are there any traces of the private self in Andy Warhol's portraits of Monroe and Taylor? The timing would certainly have been right for Warhol to turn towards the private since he painted these two stars just at the moment when the press was examin- ing their private lives with the greatest scrutiny. He was certainly not oblivious to the popular press. Walter Hopps, recalling a visit to the artist in 1961, commented:
What really made an impression was that the floor - I may exaggerate a little - was not a foot deep, but certainly covered wall to wall with every sort of pulp movie magazine, fan magazine, and trade sheet, having to do with popular stars from the movies or rock 'n' roll. Warhol wallowed in it.13
Moreover, he began to depict Monroe immediately after her suicide. Similarly, his series of paintings devoted to Taylor, which began in 1961 shortly after her near brush with death, continued throughout the scandal unleashed by the movie Cleopatra. But Warhol avoided the sensationalism of their private lives. His portraits of Monroe and Taylor are images of movie actresses.
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987 63
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Warhol did more than simply avoid the private self; he actively transformed the mass media's inter- play between the public and the private into a purely aesthetic phenomenon. He disembodied mass- produced photographs of his stars from their textual source - whether newspapers or publicity stills and silkscreened them as either single or multiple images painted with bright metallic colours. The differences between Warhol's many single-image Monroe canvases lie in the various colours or the graininess of the paintings, not in the various emotional states of the sitter. Our impulse may be to read the variations in these images as representative of different moods.14 But in Warhol's canvases there is no correlation between changes in colour or shadows and the feeling or emotions of his model. In each image Monroe's face is essentially the same; it lacks any significant change in facial expression or in the positioning of the head. Warhol has simply applied different colours to the same basic face. Moreover, he has selected psychedaelic and metallic colours which, in their newness and artificiality, resist attachment to human emotions. If anything, the namesake colours in Warhol's Gold Monroe and Silver Monroe paintings refer more to the monetary value of the public image than to the mood of the private sitter.
A composite image of Monroe, such as Marilyn Monroe, might seem more likely to come into line with the mass media's public/private dynamic, since it promises an emulation of the popular press's strategy of presenting serial images of the star in order to gain insight into the multiple moods of the individual subject (c.f. Fig. 3). We have already seen, for example, how an artist such as Gill adopts the strategy of differentiation within repetition to imply a contrast between the public and private self. But the images in Warhol's composite paintings lack any such distinctions. Warhol differentiated his multiple stacked Monroe images with nothing more than the aesthetic characteristics of the pictorial form. All twenty images in Marilyn Monroe are based on the same photograph and each is distinguished from its neighbour only by the fact that some are blurred, others streaked, some washed out, others darkened. Each representation of Monroe is simply an aesthetic contrivance, for all appearances the mere result of a sloppy application of his silkscreen technique.
Variation in Warhol's pictures thus occurs only in the public realm of visual aesthetics. He pointed out the pure image value of the public self by submitting the photograph of the public star to aesthetic play. To this end the use and emulation of publicity photographs in his painting makes perfect sense: Warhol's paintings are not showing us any real or private Monroe or Taylor, rather they depict the public image of these stars as given by the popular press and make us conscious of them as images or symbols through the manipulation of colour and shadow. Warhol sliced off the private side of the dichotomy between the public and private self and
denied the very possibility of discussing the private. Whereas pictorials in the media transformed the private into public spectacle. Andy Warhol dis- played the public symbol as straightforward aesthetic spectacle. He did not reveal the private, he elided it.
This same device of effacing the private and pre- senting the public operates in other Warhol paint- ings from the same period. The paintings which come closest to those of Taylor and Monroe, of course, are his images of male stars like Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. Here the same rhetoric applies except that these paintings lack the added punch of evoking the woman-as-sex-commodity tradition from popular culture. None the less these men come as close as male subjects can to the Taylor and Monroe model because both Elvis and Brando were famous in the 1950s as sex symbols, that hybrid category which casts the male body into a tradition- ally female role. In the case of his paintings of food products - Campbell Soup, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Coca Cola - Warhol treated not the dynamic of public and private within the popular press but that of image and product in American advertising. Advertising rhetoric is virtually identical to that of the mass media because a real product is assumed to stand behind each advertisement image, and it is that product which is meant to legitimize the product's public image. In Warhol's pictures, however, the presentation is the product; there is nothing behind the label. Warhol's aesthetic varia- tions thus tend to efface the relationship of advertis- ing image to actual product, much as it eliminated the private self behind the public star.
