Andy Warhol—from a to B and Back Again

In his entertaining memoir Younger Blood brother, Younger Son (1997), Colin Clark, a son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, recounts a story from his time working as a production assistant on the film The Prince and the Showgirl. To explain why Marilyn Monroe came beyond far more than vividly on screen than her classically trained costar Laurence Olivier, Clark observed that, in front end of the cameras, she knew how to speak a language an role player trained for the stage simply could not understand. To Olivier’southward fury and frustration, the less the Hollywood goddess appeared to act, the more than she lit upwards the screen. “Some years later,” Clark continues,

I experienced a similar situation when I took my father to the studio of the Pop artist Andy Warhol in New York. My male parent was an fine art historian of the old school, used to the canvasses of Rembrandt and Titian. He but could not conceive that Andy’south silk-screened Brillo boxes were serious art.

Just every bit Monroe understood that you don’t have to human activity for the camera in the manner the stage-trained Olivier defined acting, so Warhol realized that you lot don’t need to make fine art for an audience brought upwardly on picture and tv in the way Kenneth Clark divers art. Actress and artist grasped that in the modern world, presentation counts for more than substance. The less you exercise, the greater may be the impact.

What defeated Kenneth Clark about Warhol’s paintings was not only their banal subject matter but as well the means he used to make them. Before information technology is anything else, Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe is a silk screen, a elementary reproductive technique in which the artist or craftsman stencils a design onto an acetate plate and then fits the plate into a meshed screen. When ink or paint is forced through the mesh, the blueprint is transferred onto material or paper.one

Late in 1962 Warhol started to transfer silk-screen images onto canvas to brand paintings. Other American artists, notably Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, were already painting images they found in comic strips and on billboards. It was not, therefore, Warhol’s subject matter that constituted the significant breakthrough in his early piece of work just his decision to make fine fine art using a technique primarily associated with printmaking and with inexpensive commercial products such as T-shirts and greeting cards. Warhol’south friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist’due south two slap-up innovations were “to bring commercial art into fine art” and “to take printing techniques into painting. Andy’s prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever washed that before. It was an astonishing matter to do.”

After his early experiments painting cartoon characters and Coca-Cola bottles in the loose, drippy style of the Abstract Expressionists, Warhol liked the grainy, slightly out-of-register images produced by a silk screen because, he said, “I wanted something…that gave more of an assembly-line effect.” Warhol’s new paintings didn’t wait as though they were painted by hand; they looked similar mechanically reproduced photos in inexpensive tabloid newspapers.

A silk-screened image is flat, and without depth or volume. This perfectly suited Warhol because in painting Marilyn Monroe he wasn’t painting a adult female of mankind, blood, and psychological complexity only a publicity photograph of a commodity created in a Hollywood studio. Every bit Colin Clark’s anecdote suggests, yous can’t look at Warhol’s Marilyn in the same mode that you look at a painting by Rembrandt or Titian because Warhol isn’t interested in whatsoever of the things those artists wereâ€"the representation of material reality, the exploration of graphic symbol, or the creation of pictorial illusion.

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we identify on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To practice this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster serial, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Xxx-Six Times. Though Warhol isn’t always seen equally a conceptual creative person, his nigh perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him “the nearest matter to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.”

Silk screen also enabled Warhol to produce serial imagesâ€"that is, to choose a motif and so reproduce it repeatedly by silk-screening it in unlike colour combinations. In a conventional printmaking process like carving, the artist makes a limited number of impressions, and so destroys the copper plate. Merely Warhol’southward series are not finite in this manner. The number of finished works he fabricated depended on how many he needed, or idea he could sell.

In Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, their fascinating study of Warhol’s ascension from commercial artist to the most celebrated painter and filmmaker in 1960s America, Tony Scherman and David Dalton are clear that Warhol’south move from painting his pictures by hand to photo silk-screening was at the center of his artistic achievement:

Traditional, manual virtuosity no longer mattered. The fact that Warhol could describe had no begetting on his art now: how an artwork was made ceased to be a criterion of its quality. The result lone mattered: whether or not it was a hitting paradigm. Making art became a series of mental decisions, the most crucial of which was choosing the right source image:â€"as Warhol would argue some years afterwards, “The selection of the images is the most of import and is the fruit of the imagination.”