Warhol's series of paintings of Jackie Kennedy painted after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, would seem to be a blatant exception to his usual operation of effacement. These canvases appear to catch her at a moment of private grief mourning the loss of her husband in the prime of his life and seem to penetrate to the real woman behind the public role of the First Lady. But in fact Warhol's elimina- tion of the private took its most extreme form when he adopted this subject since the funeral of the President was the premier instance of the public presentation of private emotion in Warhol's lifetime. Both the printed media and television converted the funeral and the family's private grief into a spectoral public ceremony.15 Jackie Kennedy herself laid the ground for this press extravaganza by personally helping to plan the details of the funeral which she modelled on Abraham Lincoln's: the press amply publicized her central role in doing this, characteris- ing her as being as courageous and as dignified as the tragic Mary Todd Lincoln. The parallel between the Kennedys and the Lincolns shows the extent to which the funeral and Jackie Kennedy's public display of grief followed an established protocol.16 The nation witnessed the pageantry and emotions of the funeral on live television and relived the event through the print media which published photo- graphs of the ceremony in chronological sequence.
THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 10:2 1987 66
The December 6, 1963 issue of Life magazine, for instance, presented a narrative about the funeral entitled 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest' in the form of full-page black-and-white and colour photo- graphs, each accompanied by explanatory texts. The annotated photographs allowed the reader to follow the procession from the Capitol rotunda where Kennedy lay in rest, down the Capitol steps and through the streets of Washington to Arlington cemetary. Here seriality in the public press recounts not so much the variations of private mood as a narration of Jackie Kennedy's personal odyssey through the funeral. Both photographs and texts display the funeral procession and the family mourning for all to see; for example, the words below one photograph of the funeral read:
A woman knelt and gently kissed the flag. A little girl's hand tenderly fumbled under the flag to reach closer. Thus, in a privacy open to all the world, John F. Kennedy's wife and daughter touched at a barrier that no mortal ever can pass again ... Through all this mournful splendor Jacqueline Kennedy marched enfolded in courage and a regal dignity.17
The media served as a conduit between Jackie Kennedy and the nation; with the aid of the media the nation collectively mourned Kennedy's death through her private grief. Her private grief became public ritual; her sorrow was not hers, it belonged to the nation.
Warhol's aesthetic manipulations of these images make clear that he is dealing with this nationally known public image, not the private Jackie Kennedy. In his paintings he used eight widely diffused newspaper photographs of Jackie Kennedy, most of them reproduced in Life, from both imme- diately before and at various times after the assassi- nation. And once again Warhol subjected these images to purely aesthetic variations. In The Week That Was I (Fig. 7), which contains all eight images Warhol used for the Jackie Kennedy series, the photographs are not presented in chronological or narrative order. The photographs in the top left quadrant show Jackie Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas moments before the assassination; the images in the bottom right quadrant, which depict her at Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing-in, are the next set of pictures in actual narrative time; the photographs in the upper right and lower left quadrants all come from the funeral ceremony but are hopelessly out of chronological order. Warhol pairs each of the eight photographs with its mirrored reversal; this tactic not only guarantees that half the images must necessarily be inaccurate as documentary photo- graphs, it also creates playful visual impressions for purely aesthetic effect. In the upper left quadrant the mirroring goes so far as to evoke a visual joke at the expense of John F. Kennedy; one side of his face matches the same side of his face reversed in order to constitute one distorted frontal view of his head. All
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 10:2 1987
eight reversals form striking geometric patterns. While in the top left and bottom right quadrants the pairs of heads face towards and away from each other alternatively, in the top right and bottom left horizontally neighbouring images line up like soldiers pointing in the same direction, first left then right or vice versa. The Week That Was I treats the image of Jackie Kennedy's face not as a record of private grief but as a public icon, already produced by the popular press and subject to Warhol's aesthetic manipulations. Indeed such aesthetic play cuts off any reference back to the private self; the actual Jackie Kennedy, like the real Monroe and Taylor, is strikingly absent in Warhol's pictorial essays.
Warhol undid the public/private dynamic of the popular press's presentation of famous women, distancing himself from its rhetorical norm. This was not the only visual language available at the time, however, and given that Warhol's paintings portray famous people with oil paint on canvas another visual heritage suggests itself immediately: high-art portraiture. At first this avenue does not promise much since the primary function of portrai- ture is remarkably similar to the mass media's public/private dynamic: although high-art portrai- ture does not use the practice of serial repetition, it does try to find an expression, pose, or painting style which gives us insight into the real person behind the picture. Moder twentieth-century portraiture in particular (when being moder is often equated with an examination of interior experience), strives to reveal the sitter's deeper psychological self. Since Warhol's paintings of Monroe, Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy resist all connection to a private reality, they have no meaning as portraits of individuals. That we hesitate to call Warhol's paintings of these women 'portraits' reveals their inherent incompati- bility with the rhetoric of high-art portraiture. His works would therefore appear not to fit into its primary dynamic any better than they do into that of the popular press pictorials.
Yet a second dynamic exists within modern high art portraiture: technique and aesthetic manipula- tions refer to the private artist as much as, if not more than, the private sitter. In Francis Bacon's Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (Fig. 8), for example, the grossly twisted and disfigured face of the sitter, the sweeping gestural brushstrokes, and the lurid, predominantly brown, colours seem less to concern the tortured private self of the sitter than the private angst of the painter himself. Such a connection between style and artist, of course, is not limited just to modern portrai- ture, but is rather a characteristic of modern painting in general, and indeed Bacon adopted much of his stylistic angst from an art movement which was custom designed to minimise reference to the subject and to maximise reference to the artist: Abstract Expressionism. Although its critical supporters espoused an 'art for art's sake' position in the 1950s by claiming that the signs of Abstract-Expressionist
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Fig. 8 Francis Bacon. Portrait of Isabella Raws- thome, oil on canvas, 32 X 27 ins., 1966. Tate Gallery, London.
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paintings lacked any external reference, they did insist that such works referred to the individual private artist. Pure aesthetic manipulation in Abstract Expressionism revealed the artist's indi- viduality and interior emotion in its heroic propo- rtions, the gestural brushstrokes of a Jackson Pollock or Wilhem de Kooning, the argument ran, conveyed the spontaneous expression of the artists' personal confrontation with the blank canvas. As we have seen Warhol's manipulations discount any reference to external subject for the sake of pure aesthetics: do his paintings thus belong to the Abstract-Expressionist heritage of style revealing the individual artist?
The answer is, once again, no: Warhol completely breaks the link between painting and private artist. Moreover, the private artist, like the private sitter, no longer exists in his world. His aesthetic manipula- tions specifically avoid the language of Abstract Expressionism and stress instead the impersonality of the artist. The silkscreen itself is a technical medium - which Warhol called an 'assembly-line' technique18 - which is the opposite of the direct physical and personal encounter between artist and canvas which occurred in action painting. Warhol's paintings do not even need to be reproduced by the individual artist but can be- and were- mass- produced in the 'Factory'; Warhol's chosen name for his studio itself suggests impersonal production. As he once commented to G. R. Swenson: 'I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's.'19 His technique self- consciously eschewed the personal and individualis- tic. He eliminated the flourish of the gestural brushstroke which in Abstract Expressionism serves as a signifier of the artist's presence, personal vision, or individual angst; all that remain are mechanical silkscreen stains. Warhol seemed aware- retro- spectively, at the very least - of the implications of his technique when he said in 1980: 'I still wasn't sure if you could completely remove all the hand gesture from art and become noncommittal, anony- mous. I knew that I definitely wanted to take away the commentary of the gestures.'20 His working process and technique subverted the Abstract Expressionist fiction that the brushstroke on the canvas represents the pre-aestheticised and direct emotions of the artist. Whereas Abstract Expression- ists proposed a direct correlation between surface gesture and the genuine and spontaneous expres- sion of personal emotion, Warhol argued that private unmediated emotion never appeared in his paintings.