Throughout the 1960s Warhol was personally involved in choosing, mixing, and applying the paint in most of the silk-screened works. But it was also his frequent practice to delegate the manual task of silk-screening an image onto sail to his assistants Gerard Malanga and Billy Name. Malanga has said that in the summer of 1963 he was responsible for painting several canvases, including some Electric Chairs, entirely by himself. The post-obit year Warhol told a journalist from Glamour magazine, “I’k becoming a factory,” and of course the building he worked in wasn’t called the “Studio” but the “Factory.”

Those who witnessed Warhol at piece of work on a daily basis in these yearsâ€"Malanga, Billy Proper noun, his manager Paul Morrissey, and his primary assistant from 1972 to 1982, Ronnie Cutroneâ€"all attest that, just equally you’d look from a mind as restless, inventive, and original as Warhol’southward, the degree of his intervention in the creation of a painting variedâ€"non just from series to series, but as well from painting to painting within the same series.ii

By the 1970s Warhol no longer had any sustained involvement in the mass product of his paintings. In his book about Warhol, Holy Terror, Bob Colacello quotes Warhol’s longtime printer Rupert Smith:

Nosotros had then much piece of work that fifty-fifty Augusto [the security man] was doing the painting. We were then busy, Andy and I did everything over the telephone. We called it “art by telephone.”3

1 person they were calling was Horst Weber von Beeren, who was responsible for painting many of Warhol’due south later works in a studio in Tribeca (and non at the Mill in Marriage Foursquare). He has said that Warhol’s primary role in the creation of these paintings was simply to sign them when they were sold.4 The artist had come to realize that a painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or non he e'er touched information technology.

In fact, Warhol had long been familiar with this arm’s-length working method. In his days as a successful commercial fashion illustrator, his chore was simply to make the drawing and hand it over to the fine art managing director, not to become involved in the layout. Scherman and Dalton quote Tina Fredericks, the art director at Glamour who gave Warhol his first New York job: “He didn’t care about that stuffâ€"’Will my drawing exist displayed large enough? Are you lot going to shrink it downwards?’ You could say to him, ‘We want this,’ and he’d only do it, he’d understand.”

Moreover, in his early fashion drawings Warhol developed a technique of blotting his initial design onto high-quality paper in such a way that his pen nib never touched the terminal drawing. “In fact,” Scherman and Dalton go along,

the original mattered so little to Warhol that he didn’t even draw itâ€"his longtime banana Nathan Gluck made the commencement sketch, rubbed information technology down to make the tracing, and hinged the tracing to the Strathmore [a brand of high quality drawing paper]. Andy entered only for the insurrection de grâce, the inking and blotting…. What remained constant throughout Warhol’south career, whether he drew, painted, or silk-screened photographs, was his fascination with the simulacrum, the copy, the second-generation image. In commercial art, the partition of labor is the norm. When Andy began using it in fine art in the sixties, he undermined the myth of the auteur, the sole, and solitary, fount of fine art.

In this conceptual approach to making art, Warhol inherited the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, an artist he knew, admired, painted, and filmed. Like Duchamp’southward prepare-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas information technology generates. As the son of immigrants, Warhol in his early works returned once again and again to the theme of America itself. What else are the paintings of cheap advertisements for nose jobs and trip the light fantastic toe lessons concerned with if non the American dream and the price of conformity information technology exacts? As shortly as he’d examined the American obsession with celebrity and glamour in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, he was quick to testify its race riots and electrical chair. Different Duchamp’due south, his was a highly public fine art, one that criss-crossed between high art, popular culture, commerce, and daily life.

Everything that passed earlier Warhol’s basilisk gazeâ€"celebrities, socialites, speed freaks, rock bands, film, and fashionâ€"he imprinted with his deadpan mixture of glamour and humor, then cast them back into the world equally narcissistic reflections of his own personality. This is what makes him one of the almost complex and elusive figures in the history of art. Equally Danto explains in his brilliant short report of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is non “What is art?” but “What is the difference between ii things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is non?”