But Warhol did not just avoid the presentation of Abstract-Expressionist personality within the canvas itself: in his day-to-day life he challenged the entire myth of the Abstract-Expressionist artistic persona. Resolutely rejecting the Abstract-Expressionist myth of the artist as the profoundly tortured and solitary individual, he was a public star without a
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private or unique identity in the 1960s. His inter- action with the press functioned to deny the indi- viduality of his self. In the rare cases when he employed the formulation 'I think' in his statements to reporters - a construction which by its very nature would suggest an independent ego - he used it to advocate the elimination of the 'I' or the individual self: 'I think everyone should be like everyone else.'21 In order to insist on the absence of individuality in his public persona he denied any sort of personal point of view: he tended either to react to every question in the same way or to respond with his infamous monosyllabic answers of 'yes' or 'no' as if nothing could possibly stir a private emotional response, an individual outburst of indig- nation or approval.22 His public statements of the early 1960s lack any sort of personal stance on current issues, much less a commitment or even a judgement. Warhol effaced his own ego, instructing that 'The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I'll repeat them after him. I'm so empty I can't think of anything to say.'23
He claimed that there was neither an individual nor private Andy Warhol; he emptied his private life into the public arena. The promotional blurb on the back cover of the Harper paperback of Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol tantalises the reader with: 'At last, the private Andy Warhol talks: about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success'. This sensationalist advertisement places Warhol's Philo- sophy within the genre of confessional autobio- graphies written by movie stars. But Warhol's book does no such thing. Rather, it functions as a parody of personal revelation; it is full of chatty banalities and frequent reassertions that he is 'nothingness'. In the end the Warhol Philosophy reveals no more to us than that he is a non-entity without politics, personal life, sex, or age. While there is obviously a self operat- ing here to promote the image of the non-self, to say that Warhol was a self-promoter is not a contradic- tion in terms since self-promotion for him was simply a means for emptying the private into the public sphere. By exploiting the media to expose himself to constant view, he transformed his private life - or lack of it - into public spectacle. While Warhol may have been self-emptying, the emphasis was always on the empty and not on the self. He thereby became doubly transparent: he offered himself up as an empty receptacle that could be filled with whatever others want to see in him, and as a mirror that could reflect back to others an image of themselves and their culture. As Warhol himself wrote in the Philosophy: 'I'm sure I'm going to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?'24
The claim can be made, of course, that the non- self Warhol presents - his empty, detached, or cool persona - is none the less an idiosyncratic character or even an individualistic stance. Yet he was so effec- tive at publicly typecasting himself - both his
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physical appearance and his personal behaviour that his idiosyncracies can also be understood as being generic. Thus he could be successfully imper- sonated on college campuses in 1967 by Alan Midgette, a man who did not much look like Warhol but nevertheless managed to pull off the act simply by spraying his hair silver and imitating the painter's monosyllabic responses to questions. It is, therefore, not a paradox to say that Warhol was both idio- syncratic and generic simply because it is impossible to distinguish his private from his public self. The private simply did not exist for him, or, alternatively, the absence of the private constituted his public persona.
Warhol's relationship with his entire Factory entourage, most notably with his Factory sidekick Edie Sedgewick, was one of his most successful techniques for denying the existence of his own private self. He surrounded himself with people who were willing to strip themselves of their own indi- vidual personalities and adopt Warhol's generic husk. Sedgewick, a rich girl from a well-established family, joined the Factory in 1965 and soon became Warhol's 'pop girl of the year'.25 As Warhol's fiction of an instant celebrity, Sedgewick represented a star without a personal self come to life. Warhol himself wrote of Sedgewick: '[She] could be anything you wanted her to be - a little girl, a woman, intelligent, dumb, rich, poor - anything. She was a wonderful, beautiful blank.'26 More important, however, her vacuousness made Sedgewick a perfect clone of Warhol's own emptiness. Slim, rich, and pretty, she was an otherwise empty receptacle whom Warhol, himself totally vacuous, could manipulate as a reflec- tion of himself, a mirror reflecting a mirror. And Warhol and Sedgewick played on the interchange- ability of their two non-existent selves for all it was worth: Sedgewick dyed her hair silver to match Warhol's and dressed in clothes like his. It was not just that Sedgewick lacked a private self, even her public identity was not her own: she reflected back to Warhol the empty public self he projected onto her. And conversely, as the alter-non-ego of Warhol, Sedgewick highlighted the fact that Warhol's generic image was not even attached to his single unique body. Like so many Campbell soup labels, it could be pasted onto any human receptacle that happened along.
Mutual reflection between Warhol and his self- image Sedgewick was so close as to border on love, or at least that which comes closest to love when no active subject or object of affection exists.28 Indeed Sedgewick was the one person whom he allowed to share his bed. Yet even on the single occasion when Warhol spent the night with Sedgewick he never let down his generic guard, for he did not sleep himself but stayed awake all night to watch her sleep. During that night it was her private self which emerged, served up to Warhol's scrutiny. Warhol recounted his 'fascinated-but-horrified' reaction as he watched her:
One night, when the parties were over, I guess she didn't want to sleep with somebody, so she asked me to share a room with her. In her sleep her hands kept crawling: they couldn't sleep. I couldn't keep my eyes off them. She kept scratching with them. Perhaps she just had bad dreams ... I don't know, it was really sad.29
Quite unconsciously, of course, Sedgewick reversed the process from the 1950s movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that archetypal allegory of conformity, for it was during her sleep that Sedgewick's individual- ity emerged out of Warhol's generic mould, reclaim- ing control over her body. And Warhol, having gone to such efforts to eliminate the private in his own life and that of his Pop 'superstar' follower, thought it 'sad' when Sedgewick's private tortured self rose to the surface.
Warhol applied the device of effacing his private self and packaging the public image with equal efficacy in both his paintings and his life. In his paintings he eliminated any connection between image and private sitter, as that relationship existed in both the popular press and in high-art modem portraiture, and between image and the private artist as that relationship existed in both portraiture and Abstract Expressionism. As Warhol once pointed out: 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my films and paintings and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.'30 The Warhol painting seems to negate all its possible referents.
Warhol's double negation of any reference to the subject or to the artist allows for the argument that Warhol was actually espousing a position that was holier than thou vis-a-vis Abstract Expressionism; he might be seen as extending the Abstract- Expressionist position of 'art for art's sake' by even purifying art from the contamination of the artist's personality. Some critics in the late 1960s did in fact make an effort to connect Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, reincorporating Pop into the avant- garde tradition by claiming that Pop artists were not concerned in the least with the images of mass culture per se but rather with the same formal issues as their abstract predecessors.31 Richard Morphet, for instance, baptised Pop Art as the natural successor to Abstract Expressionism by saying: 'In successive phases of American art since the war, simplicity, directness and limitations of both images - whether abstract or figurative - and means, have been powerfully expressive in them- selves.'32 In retrospect it is evident that Pop artists did indeed take on certain Abstract-Expressionist concerns. In the design of his silkscreens, Warhol, like Jackson Pollock, incorporated the accidents of the medium - slippage, blurring, overlapping - which gave both variety to his surface and evidence of his working process. In this sense he reclaimed visual imagery from mass culture - movie stars, soup cans, coke bottles - for the avant-garde conventions of Abstract Expressionism, in essence suggesting that
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the aesthetic language of high-art abstraction was powerful enough to treat even popular imagery without being infected by its generally accepted powers of external reference. Even Warhol's titles serve to incorporate mass culture into high art practice since in the case of his paintings of Monroe and Taylor, for instance, the title consists of the star's name qualified by either the number of images within the frame, the predominant colour of the canvas, the size (big/little) of the work, or its date (early/late), not unlike the Abstract Expres- sionists whose works were often titled by number or colour.