That is very like the question at the centre of a class-action lawsuit brought by the motion picture producer Joe Simon-Whelan and other yet-to-be-named plaintiffs against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc., which is the commission that was prepare up eight years after the artist’due south expiry in 1987 to pronounce on the actuality of his work. The instance revolves effectually a series of ten identical silk-screened self-portraits from 1965 (Red Self Portraits), i of which is owned past the plaintiff and all of which the hallmark board has declared are not past Warhol. The background to the case, which has become something of a crusade célèbre among dealers, curators, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, is discussed in item in I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon), Richard Polsky’s breezy memoir of the art market before the economical crash. New developments can be followed in Simon-Whelan’south crusading Web site www .myandywarhol.com.

The Red Self Portraits are amongst Warhol’south best-known works, endlessly reproduced in books near the artist and on exhibition posters. Based on an image taken in an automatic photo booth, the portrait shows Warhol’s head and shoulders head-on and slightly from below, a pose much like those in two other important works from this menstruation, the mug shots he used in Thirteen Most Wanted Men and the anonymous beau in his hush-hush motion picture Blow Job. Warhol presents himself as insolent and impassive, in the take-it-or-get out-it stance of the hustler or gangster. Out of annals, like a color TV on the blink, the person in the portrait is a new kind of homo being, one trapped in some fathomless, unreal televisual infinite, without concrete mass or emotional depth. The dead, unseeing optics in the self-portrait suggest that he was perfectly serious when he said, “If you want to know all most Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and in that location I am. There’s nothing behind information technology.”

Every bit usual in making a silk screen, Warhol started by having the photo transferred to acetate plates. From these acetates he made two serial of self-portraits. The starting time, which he began in the spring of 1964, consists of 11 self-portraits printed on linen, with several dissimilar groundwork colors. These the hallmark board considers 18-carat. The post-obit twelvemonth, a second series was printed from the same acetates on cotton, each with the aforementioned cherry groundwork. The board denies the authenticity of this 2nd series because Warhol was not present when they were printed.

What happened is that Warhol gave the acetates to the publisher Richard Ekstract in exchange for the utilise of the expensive Norelco video equipment that Ekstract had loaned him to brand his beginning, groundbreaking videos. Prompted past Morrissey (who asked Warhol “why he didn’t save money past having the silk screen factory do the entire chore with his instructions for all of his images”), Warhol told Ekstract to send the acetates to a commercial printer for silk-screening. Morrissey further says that Warhol spoke to the printer over the phone to requite him specific, detailed instructions regarding the colors he wanted the printer to use. Both Warhol and Morrissey communicated with the printer, but Morrissey is clear that neither was present during the silk-screening process.five After the printing, Ekstract returned the acetates to Warhol.

The second series is printed on white cotton duck. Its surfaces are slightly flatter, which makes the images wait more than machine-fabricated than the ones in the first series because there is no evidence of the artist’due south hand in the form of under-drawing or paint texture. The effect pleased Warhol. Sam Green, the curator of Warhol’due south famous retrospective that opened at the ICA in Philadelphia on Oct 8, 1965, did not wish to include the Red Self Portrait in the exhibition

because it seemed also “manufactured” to get with the other paintings. Andy was pushing for it, though, because he said it exemplified his new technique for having works produced without his personal touch: he wanted to get away from that.6

The ten self-portraits in the second serial were exhibited at a party Ekstract gave on September 29, 1965, both to celebrate the premiere of Warhol’s first video with Edie Sedgwick and to launch Ekstract’due south mag, Tape Recording. When the political party was over, Warhol gave the self-portraits equally a form of payment to Ekstract, who in plow took one for himself, gave ii to the printer, and presented the rest to the people who had helped with the videotaping.7

And then far, it might exist possible to argue that whatever Warhol’s working practice was after in his career, the second serial of self-portraits is not authentic considering he was not present when they were printed. Simply this argument is undermined by ane overwhelming fact: one pic in the series, at present owned by the London collector Anthony d’Offay, is signed and dated by Warhol, and dedicated in his own handwriting to his longtime business partner, the Zurich-based art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (“To Bruno B Andy Warhol 1969”). Since the Renaissance, a signature is the way artists such as Mantegna and Titian acknowledge the authenticity of their work.