Such an argument misrepresents Warhol, how- ever, for he never really sought to attain the hermetic isolation of an 'art for art's sake' position; rather he brought both the images and the rhetoric of mass culture into play with Abstract Expressionism in such as way as to subvert some of the most basic assumptions of the 1950s about the relationship between art and politics. The very presence of images of mass culture which are subjected to formal exercises in Warhol's works repudiates both the Abstract Expressionists, who adopted only tragic myth or anguished inner emotion as valid subject matter, and their two most important critical supporters, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosen- berg, who resoundingly condemned mass culture as being incompatible with - even detrimental to the concerns and welfare of the avant-garde.33 According to them, the contamination of high art by mass culture or even commercialism would not only lead to the deterioration of critical standards and the quality of art, but could also have even more serious political effects. Greenberg and Rosenberg, along with a number of other influential American intel- lectuals of the 1950s, associated mass culture with mass consciousness, and felt, based on the examples set by totalitarian states, that this was a tool of political control.34 As a result they felt it was their duty to point out instances of mass consciousness and conformity in the United States which they believed fundamentally threatened democratic indi- vidualism. Abstract Expressionism, for Greenberg and Rosenberg, epitomised a form of individuality which both functioned in opposition to mass con- sciousness and celebrated the freedom supposedly allowed in a democratic state in which creativity could flourish.35 It can not be accidental that many of the images of popular culture which Warhol adopted date from the 1950s, when the distrust of mass culture was extremely prevalent among the intellectuals, nor that he engaged the rhetoric of the popular press which was considered the primary instrument of mass indoctrination. Warhol's images offended because he used that which was considered not only artistically but also politically taboo.36
Warhol's artistic persona of the anti-self also rejected another crucial component, individuality, from the principles which were so important in the 1950s to the Abstract Expressionists and intellectuals
concerned with the external threat of communism and the internal threat of conformity. Warhol went so far as to suggest in Newsweek magazine in 1964 that everyone should become a machine, the charac- ter trait attributed in the red-baiting era of the 1950s to people who lived in the Eastern Bloc.37 Warhol seemed to be celebrating a spirit of conformity which intellectuals in the past has associated in its most extreme case with the faceless communist auto- maton and in its less extreme form with the comfort- able suburban middle-class citizen. Warhol stated:
I want everybody to think alike ... Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under strict government; so if its working without trying why can't it work without being Com- munist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.38
This is almost exactly what intellectuals in the 1950s might have said, yet they certainly would not have added a positive note of approval. The repudiation of the conformity and levelling of society which seemed to be manifesting itself almost everywhere in American life in the 1950s, was the very raison d'etre of critics such as Greenberg and Rosenberg. Indi- viduality became for them a sacrosanct value which the artist (and art critic) were best equipped to protect. Warhol's paintings and lifestyle thus end up negating the hegemony of intellectual thought in the 1950s; he re-opened the dialogue between highbrow and lowbrow art in an effort not to shock the American middle class out of their comformity but to epater les intellectuels by attacking their sacred cow of individuality.
And yet while Warhol succeeded in subverting the assumptions of 1950s intellectuals and the then avant-garde of Abstract Expressionism, his reversal of prevailing ideas was a very traditional strategy to claim avant-garde status. Warhol's commissioned portraits of the 1970s, wholesale in number, reveal the extent to which his adoption of the process of subversion in the 1960s guaranteed his avant-garde status and consequently provided him with a lucra- tive sales in the 1970s. The 1960s paintings served to define a style recognisable as Warhol's own; the 1970s works modify his artistic position in order to sell that style for profit. As iconoclastic modernist Warhol acted as an astute entrepreneur forming and exploiting his own artistic market. Indeed Warhol's practice highlights the place where high-art painting and mass marketing find common ground in post- war America: good business sense.
One canvas of the 1960s eliminates the usual Warhol device of effacement in such a way as to pre- figure the direction his art was to take in the 1970s: this work, Ethel Scull 36 Times (Fig. 9) is a portrait of the wife of a New York taxicab fleet owner and art collector, Robert Scull. It depends on a wholesale incorporation of, not a distancing from, the sources and rhetoric of popular culture. The photographs he
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Fig. 9. Andy Warhol. Ethel Scull 36 Times, silk- screen on canvas, 35 panels each 20 x 16 ins., 1963. Mr. and Mrs. Scull, New York, courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery.
used in the painting were taken in a coin-operated photo booth, that popular and inexpensive machine found in bus stations and department stores all across America. In using these four-frame serial images as the basis for the portrait of this relatively unknown person, Warhol employed the multiple image rhetoric by which the tabloids and popular magazines presented famous stars. Ethel Scull 36 Times includes over thirty separate images each of which is differentiated by physical pose and/or psychological expression (the work also includes a few reflected image repetitions but these are well- hidden). In each of the thirty-plus images she has a new facial expression, turn of the head, or hand
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gesture which connotes a different mood. Even the fact that although there are 35 panels, Warhol titles his painting Ethel Scull 36 Times, suggests that his painting functions like a portrait-pictorial in the popular press. All 35 panels together constitute a mosaic, a 36th portrait, of Scull. Thus he directs his sources in popular culture to obtain the goal of both popular portrait pictorials and high-art portraiture that of capturing the sitter's personality.
In the 1970s Warhol began to accept commis- sions for portraits on a regular basis. These works, while still recognisably in his style, entail a commodity relationship between portraitist and client and fall entirely back into the tradition of
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high-art portraiture.39 He depicts the wealthy and well-known, including Brigitte Bardot, Yves St. Laurent, Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, and Philip Johnson, most often in single (not multiple) images titled either by 'Portrait of.. .' or by the sitter's full name. In these commissioned portraits the subjects appear in a variety of poses - frontal or from the side, their heads turned or tossed back, smiling or serious - the standard conventions, in other words, for suggesting real personality captured by the portrait. In one, Portrait of Yves St. Laurent, for instance, the designer appears dressed in a striped blue shirt, bow-tie, and jacket, his cheek resting on his fist, his eyes cast downwards with a serious and contemplative expression on his face. The fact that St. Laurent, like Warhol's other sitters from this period, is dressed in his own clothing and seated in a 'spontaneous' pose is meant to suggest that Warhol has succeeded in conveying his own personal sense of profound self, not a flattened image of the public figure.
But it is not just the private sitter who re-emerges in these portraits of the 1970s; Warhol, the private artist, surfaces as well. The style here has changed, for Warhol has reincorporated the verve of the Abstract-Expressionist gesture in order to signal the presence of his own artistic personality. Although the basic images in these works were still produced by silkscreens, Warhol superimposed bold, painterly strokes of colour upon this visual foundation. In the portrait of St. Laurent thick strokes of paint appear around the sitter's head and his left shoulder. Warhol's commissioned portraits, therefore, not only show a more private view of the sitter, they also index the private artist, definitively converting his images back into the high-art portrait tradition.
The paintings of the 1960s which ride the line between so many rhetorical forms collapse back into the banality of conventionalised portraiture in the 1970s. Yet at the same time the commissions for the portraits during this later period depend on Warhol's avant-garde status and style which was established by his early 1960s paintings. The recipe of the 1970s is as clear as it was lucrative: to a solid avant-garde reputation Warhol added the indi- viduating signs of private artist and private sitter which gave his paintings the added value of being unique commodities.
Notes
My thanks to Anne Higonnet, Cat Nilan, Lisa Tiersten and, above all, Jim Herbert, for their comments on this paper.
1. See, for instance, Alice T. McIntyre, 'Making the Misfits or Waiting for Monroe or Notes from Olympus', Esquire, 55 (March 1961), p. 74; Richard Meryman, 'Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous', Life, 53 (3 August 1962), pp. 31-4; David Zeitlin, 'Powerful Stars Meet to Play-Act Romance', Life, 16 (15 August 1960), pp. 64-71; 'Marilyn's New Role', Time, 77 (17 February 1961), pp. 39-40.
2. An extremely serious strain of staphylococcus pneumonia almost killed Taylor in March of 1961.
3. 'The New Cleopatra Complex', Vogue, 139 (15January 1962), p. 40.
4. 'They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On', Life, 52 (22June 1962), pp. 87-9.
5. See Geraldine Finn, 'Patriarchy and Pleasure: The Pornographic Eye/I', in Feminism Now: Theory and Practice, Montreal, 1985, pp. 81-95.
6. Richard Meryman, 'I Refuse to Cure my Public Image', Life, 57 (18 December 1964), p. 74.
7. Ibid., pp. 81-2. 8. Richard Meryman, 'A Long Last Talk with a Lonely Girl', Life, 53
(17 August 1962), pp. 32-3, 63-71. 9. 'I Love You ... I Love You', Newsweek, 60 (20August 1962),
pp. 30-1; Clare Boothe Luce, 'What Really Killed Marilyn', Life, 57 (7 August 1964), pp. 68-72.