As if this were not plenty to authenticate the work, the Bischofberger self-portrait appeared in Rainer Crone’s 1970 catalogue raisonné of Warhol’southward piece of work and is reproduced in color on the jacket. Crone is a highly respected independent scholar who worked closely with Warhol over a two-year period to compile this catalogue raisonné. Anthony d’Offay, who was Warhol’s dealer in London, writes in his statement about the “Bruno B Self-Portrait”:

When Andy Warhol came to London for his testify with u.s.a. in 1986, he signed in my presence our copy of Crone’south book in ii places: 1 signature was beyond the dust-wrapper [comprehend] which reproduces our “Bruno B” Self Portrait eight times. The other was on the book’s one-half-championship.

Information technology is important to realise that Crone and Warhol together chose the “Bruno B” Self Portrait for the comprehend of the book and Andy Warhol’s signature across the “Bruno B” epitome on the dust jacket is farther unequivocal bear witness that Warhol not only was authenticating the work, but remained extremely proud of it.

On page 294, the catalog entry (no 169) for the “Bruno B” Self Portrait makes it articulate that this is the movie that appears on the front encompass of the book and was endemic at the fourth dimension by Bruno Bischofberger.

It is unthinkable that Warhol would have signed the book and the image if at that place was the smallest doubt in his mind that the work was not authentic. The combination of the dedication on the back of the painting with the choice of that image for the cover of the catalog raisonné, together with his farther endorsement of the image past signing beyond it leave no room any for any uncertainty every bit to the authenticity of the work and the artist’s intention.

In the letter denying that d’Offay’s picture is 18-carat (May 21, 2003), the board writes, “Information technology is the opinion of the hallmark board that said work is NOT the work of Andy Warhol, but that said piece of work was signed, defended, and dated by him.”

We are now in the realms of farceâ€"and in that location is more to come. In 2004, the Warhol Foundation copublished its own updated catalogue raisonné with Thomas Ammann AG, a firm of Zurich-based fine art dealers heavily involved in the sale of Warhol’s piece of work. In information technology, the authors, all of whom who are paid either by the Warhol Foundation or by Thomas Ammann AG, silently omit all mention of the Bischofberger cocky-portrait, even in a footnote or an appendix. A motion-picture show that existed in 1970 has been made to vanish: so much for scholarly rigor.

This may be the commencement time in history that a signed, dated, and dedicated painting personally approved by an creative person for the embrace of his kickoff major monograph, which included a catalogue raisonné of his works, has been removed from his oeuvre past those he did not personally engage. Although Rainer Crone has worked closely with the artist and possesses an important annal of the work they did together, at no time was he consulted by the compilers of the 2004 catalogue raisonné. In a statement of August 14, 2009, Crone writes, “I am aware of no other instance in which a revised itemize raisonné omits a hitherto accepted piece of work without explanation.”

When challenged to explicate why information technology continues to deny the authenticity of works in this serial, the board replied in a letter of the alphabet of October 2004 that information technology

knows of no independent verifiable documentation from the menstruum in question, 1964 through to 1965, to indicate or suggest that Warhol sanctioned or authorized anyone to make the work.

But how is it possible to say this? Quite apart from his signature and dedication, there are on record numerous statements from Warhol employees, assistants, and his manager all supporting the evidence regarding Warhol’s intentions about the series.

Few artists in the twentieth century were as restlessly experimental equally Warhol. This ruling by the board represents a complete misunderstanding of the very nature of what he achieved, and how his approach to making his piece of work changed Western fine art. Innovation has to start somewhere, and information technology is precisely because the 1965 Red Self Portraits were fabricated without Warhol’s on-the-spot supervision that they are so critically important. They are the kind of transitional works museums and collectors particularly value considering they show Warhol groping toward the working method he would prefer in the following decade, when his participation in the creation of his own paintings was frequently limited to choosing the epitome and signing the picture.

The single nearly important thing you tin say about a piece of work of fine art is that information technology is real, that the artist to whom it is attributed made it. Until you are sure that a work of fine art is accurate, it is impossible to say much else that is meaningful about it. The separation of the real from the faux is the cornerstone on which our understanding of any artist’s work is based. The very nature of the silk-screening process makes Warhol a peculiarly easy artist to fake because there is virtually no difference between the appearance of a silk screen that Andy Warhol made with his own hands and one that an assistant might have run off after-hours. From early, Warhol signed some works and used a stamp of his signature on othersâ€"but sometimes he didn’t sign a work at all.