10. 'Marilyn Monroe', Vogue, 140 (1 September 1962), p. 90. 11. Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography, New York, 1973. 12. 'The Growing Cult of Marilyn', Life, 54 (25January 1963),
pp. 89-91. 13. Jean Stein, Edie: An American Biography, New York, 1982, p. 192. 14. See, for instance, Roberta Bernstein, 'Warhol as Printmaker',
in Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonni, ed. Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, New York, 1985, pp. 15-16; David Antin, 'Warhol: The Silver Tenement', Art News, 65 (Summer 1986), pp. 47-8, 58-9.
15. Warhol himself comments: 'I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as President; he was handsome, young, smart - but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the tele- vision and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad.' Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol '60s, New York, 1980, p. 60.
16. See, for instance, 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest', Life, 55 (6 December 1963), pp. 38-47; Dora Jane Hamblin, 'Mrs Kennedy's Decisions Shaped all the Solemn Pageantry', Life, 55 (6 December 1963), pp. 48-9.
17. 'President Kennedy is Laid to Rest', p. 38. 18. Warhol, Popism, p. 22. 19. G. R. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', Art News, 62 (November
1963), p. 25. 20. Warhol, Popism, p. 7. 21. Jack Kroll, 'Saint Andrew', Newsweek, 64 (7 December 1964),
p. 102. 22. See 'Soup's On', Arts, 39 (May-June 1963), pp. 16-18. 23. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol, London, 1971, p. 9. 24. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back
Again), New York, 1975, p. 7. 25. See 'Modem Living', Time, 66 (27 August 1965), pp. 65-6. 26. Warhol, The Philosophy, p. 33. 27. Stein, Edie, p. 182 and p. 250. 28. One can infer the possibility of love from the Philosophy in which
Warhol writes about Edie (she is named Taxi in the book) in a chapter entitled 'Love(Prime)'.
29. Stein, Edie, p. 247. In the Philosophy Warhol used the adjectives 'fascinated-but-horrified' to account for his reaction when he described this scene. Warhol, The Philosophy, p. 36.
30. Gidal, Andy Warhol, p. 9. 31. Richard Morphet, Andy Warhol, Tate Gallery, London, 1971;
Robert Rosenblum, 'Pop Art and Non-Pop Art', in Pop Art Redefined, eds. John Russell and Suzi Gablik, London, 1969, pp. 53-6.
32. Morphet, Andy Warhol, p. 8. 33. See articles by Greenberg and Rosenberg from the 1930s, 40s and
50s, many of which have been collected in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture and Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New and The Anxious Object. See, as well, analyses of their intellectual development by Serge Guilbaut, How New rork Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, Chicago, 1983; Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, 'Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed', Art History, 4 (September 1981), pp. 305-27; James D. Herbert, The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, Number XXVIII, Stanford, 1985.
34. See the special issue of the Partisan Review: America and the Intellec- tuals: A Symposium, Partisan Review Series #4, 1953.
35. Eva Cockroft, 'Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold
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War', Artforum, 12 June 1974), pp. 39-41; Max Kozloff, 'American Painting during the Cold War', Artforum, 11 (May 1973), pp. 43-54.
36. Both Greenberg and Rosenberg condemned Pop Art, contrasting its superficiality to the depth, originality and staying power of Abstract Expressionism. Eventually Rosenberg finally came to accept Warhol in the 1970s as an artist who demonstrated that art was a commodity of the art market. But, even at this later date, Rosenberg wrote of Warhol: 'His weakness is that he expresses no desire to change that situation and suggests nothing capable of doing so.' See Harold Rosenberg, 'Warhol: Art's Other Self, in Art on the Edge, London, 1976, pp. 63-4; Clement
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Greenberg, 'After Abstract-Expressionism', Art International, 6 (October 1962), pp. 24-32.
37. Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?', p. 25. 38. Ibid. 39. See Robert Rosenblum, 'Andy Warhol: Court Painter to the 70s' in Andy
Warhol: Portrait of the 70s ed. David Whitney, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1970, pp. 18-20; David Bourdon, 'Andy Warhol and the Society Icon', Art in America, 63 (January-February 1975), pp. 42-5.
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