The task of an authentication board for Warhol’s works is therefore not easy. Merely decisions like the one about the “Bruno B Cocky Portrait” at best raise doubts most this board’southward competence and at worst about its integrity. For with assets in the region of $500 million worth of art, the Andy Warhol Foundation funds its charitable activities by selling the works it owns. This has left it open to the accusation that it is in the foundation’s financial interest to control the marketplace in Warhols. Simon-Whelan’south lawsuit alleges that the board routinely denies the actuality of works past Warhol in order to restrict the number of Warhols on the market and thereby to increase the value of its holdings.

Whether this is true or non I can’t say considering, unlike whatsoever other authentication board that I’m familiar with, this one operates in secret, and is not required to divulge the reasons why a work has not been authenticated. Before it will look at a piece of work submitted to information technology, the owners must sign a document saying that they will non challenge its verdict in court. Nor is the board obliged to reveal the reason for its decisions, fifty-fifty reserving the correct to deauthenticate works that it has already authenticated, and to reinstate works it has already denied.

When a work is accounted non to be by Warhol, it is mutilated by stamping it in ink on the reverse with the word “DENIED”â€"thereby rendering the picture unsaleable even if the board afterwards changes its heed. Although a lawyer for the lath has said that no one forces applicants to submit works for hallmark, no auction business firm or dealer will handle a work whose authenticity the board has questioned. A painting stamped DENIED is worthless.

Commonly, authentication boards consist of contained experts who have spent their lifetime studying and familiarizing themselves with the work of a detail artist. Often they are made up of quondam studio assistants, a spouse, and art historians who take organized major shows and written extensively about that artist.8 But the two longest-serving members of the Warhol board are Neil Printz, a teacher at Caldwell College in New Bailiwick of jersey, and Sally King-Nero, curator of drawings at the Andy Warhol Foundation. We’ve already seen one example of the standard of their scholarship, and neither can exist said to take contained status since both are likewise editors of the catalogue raisonné that is paid for with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Thomas Ammann firm (Thomas Ammann died in 1993).9 Vincent Fremont, a quondam Warhol assistant whom the foundation appointed exclusive sales agent for its paintings, and who personally takes a commission on each sale, is a “consultant” to the authentication lath. In his lawsuit, Simon-Whelan says that defendants in his case also enforce their command over the marketplace for Warhol works through a select grouping of powerful galleries and dealers who relish a special human relationship with Fremont, the foundation, and the hallmark board.

Over the years, a number of respected writers and scholars have joined the hallmark board. Some have written almost or helped organize exhibitions of Warhol’s work, simply none has had expertise in the authentication of his work or firsthand knowledge of his working methods. In the light of cases like the Red Self Portraits, this has led to the suspicion that the real function of the exterior scholars and curators has been to lend credibility to decisions made by Printz and Sally King-Nero in consultation with Fremont.

The Andy Warhol Foundation is packed with lawyers, and with hundreds of millions of dollars it has all the time in the earth to fight lawsuits like Simon-Whelan’south, drawing them out until their opponents run out of money. Then far, it has been impossible for ordinary people to challenge its decisions. But in that location may now be hope for those whose works take been denied without caption and for no creditable reason. In May federal approximate Laura Taylor Swain, in deciding against the Warhol Foundation’south move to dismiss Simon-Whelan’s case, gave the plaintiffs the all-important right of “discovery” then that the authentication board’due south long-suppressed methods of reaching its decisions can at present be brought to light. If the plaintiffs are successful, this case has the potential to pause the stranglehold the board has had on the authentication of Warhol’s work.

One person who will be following the case with close attention is Tate managing director Sir Nicholas Serota. In 2008 Anthony d’Offay sold his collection of contemporary art to the English nation (accepting £28 million for a drove then conservatively estimated to be worth £125 million), an deed Prime Minister Gordon Chocolate-brown called “the greatest souvenir this country has ever received from a private individual.” Among the many works d’Offay included in the donation was the self-portrait signed by Warhol and defended to “Bruno B.” Until its status is resolved, d’Offay has been forced to withdraw the painting.

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